“Where are we going?” I asked Will as he turned out of Gloria’s winding driveway and off onto the long, empty evergreen-lined main road.
A smarter woman than I probably would’ve asked this question before she’d gotten in his car. But strangely, I already trusted Will. (He’d kept my secret snooping from Gloria last night.) And besides, it was nice to escape the isolation of that quiet house. Wherever it was he was taking me would be a welcome change of scenery.
“My office,” Will said. “Is that okay?” His voice sounded kind, like he was ready to make an illegal U-turn if I asked him to go back.
I nodded. I kind of liked the idea of seeing where he worked, knowing more about him, whether it led to any new information about Gloria or not. “What’s at your office?” I asked.
“Nothing,” he said calmly, as he made a right turn, following the sign that pointed toward I-5 south/Seattle.
“Nothing?” I repeated, confused.
“I just mean it’s quiet there. I set up a FaceTime with my aunt at three thirty so we could ask her questions, and I didn’t want to do it in my mother’s house. We could go to my apartment in the city, but I thought you might feel...awkward there. A coffee shop seemed out of the question because people might recognize you...” His voice trailed off.
Clearly, he had put a lot of thought into this. I appreciated that, even though I didn’t often get recognized in public these days, and I was pretty sure we could’ve gone to the bar we went to last night and been perfectly fine. But the fact that Will had overthought this made me like him more. “Sounds like a good plan.”
“And I thought,” Will added carefully, “we could eat an early dinner in the city after. Do you know Seattle well?”
Unless you counted Seattle Med (which I did not), I didn’t know Seattle at all. I shook my head. “Nope. I went once with my mom when I was little, and we went to the Space Needle. Well, the story goes that she tried to take me up in the Space Needle and I had a full-on meltdown on the street and refused to budge. Or so my mother liked to say. I have no real memory of it.” My voice caught on the edges of the word memory. I was repeating a story my mother liked to tell, a story that, in essence, had disappeared along with her, like all my others. Annie, her childhood, gone just like that. Even when I repeated it now, like this, who was left to know if it was true?
Will smiled and shook his head. Then he broke out into a full-on laugh that shook his shoulders and seemed to vibrate through the car.
“Are you laughing at me right now?” I said, eyebrows raised.
“No, I’m laughing because my mother has a very similar story to tell about me. Only it was the Eiffel Tower. On her first French book tour. There was allegedly a very rambunctious tantrum on the sidewalk. I may have uttered some naughty words.” He paused to laugh again. “It’s one of my mother’s favorite stories to tell at Christmas parties. Otherwise known as How Will Likes to Ruin Anything Fun.”
I smiled a little and tried to envision it. A young Will dragged to Paris on Gloria’s French book tour. The fact that Gloria had regaled people with this story, at a Christmas party, no less. (Gloria did parties?) And then little Will, having a meltdown on the sidewalk rather than going up to the viewing platform on the Eiffel Tower. Maybe we were kindred spirits in a way, Will and I. “For the record, heights should be no one’s definition of fun,” I said. “And I’m sure all the naughty words you said were very warranted in the moment.”
Will’s shoulders relaxed, and he smiled again as he merged onto the highway. “Anyway, my office isn’t too far from the waterfront. We can walk around Pike Place after and there’s a great little Korean restaurant nearby. Does that sound okay?”
I realized having dinner with him in the city would keep me from my 6 p.m. dinner at Gloria’s, and the maybe ten-minute opportunity I would have to watch her again today. But I had a feeling I might learn more on this FaceTime with Will’s aunt than at Gloria’s house. We had to eat dinner. And glass noodles and spicy kimchi? Yes, please.
And for the first time in weeks, suddenly, I actually felt hungry.
Will’s office was on the second floor of a three-story walk-up in downtown Seattle.
“If you look up, you just might see the Space Needle,” Will said as we got out of the car and headed toward his building.
I looked around but saw only the other walk-ups down the street. The rain had stopped but the day was cool and cloudy, a pervading mist seemingly hanging over the entire city. I couldn’t see much of anything. “Really?”
“Nope,” Will said, with a straight face. “That was joke.”
“Ah, you’re hysterical.”
“I get that a lot.” He sounded so serious, but it was very clear he did not get that a lot. If ever.
I smiled as I followed him up the flight of stairs to his office, and through a door adorned with the sign, Forrester, Lee and Wakeman. Forrester, so Will was not just lawyer but a partner? That was a fact I found altogether unsurprising even having known him for only a little over twenty-four hours. Will struck me as extremely competent, intelligent and driven.
He waved to the receptionist in front as we entered the lobby. She turned her attention to me and squinted, as if trying to place me, and I wondered if she’d seen Saving Addy. But no, she asked Will if I was here for a client meeting. (Did she think I was a criminal? I should’ve done my makeup before we left.)
“I thought you were off for the week, Will?” She leaned across her desk. “There’s at least ten messages on your desk. And something urgent—”
“I am off. Something came up,” Will said vaguely, cutting her off.
He kept walking, I assumed toward his office, and I shot the receptionist an apologetic smile before I followed him. These kinds of things fascinated me. These real-life/real-job moments. I’d been up for a part in a law series a few years ago for the office receptionist role. In the end, they’d given it to a former model who was five inches taller than me and probably about twenty pounds lighter, who definitely looked better in the low-cut tops they eventually dressed her in for the series. But here was Will’s receptionist in real life, probably about my age, with frizzy hair in a harried bun, dressed in a thick gray wool sweater and looking like she had permanent frown lines etched around her brown eyes. She seemed frazzled and wound so tight she could snap at any moment. Now, she would be fun to watch on TV.
“What do you think?” Will asked, as I followed him inside his office. It was expansive, with a big wall of windows that looked out onto the dark alleyway behind the building, lined with an overfull dumpster and row of black trash cans.
“Fancy,” I said, peering out the window to the alley below.
“Isn’t it?”
I thought about Gloria’s desk, encrusted with diamonds, and here was Will’s. It was a dark piney wood with worn edges, and the desktop itself was covered in stacks of papers. How exactly did the son of The Queen of Romance grow up to be Will, working in this office, defending criminals in court?
“Here.” Will motioned to the sitting area with a small sofa and coffee table across the room from his desk. “Let’s have a seat, and I’ll get Aunt Marge on FaceTime.”
I sat down and then he sat next to me, pulling an iPad from his bag. “Tell me about your aunt for a minute before you call her. Your mother’s sister or your father’s?”
“My mother’s,” he said.
Interesting because Gloria didn’t mention a sister in her memoir. “Are you two close?” I asked him.
He shook his head. “I wasn’t sure she’d even respond when I emailed her this morning. I haven’t talked to her in a few years. We send birthday and Christmas messages every year but usually that’s it.”
“But she responded?”
He nodded. “Right away.” He paused for a moment. “She and my mother have never been close as far as I can remember. But I stayed with her a few times when I was younger and Gloria went on tour without me. Then she and Gloria got in a fight, and I haven’t seen Aunt Marge since.”
“I sense this is all connected to the great Eiffel Tower meltdown somehow.”
He laughed, but also nodded in agreement. “Anyway, I realized this morning I never thought to ask Aunt Marge about the past.” He paused. “I guess I kind of buried my memories until I saw that picture again yesterday.”
For a brief moment I felt a pang of remorse for whatever Band-Aid I’d ripped off for Will by snooping in Gloria’s office yesterday. Gloria was my job, but she was Will’s mother.
But he didn’t seem upset—he was already scrolling through his contacts for his aunt’s name. This was his idea; he’d made all the effort to bring me here and include me in this conversation. Maybe he wanted to understand the real Gloria as much as I did, for very different reasons.
A woman’s face suddenly popped up on the iPad screen. She was Gloria, if Gloria were ten years older, had kind eyes and the face of a teddy bear. “Oh my gawd, William!” (Also, if Gloria had a thick Midwestern accent, and the gravelly tone of a smoker.) “Look at you!” Marge was exclaiming now. “You’re all grown-up and so handsome!” Will’s face, understandably, reddened. “Where is she? Move the camera so I can see her, William.”
He tilted the iPad a little toward me and I smiled and waved. “Addy Hemlock! Alex was so wrong to break up with you. What was he thinking?”
Will raised his eyebrows, confused, but I chuckled. Alex, Addy’s boyfriend, had dumped her at the end of season two. Then sadly, we were canceled before the writers could get them back together in season three. “I totally agree, Marge,” I told her. “Alex will never find anyone as good as Addy.”
Will cleared his throat. “Aunt Marge, this is Amelia Grant, the actress who is going to play Mom in the movie version of her memoir.”
Marge frowned a little. “Well, of course I know who she is, William. Don’t tell me you’ve never watched Saving Addy? Great show, honey,” she added, clearly talking to me. “Never should’ve been canceled.”
“Thank you,” I said. “I’m glad to know you enjoyed it.” This never got old. No matter who said it, where I was, how many years it had been. There was always a thrill in remembering that I had been a part of something that people had watched and loved. That I had dreamed of being an actress since I was a little girl, and I had pulled it off.
“So, Aunt Marge,” Will said, his voice turning serious. All business. I imagined the walls of this office were pretty used to this. “Amelia has been trying to learn more about Mom for the role, and you know what she’s like. She doesn’t make it very easy.”
Marge closed her mouth and frowned. “I haven’t talked to Mare in over ten years.” What was it that Gloria said to me just yesterday, that no one had called her Mare since George had died? That Mare had disappeared along with him. Mare. Even the name sounded foreign now, like a person neither Will nor I had ever met.
“That’s okay,” Will reassured her. “The movie is about how she met my dad in college. Her love story with him, and then how he died, and she started her writing career.”
“I’m trying to understand her relationship with George so I can get the role right,” I added. It didn’t seem like Marge planned to talk to her sister anytime soon, so I didn’t think I had anything to lose now by being honest. “Was George really the love of her life?” I asked her, thinking about how Gloria had spoken in those exact terms earlier this afternoon, and how I wasn’t altogether sure she’d even been talking about George.
Aunt Marge pressed her lips together tightly and didn’t move. For a second I thought she was frozen, but then she put her hand to her head, like it suddenly ached. “I didn’t know George very well,” she said slowly. “Mare met him in college, and they eloped, and you were already born, William, before I even met him for the first time,” she added. “I saw him only a handful of times before he died. You probably remember more than I do.”
Will shook his head. “I just have a vague memory of them fighting. And that’s not at all what Mom wrote about in her memoir. Do you think she really loved him like she says she did?”
Marge shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said.
“There wasn’t anyone else?” Will prodded. “No other man she was in love with?”
Marge didn’t say anything, but bit her lip, like she was trying to remember or trying to decide if she should say anything more. Finally, she shook her head. “I don’t remember another man. No one I ever met or heard about. But you know we were never close, so that doesn’t mean there wasn’t one...” She paused and pressed her lips together, and then after a moment she added, “I do remember a woman.”
“A woman she was in love with?” Will asked. I turned to look at him, but his face was blank, so I couldn’t get a read on what he was thinking.
“They were very close friends,” Marge said. “She came out here to help take care of you for a few weeks after your mother’s accident. You don’t remember that, William?”
He squinted like he was trying very hard to recall it, but then he shook his head. “My mother doesn’t have many close friends,” he said.
While I said, “Her accident?”
“She was in a car accident when I was really little,” Will clarified.
Marge nodded in agreement. And I wondered how much she had left out of her memoir. Certainly, she had not mentioned a close friend, nor a car accident, which must have happened during the time period of her memoir if Will was really little.
“What was her friend’s name?” Will asked, still sounding skeptical. It was not at all hard to picture him as a trial lawyer, the way he was currently grilling his aunt with a quiet sort of tenacity, while I was getting lost in my own rambling thoughts.
Marge shook her head. “I can’t remember... I only met her a few times, thirty years ago. She was a tiny, pretty thing. Bubbly. God knows why she was friends with Mare.” She closed her eyes for a moment, then chuckled softly to herself.
“And you don’t know what happened to her?” Will asked.
“I never heard about her again, after George died.” Her voice caught on the final few words. George died. Like it was something she couldn’t, or shouldn’t, talk about, even all these years later. “You know what, I shouldn’t have said anything at all.” Marge’s voice came through slow with doubt. “It was all so long ago... And I don’t think this has anything at all to do with the movie. Do me a favor, William, don’t tell Mare we FaceTimed, okay? I don’t want to upset her.” She paused and clucked her tongue. “What a life she made for herself, my baby sister. They’re making a movie of it!” Marge smiled now. “Do a good job playing her, Addy,” she said to me.
“I’ll try my best,” I promised.
But as Will disconnected us from FaceTime, I somehow felt further from doing a good job portraying Gloria than ever.