Chapter fifteen

Before the last piece of confetti had barely hit the floor, while Brandi stood in front of a hundred reporters and ten thousand camera flashes, while the rest of the cast—from first show to last—ramped up the wrap party, Micah dashed up the hill from the soundstage to his workshop. He needed to look at something.

From his desk he logged into the online film vault and found the footage from the master shot camera for that night’s show. A staple of television, this camera used a wide angle to capture all the action and all the players from the beginning of the show to the end. He loaded the footage into the computer program and hopscotched to the part where Brandi found the missing coin. From there it took about ten seconds for his suspicions to be confirmed: Cass had rescued Brandi.

Micah leaned back in his seat and shook his head. Almost anyone can be selfless if they have enough time to think about it and to arrange the circumstances so that the unpleasant act will cause as little discomfort as possible. Cass hadn’t had any of that. She’d had mere seconds to decide. She had a large sum of money at stake. Her fans wanted her to win. Her career desperately needed a win. Fifty million viewers had the reasonable expectation that she herself wanted to win. Yet, under the bright lights, under the weight of all those expectations, instead of winning she chose to help another human being. Cass Moreaux had done it once again.

And this was the same Cass Moreaux whom he had just ditched.

Micah had to wonder about his defective powers of discernment. He valued a thoughtful, steady demeanor over many other qualities, but his appraisal of Cass had been all over the map. First, before he had even met her, based on nothing but her Hollywood address, he decided that she had to be just another rotten apple. Then he got to know her, corrected his evaluation, and got it right. Then she lost her temper, he stormed off like a child, and he plopped her back over to the other side. Now he had video proof that he had been completely wrong and had to put her back where she should have been all along. He had been wrong, right, wrong, and right. He either needed to get his act together or go on medication.

In the meantime, while he sorted out these personal issues, the question of what to do next waited to be answered. While the heart clearly knew what it wanted, the head had some serious questions to ask. Namely, if the heart actually got what it wanted, what happened next? Life at the ranch? The same ranch that had killed his marriage? Life in Hollywood? Micah didn’t even want to think about that. And, thankfully, he didn’t have to because he didn’t have time to think about anything. Starting right then, the next twenty-four hours of his life had been booked solid with interviews and other StarBash promotion. And immediately after that, Lenora had saddled him with museum business on the other side of the country.

If the ranch never gave him anything else, it always gave him a safe wall of obligations to hide behind. Success breeds obligations, and more success always means more obligations. And at the ranch you ground through them because nothing ever got in the way of success. As Micah sat at his desk and thought about these things, his eyes fell upon the picture of his wife. She looked peaceful, like a day at the beach. For some reason the sight of that image, which depicted perfect contentment, began to distort the sight of the obligations that had been spawned from his latest success. They changed shape. They looked less like the by-product of success and more like feeble excuses that felt uncomfortably familiar. They tugged on his sleeve and said, “She’s leaving. What are you going to do about it?” They whispered in his ear and said, “Here we go again.” They made him wonder why he found it so difficult to draw a line in the sand.