Chapter 18
Gabe made me gourmet dinners on the nights he wasn’t playing a gig.
We watched stupid movies and brought picnics to the park.
We met his band for drinks, and he came out with Jen and Celia, listening to them complain about their own love lives, dancing with them, but never too close.
He gave me foot rubs while I emailed Mr. Pichietti and the friends who had joined him in requesting freelance newsletters, refilled my coffee and did the crossword puzzle, asked me how I wanted the AC.
I emptied his dishwasher. He wrote jokey songs with my name in them, being as ridiculous as possible until I came over and kissed him to make him shut up.
In the rosy glow of my second-chance romance, I almost didn’t mind that I hadn’t found another job yet in TV.
Gabe was working on other people’s music projects, sitting in on writing sessions and messing with soundboards or computers or I wasn’t sure quite what.
Maggie’s album was one of those projects.
He told me exactly when he was meeting her, where it would be, what they did, who else was with them.
He invited me to all his gigs, which felt less like a request for my companionship than an assertion that he’d be where he had told me he would be.
We were two months back in, and he hadn’t addressed the tabloids or the paparazzi, who accosted us in a parking lot at one point but then, seeing I was obviously not Maggie, gave up and backed off. He hadn’t told me if he was the one who got Maggie to break up with Jason.
“The tabloids lie,” Gabe said with no elaboration.
I guess he knew that having worked in Reality TV, I was firmly aware that what you see isn’t always what you get.
But that went both ways. I had Gabe; I saw him.
I was trying to take my mother’s advice.
I hadn’t mentioned what Maggie had said to me that day at the fountain in Calabasas.
How well do you really know him?
I hated Maggie McKee for watering this seed of distrust, yet once it had sprouted, I couldn’t force it back into its cracked little husk.
Maggie was also going through it. In an overplayed interview for ABC, she was asked if she worried about setting a bad example for her fans.
“I don’t understand the question.” In the video, Maggie pops her gum.
Her hair has been braided into elaborate pigtails that make her look younger than twenty-five.
The interviewer, a white woman in expensive pants and small gold hoop earrings, blinks as though Maggie has an IQ of six.
Whereas Jason winked at the audience when Maggie played dumb, this lady patronizes to the point of sticky sweetness.
Aspartame kindness, ready to dissolve your teeth and give you five kinds of cancer.
“How do you feel about becoming a dangerous kind of role model for American children?” the interviewer repeats. Maggie presses her lips together and answers in her calmest voice.
“Shouldn’t ‘role model’ be a job for their teachers and parents?”
“But surely you realize that young people’s eyes are on you. Does that make you regret certain choices in your personal life?”
Maggie gives a sad little half smile and, with impressive serenity, responds, “I’m a singer, not a nanny.”
Then the interviewer moves on to how it feels to know she’s broken Jason Dean’s heart.
I watched this particular interview while Gabe was at a show, not wanting him to know how much I still thought about Maggie.
Is Maggie M on a Bender? ran across a photo of her getting into a car after a night at a club.
Maggie McKee, Don’t Phone Me over an image of her visibly upset while holding her cell phone.
For months it would seem like, finally, the Maggie McKee smackdown cycle was through, and then a slow news week would prompt another round of speculation on who she’d been cheating with and how Jason was dealing with the heartbreak and shock.
To listen to the media, Jason was waking up every day with zero short-term memory, experiencing the supposed surprise of his wife’s infidelity anew.
“She knows I’ll always love her,” he said in his own prime-time interview. “I told her that whatever happens between us, I’m always a phone call away. I’m here whenever she needs me.”
This earned him a reassuring pat on the hand from the same Tasteful Hoop Earrings who had torn apart his ex-wife a few weeks prior.
Gabe’s EP had finally gotten him a deal for an album with a major label.
This was all in the works when I drove out to Las Vegas, and within our first three months back together, he had dotted all the i’s.
The day the paperwork was filed, Maggie McKee offered to sing on a track.
Gabe brought me her proposal, laying it out over brunch.
The facts were these: Maggie was finished being flighty. Gabe could have that special song they wrote together in Nashville, the one he’d asked after for literal years. Maggie would even sing harmonies or a verse, and make rounds for publicity when it released.
I knew immediately that Maggie was in love with Gabe.
She was sending me a message. Why else would she be offering this now when we’d just gotten back together?
Maggie had held Gabe on the back burner for ages, but now that he had me again, she’d realized her mistake.
She wanted him. Or maybe she just really hated me.
“Of course, I said no.” Gabe cut a sausage link and popped it casually into his mouth.
“What do you mean you said no?” I pushed my chair back from the table.
All publicity was good publicity—well, so long as he wasn’t in the news for killing someone.
Maggie might be napalm for herself, but she was an excellent lighter for Gabe’s candle.
If Maggie toured with him, did interviews, a magazine spread—that would introduce a new audience to his music.
It was the best hook he could ask for, the most certain to succeed.
Everything he wanted—the acclaim, the reassurance, the respect—was within arm’s reach, if only he would grab it.
Yet here he was, immediately pooh-poohing.
“I told you, I’m over that song. It doesn’t fit,” said Gabe. “With us. It doesn’t make sense.” He leaned back in his chair, calm and decisive. I frowned.
“Okay, but career-wise,” I said. “It makes a ton of sense for your career. You have to say yes.”
“I don’t think I do,” said Gabe.
“This is the break you’ve been waiting for,” I said.
“Do you agree that things are good here?” He gestured between us with his fork.
“Things are very good here, but that has nothing to do with it,” I said.
“That has everything to do with it,” said Gabe, looking almost smug. “That is it. I don’t need Maggie, or her song.”
Gabe leaned across the table to kiss me. His lips pressed into mine, and he smelled like sugar, and I felt his heartbeat, and I tried not to think about what I knew I would say next.
I still thought about Sally Ann. The kid in her locket, who took care of it, what it was doing. I had a recurring nightmare that I was endlessly passing out lunch orders. Whenever I thought about Sally Ann, I also thought about Maggie. How well do you really know him, Cassidy?
“Gabe,” I began.
“Cassidy, I’ve made up my mind,” Gabe said. “It’s not going to happen.”
“I have to ask you something,” I said. Gabe’s face went serious. He sat up straighter, his eyes searching mine. “Maggie said something to me that seems kind of insane, but before you make the call here and give up all her stuff for me, I have to know if it’s true.”
Open the door, I told myself; be totally real with him. What was the worst that could happen?
“Fucking Maggie,” Gabe said under his breath. Did he know what I was about to say? My heart dropped.
“Before I quit the show, before I left LA, we had a conversation,” I continued.
“Me and Maggie.” Every word felt like walking through a swamp, and I spoke quickly to keep myself from getting sucked down.
“I thought when Sally Ann died—I’d seen some stuff that made me think it wasn’t actually an accident.
I mentioned it to Maggie because I thought that maybe Jason had . . . you know. She told me it was you.”
Gabe frowned, an endearing little crease of the forehead. “She said what?” He blinked hard, then shook his head. “She told you what?”
“She said you were the one who figured out how to cause . . . Sally Ann’s accident.” I took a breath.
In the moment it took Gabe to parse what I was saying, I realized how insane I sounded. I didn’t think Gabe had been part of the murder, simply Maggie’s collateral. But why had he been her collateral? Was he really who I thought he was? I couldn’t stand the not knowing.
His hands tightened into fists. “Maggie told you that I plotted to kill her makeup artist?” He was definitely mad, but I wasn’t yet sure if he was mad at me. His tone had that half-joking veneer of disbelief that accompanies the absurd, but underneath it was actual pain. “And you believed her?”
“Well, no. I didn’t believe her,” I said. “I’m not saying I think that you did it, but I wanted to know why she would say that. If there was more that you weren’t telling me. It seemed like something we should probably address.”
“Okay,” Gabe said, tugging at his hair. “Okay. Sure, I guess I get it, kind of?”
I moved to touch his arm. “Just to be clear,” I said, “you didn’t—?”
“I didn’t do it. I don’t know what she’s even talking about.
” Gabe stood, began pacing the room. His fists clenched and unclenched.
He inhaled long, then exhaled slowly, and in this moment, he seemed to understand what I was actually asking him, all that I’d avoided saying these past several months.
“Okay.” He sat back down and took both my hands in his, ignoring my half-bitten nail. “Cassidy.”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t help Maggie kill anyone. It’s ridiculous that I have to say this.
I didn’t kill anyone or help anyone kill anyone.
And more importantly, I’m not sleeping with Maggie.
I wasn’t with her when we were together, I didn’t sleep with her after we broke up, and I haven’t been seeing her now in anything other than a professional setting.
I’m being totally honest with you. Years ago, I knew some stuff about Jason and didn’t tell anybody about it when maybe I should have.
But you know all that. I’ve told you all of it.
You know everything there is to know between me and Maggie McKee, and there won’t be anything else to know because that friendship is over.
” He squeezed my hands hard while we spoke, willing me to believe him.
“It’s an easy decision. I don’t need her help. I’m choosing you.”
I thought about the tabloid photos: Maggie’s head on his shoulder, their knees touching under the table. I thought about Gabe sitting here in front of me. That old voicemail he’d sent, slurring my name. The gentle way he kissed my neck under the earlobe.
I believed him.
“You mean this doesn’t change your mind and make you want to take her up on her offer?” I cracked. Gabe rolled his eyes. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I just couldn’t not say anything. I couldn’t let you make this kind of decision about work without letting you know it had been eating at me.”
“I know.” His grip had eased, and he was now stroking my hand with his thumb. I shifted my chair closer to him and leaned against his side.
We moved in together four months later.