Chapter 19
Chapter 19
Jaime liked filming. The technicalities and careful planning that went into every scene. The decisions about the camera’s movement and the editing. The giddy way you had to change your approach to a sequence on the fly or as someone’s performance developed.
But on this set, Jaime was the conductor on a runaway train, holding on for dear life while they flew, brakeless, down a hill. The stakes, much like their budget, were so high here. If Jaime got Queen’s Kiss wrong, he’d be branded a one-hit wonder.
He could’ve used someone to confide in about his worries, but Nate would’ve blithely told him everything was fine. Honestly, the only person who could possibly understand was Scarlett. Almost every match she played had these kinds of stakes, and she managed it with unnatural coolness.
But if Jaime looked at her for more than ten seconds combined, he plunged back into the moment when she’d told him what she’d done. His feelings were as fresh as wet paint—one of those splatter pieces by Jackson Pollock, maybe. Just an explosion of anger and confusion.
Things reached a fever pitch on the day he walked onto the set, trying to think about the pages they had to shoot today, and was immediately confronted by Scarlett chatting with Nate and two other people he’d never seen before. As he approached, the woman next to Scarlett aimed a look at Jaime that would’ve frozen running water.
Great. Today was off to an amazing start.
“Jaime! Perfect timing,” Nate called.
Jaime might actually stab his codirector before this shoot was over, and not only because the guy was nursing some ridiculous notion about how Jaime must still be wildly in love with Scarlett. No, a murder might help with promo. Maybe people would like the show more if they thought Jaime had lost it while filming. There was still a lot of currency in the misunderstood-genius piggy bank.
“Looks like it,” Jaime deadpanned. “Who do we have here?”
Scarlett’s smile was beatific: oh boy. That always happened right before a thunderstorm. “Martina and Kit. They wanted to swing by and catch a few days of filming.”
Jaime knew exactly who Martina and Kit were: two of the best chess players in the world and Scarlett’s allies in challenging PAWN. They were collecting prodigies here.
“We had to make sure you aren’t butchering Scarlett’s story,” Martina—the one with the Bond-villain glare—said faux sweetly.
Clearly, Scarlett had told them everything, and they loathed Jaime’s guts. They could join the club. These days, he mostly loathed his own guts too.
“Trying not to,” Jaime replied, which was the honest-to-God truth. As mad ... annoyed ... betrayed ... hurt as he was about what Scarlett had done, he wanted to get the show right. For himself, sure, but also for Scarlett. He didn’t know what exactly he wanted for her these days, but he didn’t wish her ill.
“Are you?” Kit said, obviously amused by Jaime’s awkwardness.
Jaime shrugged. “The show being good is in everyone’s interests.”
“Of course it is,” Scarlett interjected smoothly. Other than her words in front of the entire cast and crew at the first production meeting, this was just about the only vote of confidence she’d cast for Jaime since they’d started filming. “And while they’re here, they’re going to play a few games with Clara—and anyone else who’s up for it. They’re both grand masters.” She addressed that last part to Nate.
“I can tell they’re grand.” Nate was watching Kit with far more than friendly interest, and Jaime wanted to smack the guy with his script. They were making television; it wasn’t the best time to lust over someone.
Jaime shot a quick look at Scarlett, and his body made its typical response. As complicated as his feelings were about her, she still turned his libido over as if it were a car engine and she had the only key.
So he kept his warnings to himself. People in glass houses should hoard their stones, or whatever the line was.
“Great,” Jaime said, sounding hollow even to himself. “I have to check in with the DP, but it’s good to meet you both.”
Martina, though, wasn’t having it. “The director of photography? Oh, interesting. Can I come see the camera? I’m fascinated by filmmaking.”
Sure she was.
But Jaime wasn’t going to be an asshole—or at least he wasn’t going to be any more of an asshole. So he said, “Of course.”
As they walked away, Nate asked Kit why white always went first in chess, and Jaime could practically hear their eyes roll in response. At least Jaime wasn’t the only one sticking his foot in his mouth this morning.
“We’re using a Sony Venice camera,” Jaime began to explain to Martina. He could at least keep up appearances here. “It gives a real filmic look with great depth of field, and—”
“I don’t care,” Martina interrupted. “I wanted to get you alone.”
Of course. “Uh-huh.”
Martina swung around to look him dead in the eye. “You need to leave Scarlett alone.”
“I swear to God, I’ve been trying to.” Jaime was barely speaking to Scarlett. He certainly wasn’t trying to make her feel bad or mess with her or anything. “We’re just working together until the shoot is over.”
As confusing as all this was—and it was—Jaime and Scarlett had an expiration date. Three months of filming to go, plus whatever promo Videon asked them to do, but then they truly would never see each other again. This was nearly their last dance. After it was over, Jaime was going to avoid any and all mention of chess as if it were botulism. His next project was going to be about football or fighter pilots—whatever the absolute opposite of this was.
The prospect was strangely antiseptic, though. He disliked how seeing Scarlett made him feel, but it was hard to deny that next to her, everything else was flat and colorless. She was an IMAX movie—brash and hypersaturated—and everyone and everything else was a washed-out home movie from the seventies.
Life without Scarlett would feel like less . It would be less.
But if she didn’t think there was anything wrong with the fact that she’d made a major decision about Jaime’s family without so much as giving him a heads-up, Scarlett wasn’t someone he could build a life with. End of story.
Martina snorted, disbelieving. “You had better, mister. She has been a mess these last few months. I’ve never seen her so much as rattled before. Then you come back into her life, and everything went to hell.”
Jaime almost laughed. “Scarlett never gets rattled.”
“Bullshit. She just hides it better than most people. But whatever happened when she was in Virginia, she can’t seem to hide it anymore, and that’s your fault. She held it together in Norway, but she’s going to Candidates again and she’ll need to be more focused there. Stop screwing around with her feelings.”
Jaime . . . screwing around . . . with Scarlett’s feelings?
“What?” he demanded, because the word was so loud in his head that he had to put it out into the world.
“Stop hurting her.”
Jaime’s eyes darted around, as if something on set could make what Martina was saying more clear. This was the strangest conversation Jaime had had all day, and he’d spent thirty minutes earlier discussing which shade of light-blue shirt would be better on camera.
Martina thought Jaime was at fault for Scarlett’s turmoil. Was utterly convinced he was.
But he hadn’t known Scarlett was in turmoil.
Scarlett clearly hadn’t told her friends what had gone down in Virginia. A few weeks ago, he would’ve assumed the omission was because Scarlett was protecting herself by not sharing a story that painted her in an unflattering light. But looking into Martina’s accusing face, Jaime wondered if Scarlett might have done it to protect him by keeping the lid on his family’s dirty laundry.
Scarlett had said as much, but he’d dismissed the possibility out of hand. If she were telling the truth, though, it would knock everything off kilter.
Suddenly, Jaime was looking at the world through a Dutch angle shot. What else might he be wrong about?
Jaime almost argued with Martina. He almost explained. But he still couldn’t quite believe Martina’s admonition was real. The only thing keeping him upright was the conviction that if anyone were rattled, it should’ve been him .
“Did she put you up to this, to get me to stop glaring at her or something?” He couldn’t imagine Scarlett not choosing to fight her own battles, but maybe she let her friends in more than she ever had Jaime.
Martina clearly thought this idea was absurd. “Don’t be stupid. She has no idea I’m talking to you. But I mean it: I have my eye on you, Jaime Croft, and I am vicious when provoked.”
At least Jaime could rest easy knowing Scarlett wasn’t as alone as she sometimes liked to pretend she was. He’d be able to chill out in the future, because she had people around her who would at least try to protect her. She’d done everything in her power to keep him on the outside, and now he was done trying to scale her castle walls. Martina and Kit could be on guard.
“I believe it,” he told Martina. “But I’m not—I’m not hurting her. Not on purpose. I’m just trying to get through this shoot. No one has more riding on this than I do.”
“Except her.”
“Except her,” Jaime conceded. Because at least for the moment, he and Scarlett were still linked together by the show.
The rest of Martina and Kit’s visit to the set of Queen’s Kiss was thankfully threat-free, but Jaime couldn’t shake the effect his conversation with Martina had on him.
What was the likelihood that Jaime had been wrong? Not only wrong, but unfair in how he’d responded to Scarlett’s confession?
Naw, his gut protested. But once the petulant denial faded, worry took its place.
Jaime could admit he had been selfish in how he’d processed the news, focused only on himself. But maybe there was another angle here, one equally important and totally different: Scarlett’s.
He just couldn’t shake the fear that, in this situation, he hadn’t acted like the man he tried so hard to be.
So when Jaime collapsed in his hotel room late one afternoon, he called Evelyn. His little sister was aggravatingly grounded and good at seeing every side of something. It came with being an artist or something.
“I have a hypothetical to run by you,” he said when she answered.
“Listening.”
Which probably meant she was painting and he only had approximately ten percent of her attention, but that was fine. Ten percent of Ev’s attention offered more insight than one hundred percent from a regular person. His baby sister was the best.
“What if someone close to you told you they were responsible for Dad’s arrest?” There was no point sugarcoating it.
Over the phone, Evelyn drew a sharp breath.
It sounded like vindication. “You’d be incandescently pissed, right? And you’d feel betrayed they made the decision without consulting you, yes?” Because if so, Jaime was on solid ground, and he could squash the doubts Martina had sowed.
Evelyn exhaled, because of course she would want to know who exactly he meant by someone .
“No,” Evelyn said carefully after a long pause. “I would feel ... I mean, I would feel a lot of things. But I wouldn’t be pissed.”
Jaime almost gawked at his phone. “Why not?”
“This is Scarlett, right? And it’s not hypothetical?”
“Yes.” Jaime’s response covered both things, and it gave him the space to digest the fact that Evelyn had achieved a higher state of zen than he had. “But I’m not quite ready to move on to that yet. How are you not mad about this?”
She really ought to be, and not simply because it would make him feel better. No, Jaime’s position made emotional and logical sense, and Evelyn ought to admit that.
“You said the details didn’t matter,” Evelyn countered.
“That was before I knew them!” It turned out that the real details—not the fake ones he’d once been consumed with before he’d shoved them away forever—were pertinent and aggravating. They justified his response.
Didn’t they?
“I don’t see how this changes anything,” Evelyn said. “Dad did it, someone caught him, and he’s paying for his choices. What else matters?”
“It matters because the someone is my— was my—” He had no idea how to finish that sentence.
Jaime knew how it had felt sometimes, when he and Scarlett had been kids and when she’d stayed at his cabin, as if she were his everything . But Jaime couldn’t say it, not even in the past tense. It would make him feel too exposed. Too needy.
“It matters.” Jaime might not be sure about anything else, but he knew that. “It matters that Scarlett did it. And it matters that she didn’t tell me.”
Okay, Jaime might have oversimplified things, and he might have been melodramatic in responding. But he didn’t know if he could get past those two things, and he didn’t think that made him a shitty person.
“Except she did tell you, obviously.”
“ Decades later.”
“Hmm. When?”
When Scarlett had returned to New York, Jaime had put more distance between himself and his family. It had been all too easy to come up with excuses for skipping family dinners or cutting their phone calls short. He hadn’t wanted to answer their questions, and he’d known that if he was around them too much, he would end up blurting out what he’d learned.
He got absorbed when he was about to film—everyone knew that. If it also helped him deflect their attention and hide in plain sight, well, then those were just upsides.
“Nine months ago,” he admitted.
“Nine months!” Evelyn yelped. “Okay, you gotta move on, big brother. You have to forgive Scarlett, and you have to forgive Dad, and you have to forgive yourself. That’s what you’re really mad about, by the way: Scarlett saw this, and you didn’t.”
“I’m calling Mom.” Jaime hated how juvenile he sounded. Next, he was going to tell his sister to stay out of his room and to stop touching his LEGOs. “She’ll have my back.”
“You can call her,” Evelyn said, “but deep down, you know I’m right.”
Deep down ... Jaime didn’t know what the hell was true anymore. But having said that he was going to phone his mother, he did. She deserved to know the truth too.
“Hi, dear,” she answered. “How’s filming going? Are things rolling?”
His mother’s ideas about moviemaking mostly came from Singin’ in the Rain , but there were worse sources, he supposed.
“The first few days were good.” They’d made their pages, at any rate. “I wanted to ask you something. Do you have any theories about how the police got wind of what Dad was up to?”
In the weeks following Dad’s arrest, Jaime had declared that subject to be off limits. For so long, he’d had so little energy. He’d had to save it for the things he could control. He must have learned to manage his life better if he thought he had room for this now.
But his mother brought him up short when she said, “No, not really.”
“Why not?” Jaime was genuinely curious.
“Because so many people knew. Honestly, it’s shocking it didn’t come out sooner.”
He’d wondered the same thing, but his own version had been more like Why didn’t we know sooner?
“But if you could know the details,” he pressed, “would you want to?”
“No. It wouldn’t change a thing.”
His mom sounded so confident , it only fueled Jaime’s doubts.
But then his mother’s follow-up question proved the apple didn’t fall far from the tree, where Evelyn was concerned: “Did something set you off?”
Right, his mom had seen more than he’d intended her to.
He had long ago discovered that his grief and shame were, at best, buried in a shallow grave. Sometimes he could go months with things locked down tight, and then Jaime would glimpse someone on the street who looked like his father, or flip through Videon and see Dad’s favorite Tom Clancy movie, and it would all come back. Scarlett’s admission had sent Jaime into the longest and most acute wave of grief he’d ridden since those early days, though.
“Why am I the only one who’s curious about this?” he asked, partially because he did wonder and partially to buy himself some time.
“I’d guess because you know who it is—and they’re someone who means a lot more to you than they do to me.”
Busted. “Yeah, so eighteen years ago, Scarlett figured it out, and she called the police tip line. That’s why Dad got caught.”
The pause that followed was endless. Jaime cycled through all the feelings he expected to experience, but they were blunted a bit. Maybe not quite as intense as he would’ve expected them to be.
Now that he’d shared this information, he could process it abstractly and not bodily. The nausea in his gut was more like a dull ache. It was like a broken ankle that had almost healed but still twinged now and again to remind you of the injury. Uncomfortable, but not enough to make you sick.
His mother, though, was still in the initial throes of hearing it. Maybe she was going to hurl.
“No commentary?” he asked. “You’ve never liked her. I would think you’d be baying for her blood.”
“I don’t dislike Scarlett.” His mother sounded far away, and he was certain she was going through her own cycle of emotions—but he wasn’t going to push if she didn’t want to share them.
He wasn’t going to leave that ripe lie uncommented on, though. “Sure.”
“I do worry she’s too independent for you.”
Jaime was tempted to lift the phone from his ear to glare at it. Maybe he ought to have done this on a video call. “I love that she’s independent,” he protested.
“But not that she made this call without you.”
That was a pretty sassy line from his mother. She generally went for passive aggression versus actual aggression. She was right about this, though. “Yeah, I wish she would’ve told me. Asked me what to do about it.”
Making decisions together was the baseline for being together. Jaime hadn’t realized how strongly he felt about that until Scarlett hadn’t given it to him.
“What would you have said?” Mom asked.
“I don’t know.” Jaime could pretend he would’ve believed Scarlett’s story instantly and would’ve supported her calling it in. But being honest enough with himself to admit he might not have responded well didn’t ease the sting of her unilateral decision. “It feels reasonable to want your partner to make these kinds of decisions with you. Wouldn’t you have been pissed at Dad if he’d kept something like this from you?”
“He did keep something like this from me,” his mother said drolly.
Oh. Right. And in comparison, Dad’s betrayal was far worse.
“You were pretty pissed,” he reminded her.
When the initial shock had melted, his mother had been even more volcanically angry than Jaime had been. But she’d kept her rage inside, focusing it on scrubbing baseboards and seething. If Jaime had tried to be cold and reserved and icy to Scarlett, Mom had just rumbled at the world. But somewhere along the way, she’d clearly released her grip on her fury.
When she sighed now, it was motherly and concerned. “There are some key differences, though. You and Scarlett weren’t married, and you were kids.”
“Youth isn’t a defense.” Not a good one, anyhow.
“But it’s relevant.” She paused, and Jaime could feel the conversation shift. Whatever was coming next, he wasn’t going to like it. “As is personality. Part of why you’re so upset Scarlett made this decision without you is that you loved to be needed , Jaime. Even before Dad went to jail, you liked to take care of people. To manage things. I never meant for you to take over so much when he was convicted, but you seemed to enjoy doing it, and you were so good at it. As long as you were also going to school and you eventually left the nest, well, I thought, Where’s the harm? But that was wrong of me, and I’m sorry. I should’ve made you give me the reins a long time ago.”
What was Mom going on about? Jaime didn’t want to talk about himself. This was about what Scarlett had done. “No, that’s not—this isn’t about me.”
“It’s very much about your desire to take care of everyone.”
Which included Scarlett, Jaime supposed. He’d wanted to take care of her, and he’d wanted her to recruit him to be on her team, the way she’d clearly allowed Kit and Martina to be. He respected her independent streak, but it was also the thing that kept her from letting him in—which he was holding against her.
Even if Evelyn and Mom were right here, and Jaime wasn’t ready to admit that they were, he couldn’t see how to resolve that conundrum.
“Wasn’t wanting to take care of you and Ev after Dad’s arrest a good thing? We’re a family. That’s what family does.” Jaime didn’t regret stepping up to help Mom manage things, not remotely.
“You were still a child,” she said gently. “It wasn’t your job to right the ship. And I’m sorry you missed out on a lot because you were helping me.”
“You missed out on a lot too.” His mother should’ve had a normal life, a normal marriage. Instead, she’d had to face the prospect of life alone, with two grieving and confused kids and the scorn of an entire community to deal with.
“I didn’t say what happened was fair,” his mother said. “I’m only talking about what I should’ve done.”
Well, that was a mouthful.
Jaime rubbed his forehead. A headache was brewing in there. He’d called Mom wanting to have his frustrations validated, and instead, she’d ripped the rug out from under him. Mothers, man.
Stepping up after Dad’s arrest had changed Jaime’s life. Given him a sense of purpose. Helped him become the person he was today, the director and the man. Jaime couldn’t feel bad about that, even if it had meant he’d missed out on other things.
“Maybe we all made the best choices we could have, given the circumstances,” Jaime said, finally.
“Maybe we did,” his mother agreed. “And I would include Scarlett in that.”
Jaime ... had no idea what to say in response. The conversations he’d had today with Martina, Evelyn, and his mother had mixed him up utterly. He wanted—so many things. To cry. To scream. To be certain again.
Most of all, he realized, he wanted to believe what his mom was saying, because if Scarlett had done the best she could, then they could be ... well, he didn’t know if they could be together, but at least the possibility could reenter the universe.
“The woman I saw in Musgrove last year, the one you were writing with,” Mom pressed on, “she wasn’t the same girl I knew eighteen years ago. Just like you’re not the same boy. You’re not going to punish her or yourself for the choices those other people made, are you?”
“I have no idea.”
Jaime honestly felt as if he didn’t know anything anymore.