“Amelia?” Tate called my name, then knocked on the door. I opened my eyes and glanced at my phone on the nightstand. 6:48 p.m. Apparently, I was late for dinner.
After my session with Gloria and strange conversation with Will this afternoon, I’d come back up to my room, crawled underneath the covers in the giant and extremely comfortable king-size bed and had fallen asleep. I’d drifted into a hazy dream about my mother, where I’d been walking with her in her garden in Pasadena, trying to tell her that I had taken on a role she would finally, truly be excited about. But she couldn’t hear me, and she kept disappearing in between the yellows and pinks of her roses and azaleas every time I reached out for her. Almost close enough to touch. But not quite. Tears pricked my eyes now, and I bit my lip to keep them at bay.
I took a deep breath, stood and walked to the door. “Sorry,” I said to Tate as soon as I opened it. “I fell asleep and lost track of the time. Is Gloria upset?”
“Not at all,” Tate said easily. “She just commanded me not to feed you since, I believe her exact words were, ‘I shouldn’t have to explain promptness to a girl of that age.’”
“Oh my gosh, I’m sorry. I’m sure I can DoorDash myself something. I don’t want to cause any trouble.”
Tate chuckled. “You most definitely cannot out in these parts. I made you a salad and put it in the fridge. Just to clarify, if I read your expression right yesterday, you are a vegetarian, yes?”
I nodded and fought the urge to grab Tate in a hug as I felt overwhelmed by her kindness, by the way she was oddly mothering me even though she was clearly younger than me. I saw a flash of my mother again in her roses, and another wave of grief crested in the hollow center of my chest. I was thirty-three years old, and I still desperately needed a mother. How pathetic was I?
“Gloria gets especially anxious about eating on time on Tuesdays because Seattle Med is on,” Tate continued. “She’s kind of obsessed. Tonight is the beginning of the two-part season finale.”
A laugh rose in my throat and came out of me more like a strangled cry. Seattle Med. Gloria and Tate must know about me and Jase. It had been covered in all the tabloids and entertainment magazines. And Tate knew who I was—she’d watched Saving Addy!
“You’re welcome to join us.” Tate was saying now. She glanced at her Apple Watch. “If you can be down there in the next seven minutes. She doesn’t do streaming. She watches it live, on cable TV. Promptly at seven.” Tate paused and stared at me, and for a few seconds I couldn’t figure out what to say. Did Gloria actually expect me to join her? Was she deliberately trying to torture me?
“I hate Seattle Med,” I finally said. I wondered if it was possible that Gloria didn’t know I’d spent years sleeping in the same bed as Dr. Ryan Matthews. Tate had to know. But if she wasn’t going to bring up Jase, I certainly wasn’t. “I can’t stomach medical shows,” I added coolly. “I don’t do blood.”
Tate smiled and nodded. “I hear you, but this show is more affairs and sex than surgeries or blood.”
Affairs and sex. I remembered a brief flash of Celeste’s perfectly round breasts, Jase insisting it was all really a professional interaction. Method. Tate was still smiling, but I wondered now if she was trying to get some inside information about the breakup out of me? Liza would’ve been proud—I pressed my lips into a tight smile and said nothing.
“Well, if you change your mind,” Tate said. “The screening room is in the back of the house. Walk through the laundry room and open the door on the other side. It used to be the garage, but Gloria converted it a while back since she doesn’t drive. Just don’t come in after 6:58 or she’ll get mad.”
I nodded, letting all those small tidbits about Gloria settle so I could jot them in my notebook when Tate left. She wasn’t all that old—I wondered when and why she had stopped driving. And did people really still watch shows live, on cable, at the exact time they actually aired? But it seemed clear that Gloria liked things the exact way she liked them, and she thrived on her very rigid routine. Was this part of what was making her nervous about the upcoming film shoot? Or was there something more to it?
“Salad’s in the fridge,” Tate reminded me, and then she added, seemingly out of the blue before shutting the door, “The screening room is very well insulated. Gloria can’t hear a thing from the rest of the house when she’s in there.”
I sat down on the bed after Tate left, considering everything she’d just told me. I knew that the first part of the Seattle Med two-part finale was two hours long, Tate had said that Gloria had to watch it live on cable, and also that Gloria couldn’t hear anything in the rest of the house while she was in the converted garage. Was Tate trying to help me learn more about Gloria by hinting that if I were to snoop around, Gloria would never know?
I stood, swallowing back any guilt I felt at that thought. But it wasn’t like I was going to damage her stuff or hurt anyone. I only wanted to learn more about her. I had to learn more about her if I was going to do a good job playing her.
Gloria’s office, where she worked on her books each morning, was at the other side of the upstairs hallway. Tate had pointed it out when she’d given me a brief tour yesterday. I walked out of my room now and stepped carefully down the hallway toward it. I suddenly had this weird feeling of my mother’s presence all around me, the way it had just been in my dream. Even though she’d stopped talking about law school after Saving Addy, I couldn’t help but feel now that it would’ve been this role that would’ve finally made her genuinely proud of my chosen career.
This is for you, Mom, I thought, as I stopped in front of Gloria’s office door. Though the truth was, she probably would’ve hated that I was blaming the trespassing I was about to do on her. And as much as thinking about her had pushed me to say yes to this role initially, now that I was here, it was beginning to hit me what a huge boost this could give my career. That if I succeeded as The Gloria Diamond, then maybe it would mean Jase hadn’t left me behind in the dust of his mega success, but instead, that we had both finally moved upward in our careers, only in vastly different directions.
But then I felt annoyed even thinking again about Jase. And I pushed thoughts of him and Seattle Med away as I reached my hand up to the door. It was closed, and it occurred to me, likely also locked. But I tried the knob and felt a wash of surprise as it easily turned and the door opened into the dark room.
I blinked, trying to adjust my eyes to the darkness, worried if I turned the office light on Gloria would somehow know, or sense me up here. The light from the hallway flooded a small pathway to a large desk in the center of the room. I glanced behind me, back into the hallway one more time. Still empty—of course, it was. They were all in the screening room/former garage, even Will and Jasper, probably already watching Jase have sex with Celeste on-screen right at this very moment. Been there. Done that. Lucky me, I’d already witnessed it live.
Certain I was completely alone upstairs, I tiptoed into her office, following the slant of light to her desk.
Her desk glimmered in the yellow light from the hallway. It had a large glass top, with what appeared to be diamonds embedded all along the sides. Were they real? I ran my finger softly along the cool sharp edges and decided that they probably were. Now this was the kind of detail I was looking for. Gloria Diamond wrote each morning at her million-dollar desk, literally ensconced in diamonds. I suppressed a laugh as I moved to examine what was on the desk itself.
Half the desk was taken up by a huge monitor, with a closed laptop sitting in front of it. It felt strangely high-tech for a woman who was currently watching her favorite show on live cable television. But then I noticed a stack of yellow legal pads next to the laptop, covered with handwritten scribbles—that felt more like Gloria. Her handwriting was messy, and I couldn’t exactly make out the words in the semidarkness. But I suspected they were book ideas, plot points, characters, scenes.
A little shiver ran up my spine and settled over me. No matter what feelings I’d had about Gloria, the woman, I remembered the way Gloria, the writer, had made me feel when I read one of her novels. There was that thrill of sneaking them off my mother’s bookshelf as a teenager, reading them late at night in my room when my mother was already asleep. Back then, Gloria’s words had made me believe that love was something real, something even I could feel intimately coursing through my veins, pulsing in my own young heart.
As an adult, in real life, I’m not sure I’d ever felt with Jase what I’d felt imagining myself as one of Gloria’s heroines. My own parents had gotten divorced when I was almost too young to even remember them together. (My father had remarried and moved to New Jersey by the time I was twelve.) My mother never dated anyone after that. I understood by now that Gloria’s fiction truly was fiction. But still, I’d read her latest novel after Liza had called me about this job last week. And for a few hours, I’d almost believed again.
But it wasn’t like Gloria’s own life was filled with the kind of love she wrote about either. Here she was, living in the middle of these desolate rain-soaked pines with her little dog, her existence isolated, rigid and ornery.
She had experienced it once, though. With her husband, George. The love of her life.
I noticed a framed picture sitting behind the stack of legal pads: a young woman and a young man with their arms around each other. Was that him? Was that them? Gloria and George. Or, no, Mare and George. Was this actual proof that the kind of love she wrote about truly existed?
I turned on the flashlight on my phone and shone it across the photograph. This woman was Gloria for sure. She was a little younger than she was in the photograph on the cover of Diamond in the Rough. But unmistakably the same person. The man she was holding on to, though, was...unfamiliar. I picked up the frame, held my flashlight over it and examined the photograph more closely. This man was definitely not George.
Gloria and George’s 1983 wedding photo was also included in Diamond in the Rough. In that photo, George was much taller than Gloria, strikingly so, by at least a foot. His hair was curly and dark brown, and his face was round, much like Will’s. But the man in this picture was only an inch or two taller than Gloria. His hair was straight, dirty blond, and his jawline was square.
Yet, their arms were wrapped around each other, their cheeks pressed together, their smiles wide enough to swallow the camera whole. Then my flashlight caught on a tiny orange date stamp in the bottom right corner of the photo—October 1986. Three years after Gloria married George?
“What are you doing?” A deep voice cut through the darkness. Will. I let out a little startled cry and jumped, dropping the frame. Luckily it landed on the stack of legal pads in front of me and didn’t shatter. I quickly picked it up and put it back where it had been on the desk when I’d walked in here. “Jesus, Amelia.” Will entered the room, and reached for my arms, encircling my wrists with his fingers like they were handcuffs. “I didn’t peg you as a thief.”
I uncurled my fists, revealing my empty palms. “I’m not stealing anything,” I whispered, trying hard (and failing) to keep the edge of guilt from my voice.
He stared at me for a moment, but still didn’t let go of me. The slant of light from the hallway hit the contours of his face and I tried to read his expression. His eyes were dark; he was angry or maybe he was confused.
“I’m sorry.” I whispered an apology, not totally sure why I was still whispering. Gloria and Tate wouldn’t hear us anyway. But it felt wrong to even speak in here, much less at full volume. “I shouldn’t have come in here. I just wanted to see where she wrote. Understand more about who she is.” I paused waiting for him to say something but instead I heard him breathing hard, air rattling his chest like he’d run too fast to get here. I thought about telling him that Tate had given me her tacit permission to snoop, but I didn’t want to throw her under the bus, so instead I added, “I really wasn’t going to take anything. Or even touch anything.”
“And yet, you were touching something when I walked in,” Will said, finally letting go of me and reaching across the yellow legal pads to pick up the frame and look at the photograph himself.
I ran my finger over my right wrist, tracing the outline of where he’d just touched me, and my skin still felt hot there. Will was ignoring me now and staring at the picture, frowning.
“Who is that man? Do you know him?” I asked. “It’s not your dad, right?”
Will shook his head, and I wasn’t sure if he was trying to say it wasn’t his dad or he didn’t know. Or both. He put the picture back down on the desk. “We shouldn’t be in here,” he finally said.
I nodded and then followed him back out to the hallway, quietly shutting the door behind me. Will stopped at the top of the stairs, like he was trying to decide if he should rat me out.
“You won’t tell her, will you?” I pleaded with him. “I promise my intentions were all good.”
He slowly turned back around to face me. His expression was so neutral, I couldn’t read him at all. Was he sympathetic, or did he want to get his mother to throw me out?
“This movie means a lot to me,” I said. “I just want to get to know her, so I can play the real her, like you said.”
“The real her.” He frowned and turned away from me, and then I felt certain he was going to go interrupt Gloria right this very minute to tell her what I’d done. I’d have to leave right now, tonight. Would I have to give up the role too?
But then Will turned back to me suddenly, his expression more neutral again. “Do you want to go get a drink?” he asked. “I could really use a drink.”