“Hey, Mom,” she answered. Her voice sounded like she’d swallowed sandpaper.
“Just taking a quick break. I wanted to check on my baby girl.”
“I’m okay. Thank you. I’m still in bed.”
“That’s okay. You get your rest. You’ve been working hard.”
“Well, I have all the free time in the world now,” she said with a mirthless laugh.
“I talked to your dad. You can come home if you need to.”
“Thanks, Mom,” Amanda replied, her voice cracking. She loved them so much, but she didn’t want to go home. Her whole life felt so unfinished. Going home meant giving up. Giving up on Sam and giving up on her dreams. She swallowed and stopped herself from another crying jag. She didn’t have enough water in her body to support one anyway. “I’m going to take a hot shower and then try and come up with a plan.”
“You know you can do this. You’re a McQueen. You can do anything.”
In theory, her mom was right, but she wasn’t back to that level of hopeful determination quite yet. She heard a beep in her ear and when she glanced at her phone, she saw Helene’s name lighting up her screen.
“You have to go?” her mom asked.
“It’s my friend. I think she’s back from her honeymoon.”
“Go talk to her.”
“’Kay. I’ll call you later.” Amanda switched over just before it went to voicemail. “He—”
“Oh my God. Sorry, I know you’re at work. But have you been online yet?”
“Well, no. I’m not at work. I quit.”
“What?! What do you mean you quit?”
“What’s going on online?”
“Oh fuck,” Helene said. The sound of her voice had Amanda’s blood pressure ratcheting up. She let out a shuddered breath as a text message alert pinged in her ear. She glanced at the screen and saw a text from a high school friend named Sarah. Before she could bring it back up to her ear, three more alerts cycled up at the top of her display.
“What is going on?”
“I’m guessing you didn’t approve a source close to you to go public with your relationship with Sam? Do you have a relationship with Sam?”
Amanda swallowed, closing her eyes. “No. And yes. What the hell is going on?”
“I’m sending you a link.” A second later a text with a TMZ link popped up on her screen. She ignored the now ten different alerts in her message box and went right to Helene’s text. She skipped the headline in the thumbnail, trying to convince herself that the wordsSAM PLEASANT IS OFF THE MARKET. OSCAR WINNER IS SINGLE NO MOREwere nothing to be worried about. Amanda clicked on the link and did her best to keep from passing out as a picture of her and Sam dancing at Claim Jumpers filled the screen below the headline. Inset in the bottom corner was a selfie from Amanda’s Instagram. Her personal Instagram where she’d amassed a whole two hundred and ten followers, mostly friends from college and her early years in production.
The room started spinning as she tried to make sense of the words below the photos.
Sources close to the couple say Pleasant’s girlfriend is a former personal assistant. The two have been spotted around Hollywood in recent weeks and spent Valentine’s weekend in Sam’s hometown of Charming, California.
Sure enough there was a picture below of the two of them talking at theVanity Fairparty where they’d met and another photo of them talking on the street outside of Delightly a few days before she’d gone back to the ranch. Amanda’s face was in shadow, but with context it was clear it was her with Sam. She scrolled back up to the top and the time stamp on the article was only thirty minutes ago. Whatever damage had been done was only going to get much worse.
“Helene,” Amanda choked out.
“Where are you?”
“I’m—I’m at home. Please tell me you’re back.”
“Yeah, we’re on our way to the house right now. Okay. I need you to do two things. Set all of your social media to private. All of it. Even your Twitter even though you never use it. Lock down everything.”
“’Kay.”