THE VENICE BOARDWALK is empty even though it’s Saturday night. Usually, it would be filled with locals and tourists popping into the skater and surf shops, eating at restaurants a stone’s throw from the Pacific Ocean. But the rain has cleared everyone out tonight.
Billy’s address was easy to find through a quick Google search on my phone. Featured in the Dirt section of the Hollywood Reporter, which covers celebrities, professional athletes, and other moguls’ real estate purchases and sales, it was described as a modern architectural stunner with walls of windows and sliding glass doors showcasing oceanfront views.
I pull up in front of a custom-made garage painted with four shiny-colored surfboards—blue, pink, orange, and yellow, bringing back echoes of 1970s Los Angeles, a stark contrast to the white sterile box of a mansion standing behind it.
I get out of my car and walk to the front entrance, where a very tall guard dressed in a long, black raincoat stands.
“I’m here to see Billy,” I tell him.
“Is he expecting you?” he says.
“Yes,” I say.
“What’s your name?” he asks.
“Beatrice Bennett. Irene Mayer’s daughter.”
He makes a call on his phone. A moment later, the enormous wrought iron front door opens.
I step inside the house, and it’s as sterile on the inside as on the outside. Sparse furniture. Little artwork. It feels like no one lives here, and nobody’s here to greet me.
“Hello?” I call out.
No one responds.
Whoever picked up the guard’s call must know I’m here.
I tentatively walk inside the house and notice several cameras positioned on the ceiling. I pass a large living room, dining room, bathroom, and bedroom when I see a bright light coming from a room at the end of a long hall. I tentatively walk toward it until I reach it.
When I peek inside, I see a man seated at a white marble desk in a large office with ocean views. His face and eyes are hardened compared to how he looked in the pictures with Mom when he was a fresh-faced NYU college student.
“Come in,” Billy says. “Close the door behind you.”
I step inside his office. There are no family pictures, no artwork except one huge Saint Laurent surfboard hanging on a wall, and no cameras either. Whatever happens here will stay here, like a vault.
Panic rises inside my body. Have I unwittingly surrendered myself to the enemy, raised my white flag, thrown my hands up in the air? This is the very last place on earth I want to be. But it’s the only place I can do what I came here to do.
I walk toward a brown leather couch at least a dozen feet from Billy’s desk and sit down. The distance between us provides little comfort.
“Why are you here?” he asks.
“I know about what happened to Sally,” I say.
His stoic face remains expressionless.
“How you knew TriCPharma drugs caused her death,” I continue. “How you were complicit in covering it up.”
He gives me an icy look. “If you’re here for an apology, you won’t find one. Your mother was an addict. She wasn’t fit to be anyone’s mother. What happened was for the best.”
Shamelessness is his superpower, and he has it in spades. It makes me burn inside.
“Was it also for the best that I lost her when I was fifteen because of your family?” I say.
“You have a lot of nerve coming here, talking about things you know little about when you should be thanking me,” he says.
Anger flames inside me, and I can’t hold back, even if it costs me.
“My life was irrevocably changed when my mom was forced to disappear because of your family, and not for the better. Don’t you dare tell me I should be thanking you,” I say.
“My father paid for your mother to go to the best detox program in the country at the time. She got a second chance at life because of my family. You wouldn’t be sitting here now if we hadn’t helped her.”
I realize this is Billy’s narrative. We all have them. The stories we tell ourselves. The plots we write ourselves out of during difficult moments in our lives when taking ownership of our roles is too much to bear.
I did it with ED for a long time, solely blaming my eating disorder on losing Mom. At a certain point, I had to take ownership of my role to reclaim my agency and understand the choice before me so I could choose recovery.
Billy’s story is that his father saved my mom. A story he has undoubtedly told himself over and over again through the years until he absorbed it as the truth. Whenever the voice inside of him questioned whether his family’s opioid empire played a role in his daughter’s death, he has soothed himself with this story.
“You have her hubris,” he says. “At least I knew I wasn’t fit to be a parent as an eighteen-year-old kid.”
“Maybe it wasn’t that,” I say. “Maybe your father made you believe that because he never wanted you to have Sally.”
His eyes flicker with anger. I just poked a hole in his story. The one he’s desperately clung to for decades. The one that built his house of cards.
“Why are you here?” he asks.
“To make a deal,” I say.
“She’s never coming back,” he says it like he’s trying to hurt me as retaliation, and it works. The words sear through me so deeply it takes my breath away. I try to maintain my composure.
“I’m not here about my mom,” I say. “I’m here for Cristina.”
“Cristina,” he says, almost chuckling. “Why do you care about her after the so-called atrocity my family committed against you?”
“Because it’s too late for Cristina and me. We both lost our moms,” I say. “But it’s not too late for your future grandson.”
“Grandson?” he says, furrowing his brows, confused.
“Cristina is pregnant. She’s having a baby boy. I’m here to make a deal, so he doesn’t grow up without his mother.”
Billy gets quiet for a minute. He didn’t expect this. “Cristina’s pregnancy is none of your concern,” he finally says.
I look at him and think about the pictures I saw of Mom and him when they were younger—the one in Laura Poitier’s yearbook where they were at the acting studio together, when the world was still his to conquer, and when his dreams of becoming a director were still intact before his father gutted them in the pursuit of TriCPharma’s profits.
I’m counting on something—Billy never had the chance to become the person he wanted to be or to discover who he might have been. His healthy narcissism was never mirrored as a child, which caused a narcissistic injury. I recognize it because of the many patients I’ve had to reparent through the years, acting as a conduit for the cheering parent on the sidelines of a soccer field they never experienced.
“What if your grandson wants to become a director?” I say. My voice sounds more uneven than I’d like, revealing my nerves. “Will his dreams be snuffed out like yours were for your father’s company’s bottom line?”
He drills me a look, but it doesn’t stop me. There’s no getting out of here unless I do what I came here to do.
“Don’t you have enough money?” I ask. “Or are you the billionaire at the slot machine in Vegas, trying to squeeze out one more quarter, even if it comes at the cost of dead bodies, including your daughter’s mother? Haven’t enough children lost their moms in this cynical game?”
He stands up from his desk and walks toward me with a menacing look, clenching his jaw tightly.
I instinctively get up from the couch, backing toward the door. The numbness I felt since Eddie left me at the hospital yesterday vanishes. A life force suddenly bubbles up inside of me.
My back is to the door. Billy keeps walking toward me. I have one of my hands behind me on the doorknob. I can feel the lima bean charm pressing against my wrist, imprinting my skin.
“If you don’t set Cristina free, I’ll go to the press and tell the entire world the truth about what happened to Sally,” I say. “I’ll cause TriCPharma more headaches than you could ever dream of until none of your board members, shareholders, whoever, want you around anymore. And I’ll do it until my last dying breath.”
He looks at me like a lion holding up an antelope with its mouth agape right before he’s about to devour it. “Did it ever occur to you that it might not be a good idea to come into my home and threaten me?” he asks.
Yes, I want to say … when I realize something.
I’m in his office threatening him without any cameras around, where he could do anything to me and throw money at people after to make me disappear, but he hasn’t touched me.
“I don’t think you want me to die,” I say, realizing it as the words come out of my mouth.
He stares at me for a long while but doesn’t respond.
“I remind you of her, don’t I?” I say.
He still doesn’t say anything.
“I saw you with her once when you picked her up from our house. I never saw her look at any man that way except my father.”
It seems Billy is all out of words now.
“You loved her, didn’t you?” I ask him.
He releases his clenched jaw.
“And she loved you,” I say.
I hear his breath, uneven and shallow.
“I never meant to hurt her,” he says quietly. “I gave her the pills because my dad told me they were safe and would help her with anxiety. I never dreamt she’d become addicted to them or that he’d threaten me with her addiction to take Sally away …”
I look at Billy. He looks smaller, like a scared young man with his pregnant college girlfriend in too deep. It seems Billy, like my mom, isn’t who I thought he was either.
“Or that Sally could die because of them,” he whispers.
“If you cared about my mom, then why didn’t you tell her the truth about what happened to Sally?”
“My dad told me if Irene ever found out, she could file charges against him. He threatened me with her safety, and later yours and your dad’s. But once Margot found out, I had no choice but to tell her.”
“Is that when I saw you when you came to our house to pick her up, and she came home crying after?” I say.
He nods.
“It was before the congressional hearing. Your mom hadn’t planned to testify because she knew it could put your dad and you in danger. The two of you mattered to her more than anything in the world. But after she learned the truth about Sally’s death, she was blinded by her anger. I tried to stop her. I was terrified she’d bring up Sally in her testimony, and your entire family would be taken out. I even hired someone to rough her up in New York to intimidate her.”
So Mom wasn’t mugged, as I suspected. And this is why she testified despite the risk it posed to Dad and me. She found out her first daughter died because of this family’s drug empire and didn’t want it to happen to others.
“Getting roughed up didn’t stop her from testifying, but it scared her enough not to bring up Sally,” Billy continues. “By then, it didn’t matter. My aunt and uncle had found out that Margot had told your mom about Sally, and they let my dad know. He knew Irene could bring the company down, so he went after her, threatening your life and your father’s. When your mom was the victim of the hit-and-run accident shortly after, my dad had his suspicions about whether she had died, but she had disappeared from her life, so he was no longer worried about her coming forward. That’s all he cared about. I’m sorry. I wish things could’ve turned out differently.”
“If you feel so badly about what happened, why did you go after her again now? Your dad isn’t even alive anymore. You could’ve turned yourself in and finally told the truth about what happened to Sally. But you didn’t, and now my mom is dead because of you.” I choke on the words.
“If I did, I knew …” He hangs his head. “I knew Quentin would go after Cristina as retaliation.”
“Your brother? Cristina’s uncle?” I say, stunned.
“Even though I was named after our dad, Quentin’s the one who took after him. He’s ruthless and calculating and has dangerous partners who’ve infiltrated TriCPharma. They’ll do anything to hold onto power and money. When he found out the Feds were looking for Irene after Margot’s boyfriend gave his testimony, they wanted to search for her to see if she was still alive because they knew she could bring TriCPharma down. I wanted to protect Irene, so I told Quentin I’d hire a PI to find her. When I found out she was alive, I thought we could arrange for her to disappear again, but he and his partners said it was too risky to let her live. So I started being evasive about where she was, telling him my PI said she was on the move. Then they hired their own PI, who found out I was lying—and retaliated by murdering Maria.”
“Quentin had your ex-wife killed?” I say in disbelief. “Why haven’t you gone to the police?”
“I’m scared if I do, he and his partners will go after Cristina,” he whispers. His face looks ashen, like all the blood has been pooled out of it. “They’re the ones framing Cristina for Maria’s murder. At least your mom’s still alive.”
“What?” I gasp.
He nods. “My old PI took some of her hair from a brush and planted it in the woods near the last town she lived in. He stopped working for me after Quentin and his partners started targeting his family. But I had an old contact at the FBI who owed me a big favor, and I asked him to write a report about Irene’s remains. It was a ruse so they’d think she died,” he says.
“Where is she?” I demand.
“She was teaching psychology at a senior center up north. I was nervous about her having an outward-facing job, but it was too risky for me to have direct contact with her to warn her since they’re on my trail. So I paid the center to let her go due to ‘budget constraints.’ She picked up and moved a few towns over to Lucia Beach. I fear it’s only a matter of time before he finds her.”
“What name does she go by now?” I say.
“Sally Beans,” he says.
I open the office door. Mom’s bracelet catches on the knob, but I don’t stop. I run out of Billy’s house as fast as I can.