Her hands shook as she pulled her phone from her pocket and dialed Mansi. She prayed she wasn’t in the middle of a meeting.
“Thereyou are!” Mansi greeted. “I’ve been trying to call you all morning. Liv, there’s—”
“I’ve seen it,” Olivia said, suddenly realizing why Mansi had been trying to reach her. It was to warn her. “They just showed me, on camera. I saw the whole thing. The photos, the article. Now I’m hiding in the bathroom and freaking the fuck out. Who is she, Mansi?” She heard the panic in her own voice.
Mansi didn’t miss a beat, surely having already exhausted her resources digging up dirt on Madison Bilton. “She’s an undergrad student at UCLA. Film major. She’s listed as a production assistant onSafe Gamble, but it looks like she left the production at the same time Chuck did.”
The earth fell out from beneath Olivia. As she tumbled, the rational part of her brain tried to tell her there was an explanation for everything, but the self-preserving part, the knee-jerking fight-or-flight part, told her to run from the ugly truth.
Her heart hammered in her chest right as someone knocked on the door.
“Liv? Are you in there?” Chuck called from the other side. He knocked and then tried the handle. “Olivia, please open the door.”
“Are you okay?” Mansi asked.
“No,” Olivia said on a shaky breath right as Chuck knocked on the door again.
“Liv,please. I need to talk to you.”
Her breath grew shallower as the world narrowed to ahideous point. She didn’t want to believe he would hurt her like this. Even more, she didn’t want her pain splashed across the internet, and thanks to Chuck, both things were happening.
“I have to go,” she told Mansi.
“Olivia!” Chuck called again, and pounded on the door.
“Liv, don’t do anything you’ll regret,” Mansi said, clearly having heard him.
“Thanks, Manse,” she said.
“Liv—!” Mansi tried, but she ended the call.
A familiar fire burned in her veins. One she knew talking to the man on the other side of the door would only fan into a full-fledged blaze, but she was going to do it anyway.
She wrenched open the door to find Chuck crowding the doorframe with the camera crew behind him.
“Liv—” he started to say, like he might have been about to step inside with her and lock the door, but she stood her ground.
“Who is she?”
He blinked at her sudden, furious appearance. “She’s…no one.”
She could feel her blood instantly start to boil. “Please don’t insult either of us right now. She is notno one, Chuck.”
He stared at her looking like he would have given up his million dollars if it meant he could not have this conversation with her. “Olivia, please. Just slow down here. They are manipulating us again by bringing this up. They want us to fight.”
“Oh,they’remanipulating us, Chuck?” She shoved her way around him into the hall, suddenly feeling suffocated in the narrow bathroom. The cameras followed on her heels. “You’ve been lying to me for weeks.”
He followed, arguing back, as if it were a choreographed dance. “Olivia, I never lied to you.”
They made their way back to the kitchen, her heels clicking angrily, where she whirled on him and clenched her fists at her sides. “Then you didn’t tell me the whole truth!”
“Icouldn’t,” he said, and flexed his arms and hands like he wanted to pick something up and snap it in half.
“What does that even mean?”
“It means—” He cut himself off with a tortured groan and clenched his jaw.
“Did you sleep with her?” she asked, seeking a truth she didn’t truly want.