Chapter Thirty-One
AT MIDDAY, the restaurant was jumping with activity, the noise level hovering somewhere between loud and deafening. For the third time today, Ana wondered why her potential client had picked this venue for their first meeting. The details of her situation were delicate; they weren’t the type of thing you wanted to shout over the conversations of your fellow diners.
Ana gave her name to the receptionist and immediately the manager appeared at her side to lead her into a small back room. Now she understood. Louisa Holliday commanded enough recognition that she could choose any restaurant in town and they would accommodate her need for discretion. The manager opened the door to the private room and let Ana in, then just as quickly excused herself.
Louisa sat at one of the handful of tables, looking as delicate and exquisite in person as she did on screen. The translucent ivory skin and vibrant copper hair made her look like an illustration from an art nouveau advertisement. But when she turned to greet Ana, her voice was unexpectedly deep and sultry. It wasn’t hard to see why she’d taken Hollywood by storm.
“I’m so glad to meet you, Ana.” She didn’t rise, just extended a hand and gripped Ana’s with a surprising amount of strength. “Please, have a seat. I hope you don’t mind. I ordered wine for us.”
“I don’t mind at all. Thank you for meeting me.” Ana took her seat and placed her clutch on the edge of the table.
Louisa’s eye went directly to it. “That’s a great bag. Is it the new Prada?”
“It is.” She’d bought it as a way to bolster herself before diving back into her job. She wasn’t even officially back to work; her triumphant return all depended on her ability to snag this account today. Lionel hadn’t even been apologetic, and he hadn’t meant to be. That was the way things worked.
“I like your style,” Louisa said.
“Thank you.” Ana took a sip of her wine, a Riesling that tasted way too sweet for this early in the meal, but she wasn’t going to say that aloud. “Lionel told me you asked for me by name. I’m curious to know why. There’s no shortage of publicists in New York and Los Angeles who could have taken you on. In fact, they’ve probably been tripping over themselves to bring you on board.”
Louisa chuckled. “Oh, they have been.”
“So why me?”
She put down her glass and looked directly at Ana. “For one thing, everyone expects me to hire a publicist from New York or LA, some power player who will minimize the damage and allow life to go on as usual.”
Ana smiled slightly. “That’s generally what publicists do.”
“And how much of that do you actually think the public buys? Come now, they’re sensitive to all the spin. They know when they’re being played. But if an actress were to go back to her hometown, where everyone knew her, where she could get support after the terrible ordeal she’d undergone . . .”
“I’m sorry. I think I’m missing something. I was under the impression that the scandal was about you being caught in a hotel room with another man. While still married to someone who, by all estimations, is the most powerful director in Hollywood.” Ana spoke bluntly, watching Louisa’s expression as she did.
“Who terrorized me and tried to control my life,” she said. “He’s really not the person everyone thinks he is.”
Who is? Ana thought, but the obvious answer immediately sprang to mind. She shoved the thought of Bryan away and folded her hands on top of the table. “Let’s not play games here. Tell me exactly what you expect me to do for you.”
“I expect you to do exactly what you did for Beth Cordero. You know, even I was surprised when she went on the talk show circuit talking about the pressures of competitive sports on children and how she escaped from under her father’s thumb. Everyone has completely forgotten the blood-doping issue. Did you hear that based on her speaking, there’s been an inquiry into harassment and abuse in winter Olympic sports? It’s brilliant.” She smiled. “When I saw that, I knew I wanted you.”
Ana was beginning to feel sick at the implications. “To my knowledge, everything that Beth is saying is true. That wasn’t concocted.”
“Oh, please. Her father was a nightmare, no joke, but to say that she was afraid for her life should she not perform?” Louisa chuckled, this time a little nastily. “That was a stroke of genius.”
“How . . . how do you know all this?”
“Oh.” Louisa’s eyebrows lifted. “You really don’t know. Beth and I go way back. We grew up together, kind of. Enough to say hello and catch up on old times if we run into each other at charity functions. Breckenridge is a small town. There’s no one who doesn’t know everyone else’s business. You think that no one would have intervened if there was real abuse going on? She was the darling of the entire town. Well, next to me, of course.”
Ana couldn’t wrap her head around what Louisa was telling her. Beth Cordero had lied, had smeared her own father in order to repair her career and preserve her endorsements? Had all the corroboration been set up? Had the “witnesses” been paid off? And by whom? Beth? Or someone else entirely?
Louisa was rattling on. “Basically, I wanted to make sure I got started as soon as we could, laying the groundwork. It will only be a couple of months before I’m showing, and I need to make sure the public is firmly on my side before that happens. It will still be nasty —have you been on social media lately? —but ‘driven into the arms of another man’ is a far better headline than ‘ungrateful upstart cheats on industry powerhouse.’”
Lionel. It had been Lionel who had taken the responsibility for fact-checking Beth’s story. Now she remembered. It would be better for Ana not to be involved in that part, he’d said; she should focus on finding appropriate charities and speaking engagements for Beth while he made sure everything was on the up-and-up. Too sensitive, too high-profile to get wrong, he’d said.
And now Louisa wanted Ana to do the same thing for her. Before anyone knew she was pregnant with her lover’s baby.
It was so ridiculous, so close to her own messed-up life, that Ana started to laugh.
Louisa’s eyes narrowed. “What’s so funny?”
“Sorry. I . . .” She wiped her eyes, careful not to smudge her makeup. “I’m afraid I can’t help you, Ms. Holliday. And I’m afraid that Lionel was being too modest when he said that I was completely responsible for Beth Cordero. He played a big, really an essential part in the whole narrative, so I have absolutely no doubt that he will be able to do the same thing for you.”
“But you’re a woman. It looks better if my publicist in this case is a woman who understands.”
“I wish I didn’t understand quite so well.” Ana rose and took her purse. “Thank you for the wine. I’m sorry I can’t help you.”
And without another word, she turned and left the restaurant.
Once outside on the curb, Ana pressed a hand to her flushed forehead. Had she really done that? By walking away from Louisa Holliday, she’d ensured that she was never going back to Massey-Coleman. She’d probably ensured that she’d never get another crisis publicity job in Denver or anywhere else Lionel had connections. And for the first time, she realized she didn’t want one.
She’d spent years trying to clean up other people’s messes, thinking they deserved a fighting chance in the court of public opinion. And maybe they did. Maybe her clients were just people who had made mistakes. But they had compounded their mistakes by trying to paper over them, by trying to pretend they weren’t human, by trying to make them go away. Instead of owning up to them and taking the consequences of their actions.
Like Bryan had.
She gave her valet ticket to the man at the stand and waited as he ran for her SUV, still parked down the street. She’d gotten it washed and waxed this morning to remove any errant water spot or swirl. They’d offered to detail the inside, but she’d said no thanks. She’d known she wouldn’t have to drive anyone today, so there were still cracker crumbs in the seat and a slight smear of almond milk down the inside panel where she’d spilled her latte on the way to the car wash. It didn’t matter. All anyone would care about was the exterior.
The car came to a stop in front of her, and the valet opened the door so she could climb in. There was the faint leftover taint of old coffee inside. She threw her ridiculously expensive Prada purse on the passenger seat and slid off equally expensive shoes so she didn’t ruin them on the floor mats. And she sat there.
She was every bit as shallow and mercenary as the Hollywood starlet inside the restaurant.
Bryan had never claimed to be perfect. He’d been a hundred percent up-front about who he was, the mistakes he’d made. Now that one of those mistakes had caught up with him, he was attempting to deal with it with integrity. And she’d rejected him for it because it made their relationship messy. Because it reminded her of how Robert had betrayed her.
How she hadn’t been enough for him, and her flaws had made him go sleep with other women even while he was married to her.
How for all her money and her success and her beautiful wardrobe, she was just as lost and confused and hurt as any of the people she worked for.
She didn’t have anything together. And Bryan made her realize that for all their differences, they were exactly the same. Imperfect people trying to climb out of bad decisions.
Ana realized that tears were sliding down her face, probably taking her eyeliner with them. The valet was peering into the car with concern now, unsure whether to tell her to move on or ask her if she was okay. She made the choice for him: she put on the signal and pulled away from the curb.
At the stoplight, the guy in the car next to her stared at her and then quickly looked away. Funny how uncomfortable people got at a real show of emotion. It was okay if you could cry pretty; their discomfort came more from the disruption of the proper order of things than the feelings themselves.
Then she glanced in the rearview mirror and started. Okay, she didn’t blame him for looking away quickly. She was frightening, like some creepy corporate zombie-clown from a not-quite-funny horror movie. As soon as she pulled into the garage of her building, she grabbed a wet wipe from her glove compartment and began to scrub the smeared makeup from her face.
Then she stopped. Why was she so worried about what anyone thought about her? Why was she determined to keep everyone from knowing that she actually had emotions?
She tossed the soiled wipe in her cup holder, grabbed her purse, and climbed out of the car. When the doorman did a double take, his face concerned, she just gave him a nod and climbed onto the elevator, where she rode up to her perfect apartment and walked into her perfect kitchen to place her cell phone on the charger.
Only then did she notice that the light on the phone was blinking, indicating a message.
She pressed the button for her voice mail and listened. One message.
“Hi, Ana. It’s Bryan. I don’t like the way we left things . . . actually, I don’t even really know how we left things. We should talk. Call me.”
Ana deleted the message and placed the phone on the charger. Then she went to her room, changed out of her work clothes, and washed her face clean of the makeup she’d worn for her meeting. The girl who stared back at her looked young —young and crushed and uncertain.
For the first time in a long time, she was actually looking at herself.
She walked out of the bathroom and took a circuit of her home like she was seeing it for the first time. It was beautiful, tasteful, perfect. It could have come straight out of the pages of Architectural Digest or Domino, titled something sufficiently aspirational like “Elegant Oasis in the City.” And yet no one would walk into the space and know anything about her other than she had money. And liked clothes and shoes and handbags, based on the overstuffed state of her closet.
What had seemed to be the trappings of success, her just deserts, now seemed like a shallow attempt to cover up the truth.
She didn’t feel good enough and she never had.
Wasn’t that why she worked so hard to keep up her own image? Wasn’t that why she went to two churches of different denominations, so she didn’t have to make a choice and risk disappointing her family? Wasn’t that the real reason she’d immediately backed away from Bryan? Not because his life had suddenly become complicated, which it had —she had no doubt that being in love with a man who was co-parenting a child would be difficult and frustrating and at times unfair. But that hadn’t been the first thought that went through her mind. She’d jumped straight to how the situation would reflect on her. What people would think about her. What her parents would say.
Whether or not God would still love her.
Put that bleakly, it seemed ridiculous, and yet the question still resonated deep inside her. Hadn’t she secretly thought that her divorce was her fault? Hadn’t she believed it was caused by some deep deficiency as a wife and a person? She’d been working all these years to be perfect, to make up for those perceived faults, in the hopes that maybe God would deem her worthy again. That maybe He would bring her another chance for love.
He had. And she’d thrown it away because that man was no more perfect than she was.
She sat on her four-thousand-dollar custom sofa, selected because it had been handmade in North Carolina using only well-paid American labor and was guaranteed not to exploit workers in the developing world. In short, it was just as perfect as the rest of her image.
And it meant absolutely nothing to her.
Which was good, because this was all going away. Louisa Holliday wouldn’t have wasted any time calling Lionel to tell him what happened. By the end of the day, he would be phoning Ana to say they no longer needed her services at Massey-Coleman, something that she’d known in her heart long before this moment.
It turned out she didn’t care about that any more than she cared about the stupid sofa.
But there was someone she did care about, and he was halfway across town, probably roasting beans and wondering how to go forward since she’d so abruptly left him in the lurch with their business, not to mention their relationship. He deserved more than that. He deserved the truth, even if it was too late for them.
And there were two women who loved her unconditionally, who would have stood by her through all her doubts and feelings of inadequacy, if only she’d had the courage to let them in.
She retrieved her cell phone and tapped in the message to Rachel and Melody that she should have sent a week ago. And then, a second one.
* * *
When Ana texted, she hadn’t considered that it was the middle of the workday, and Rachel and Melody would just be finishing up the lunch rush. Which was why she was instantly flooded with guilt when they showed up, still in their chefs’ whites and without the usual food offerings that accompanied an emergency visit.
She let them in with a horrified gasp. “I’m so sorry! I didn’t even think. I didn’t mean to pull you away from work. I just —”
“It’s okay,” Rachel said. “We’re through the rush and Sam and Talia are holding down the fort. What’s going on? Are you okay?”
She ushered them in and gestured for them to sit down —on that blasted sofa —beside her. Melody and Rachel exchanged one of their now-trademark worried glances, clearly unsettled by her out-of-character behavior.
“What’s going on, Ana?” Melody asked, her brow furrowing with concern.
Now that it came to it, her big emergency seemed silly. She’d dragged them away from work to tell them about something she’d been keeping a secret for sixteen years. Surely it would have kept for another few hours. But they were here, watching her expectantly, so there was no turning back.
And yet, she chickened out and reached for the less shameful of her announcements, only confirmed moments before. “I got fired.”
Rachel blinked, like she wasn’t sure she’d heard right. “I’m sorry, you got what?”
“Technically, my temporary leave was made permanent, but it’s the same end result. I am no longer a publicist with Massey-Coleman. Effective immediately.”
Rachel gasped and reached to give her a hug. “I’m so sorry. Are you okay?”
Ana nodded. “I am. I know it sounds weird, but it’s freeing. I sat down with a new client and realized that I can’t do it anymore. I can’t plaster over other people’s mistakes.” She drew in another long breath. “And I can’t stop hiding from my own.”
Now she had their full attention. Rachel backed off and folded her hands into her lap patiently.
“I was married once.”
“What?” Melody’s mouth dropped open. “When? How?”
“When I was eighteen. It ended badly.” She poured out the story in even greater detail than she’d given Bryan, forcing herself to unburden every last sordid element. “So now you know why I’m so weird about dating. I figured if I kept my standards high —unreasonably high —there was no way I could make a mistake like that again. I’d rather be alone than wrong. And that’s a lonely way to live.”
“Ana, honey . . .” Rachel reached for her hand and squeezed it hard. “Why wouldn’t you tell us? Why did you keep it from us? You know we’d understand. It wasn’t even your fault.”
Ana hung her head for a second, not sure if the sudden burst of shame was over her past or the fact she’d been hiding things for so long. “I guess I didn’t want to be that person anymore. And I was afraid if you knew . . .”
“We’d figure out you were exactly like us? Human?” Melody sent her a wry smile. “I hate to break it to you, but we kind of already knew that.”
“Everyone —including you two —expects me to have the answers. How can I give advice to anyone else when I really have no idea what to do about my own life?”
“Well, look who’s bought into her own PR?” Melody bumped Ana with her shoulder. “You know, we’re friends because we like you. Not because we like having our own personal publicist.”
“Though,” Rachel interjected with a smile, “it is kind of a plus.”
“Well, that’s the only kind of publicity I’ll be doing. Lionel made it clear that there would be no crisis work for me in Denver anymore. Which is fine. I’m tired of spinning the truth. For other people, for myself. I’ve been hiding behind all this —this image —for too long. It’s time to face my life.”
Melody smiled. “I knew Bryan would be a good influence on you.”
“He was. But . . . that might be over.”
“What?” Now they both looked shocked. “What do you mean?”
Ana stopped. If Bryan hadn’t told anyone about Vivian’s pregnancy, it wasn’t really her place to break the news. And without that, there was no way of explaining why they were no longer together.
Though they really hadn’t made that determination. They’d just . . . stopped talking.
She remembered the message he’d left today. She’d assumed from his level tone that he was talking about the business and not their relationship. But if he hadn’t told Alex they’d broken up, did that mean he was still holding out hope? Did that mean she still had a chance?
She popped to her feet. “I’m sorry, guys. I have to go. I have to see him.”
Rachel and Melody rose as well. “You won’t make it to the roastery before he leaves. He and Alex had plans today.”
“Do you know where?” Ana asked, a tinge of desperation creeping into her voice.
Rachel smiled. “Seems like you’re not the only one reevaluating your life choices this week.”