Chapter 26
Chapter 26
Six Months Later
“Here you go, Mr. Croft,” the driver said as he parked in front of a Manhattan TV studio.
Hear Her was the top-rated morning talk show with women, making it a necessary stop on any publicity tour. But Jaime was dreading it, and for once, it wasn’t because he was going to have to face Lana Larkin—the show’s resident fashion expert and a legendary gossip—and her prying questions about his personal life.
No, the problem was going to be sitting next to Scarlett. Breathing the same air as her, at least until she incinerated him.
“Thanks.” Jaime dragged himself out of the car.
No cheering crowds waited to greet him. They’d probably cleared out after seeing Scarlett half an hour ago, but they would no doubt return for her exit after the show. Jaime had timed things so that he was going to walk in with only seconds to spare before he needed to be in the makeup chair. If he was lucky, he’d only see Scarlett on the set, where he could keep his professional mask in place and not have to think about the fact that, this time, he’d been the one who had ended things.
In the days after Dad’s arrest, Jaime had discovered he could push through bad days, because they’d all been bad days for a while. If he had waited until he had felt like doing something, he never would’ve gotten up off the floor. For days, weeks, lying on the floor had been all he’d wanted to do.
But much like a tightrope walker, he’d learned to concentrate on the destination and put one foot in front of the other: Don’t look down, don’t get distracted, and it’ll be over in no time . He got through things the way someone else might cross wire strung between two skyscrapers.
Maybe someone healthier, someone like Evelyn, would’ve said he was disassociating. But Jaime preferred to think that being a professional meant working even when he didn’t feel like it.
All those lessons served him well while he edited Queen’s Kiss . These days, he’d managed to forget that Emily was a stand-in for Scarlett. The show had become fully fictional to him, the television cocoon in which he’d wrapped himself so he didn’t have to think about anything that might cause him pain.
Which ruled out pretty much everything.
A PA met Jaime just inside the door. “You’re a little late.”
“I’m sorry.” Jaime was sorry that he was messing up this kid’s morning, but not that he was doing what he needed to do to avoid chitchatting with his ex. That was going to utterly wreck his cocoon, and he still needed the thing until Queen’s Kiss debuted on Videon to acclaim and Jaime could finally leave this entire cursed project in his rearview mirror.
According to his watch, that would happen a few months from now, or whenever Videon scheduled the damn thing. They were going to premiere a rough cut of the first episode at the Brooklyn Film Festival tomorrow—it coincided with the opening game of the Candidates Tournament, and that had proved too big a publicity opportunity for Videon to pass up—but the streamer had stayed silent on when the entire series would drop. They were probably waiting to see if Scarlett made the open-division world championship game. That would be a cross-promo opportunity too big to ignore.
Jaime arrived on set, all made up and wired, with only seconds to spare. As he took the seat next to Scarlett’s, she was laughing operatically at something one of the hosts had said. And she looked ... well, as usual, Scarlett was just beyond beautiful. Her black dress lovingly hugged every one of her curves, her mouth was painted crimson, and her skin glowed under the stage lights. If Jaime hadn’t locked up what was left of his heart behind three sets of bank-vault doors, it would’ve broken right then and there.
“Mr. Croft,” she whispered to him without so much as glancing in his direction.
“Ms. Arbuthnot,” he whispered back, staring into the reflection of the stage lights on the middle of the table. It was probably too late to feign shingles. He ought to have sent Nate to handle these promo events. This was going to be a disaster.
Unaware of the metric ton of sexual tension and resentment Jaime and Scarlett were emitting just by sitting next to each other, Grace Choi said to Jaime, “You’re cutting it a little close.”
She had no idea.
“Traffic,” he apologized.
“And we’re on in five, four ...” The producer signaled the last three counts on his fingers and then pointed to Denise Strong, who handled the lead-ins for the segments.
“Welcome back, everyone. I’m here today with two folks who are returning to Hear Her : writer, director, and showrunner Jaime Croft, whose critically acclaimed docudrama The Devouring Sun was nominated for several Emmys a few years ago, and the chess grand master Scarlett Arbuthnot, who wrote the bestselling memoir Queen’s Kiss and who’ll be competing in the open division at the Candidates Tournament, the first step in making the world championship, in a few days. Jaime has just finished filming an adaptation of Scarlett’s memoir for Videon, and a rough cut of the first episode is going to kick off the Brooklyn Film Festival tomorrow. It’s great to see you both again.”
“How kind of you to have us.” Scarlett sounded like she was doing an Eliza Doolittle impression, after her transformation at the hands of Henry Higgins.
Jaime almost snorted. No one else would know she was mocking Jaime, saying he was the pedantic asshole in this scenario.
Luckily, Grace launched right into things. “We’ve all read Queen’s Kiss , I think.”
“I haven’t,” Rylee Lagrange put in, unhelpfully. Rylee was the daughter of a pop star, had herself been a pop star, and was raising her kids to be pop stars. Her primary function on the show seemed to be creating drama and keeping the US sequins market humming.
Grace didn’t roll her eyes at her colleague, which Jaime thought showed amazing restraint. “Well, the rest of us loved it. It’s funny and feminist. I mean, I don’t even play chess, and I couldn’t put it down. But before we talk with Scarlett, I’m curious about how you ended up adapting it, Jaime. It strikes me an unusual follow-up for you because it’s so different from your previous work in genre and tone. What made you want to do this project?”
The PR people had, of course, unearthed that Jaime and Scarlett had graduated in the same high school class, and so there wasn’t any way for Jaime not to share that nugget of information. It was probably in Grace’s notes, because she was the most serious journalist on the Hear Her panel. “Well, if someone from your hometown became the celebrity bad girl of the chess world and wrote a massively successful memoir about it, you’d read it too. And once I’d inhaled it, I couldn’t get it out of my head. The whole thing was so cinematic. I couldn’t stand the idea of someone else making it, so I ... made my pitch, and Scarlett got on board.”
If they could just talk about the cinema of it, Jaime would be fine here. He didn’t want to think about whether he would take back the choice to show up in her lobby and beg her to let him do it. He’d told her that he wouldn’t regret the second act of their love story, and even now, he wasn’t certain if what he felt—the mix of loss, pain, and nausea—could be boiled down to that word.
Regret was too simple. Too pat.
Scarlett had said she wanted to have a future with him, and he’d turned her down cold because he worried she would never let him in. As a result, he was sad and alone, rather than being uncertain and with her.
Back in Vegas, he’d felt as if he had to say no. He’d kept himself so busy with work that he hadn’t had time to mourn the choice. But here, sitting next to Scarlett and without anything to do but autopsy the past, doubt flooded him.
It probably hadn’t been the right decision.
Across the table, Grace was determined to stay the course with this line of questioning. Her White House reporter instincts were engaged, and she knew there was a story here. “You and Scarlett were friends in high school?”
“Great friends.” Scarlett slanted a look over her shoulder at Jaime, and he wasn’t prepared for the wallop of emotion that followed. He was so susceptible to her.
“I moved to town junior year,” she went on, “and Jaime just made me feel so welcome.”
“Do I smell a teenage romance?” Lana Larkin asked, nearly panting. Jaime had seen the woman get excited about precisely three things: tacky gowns on awards show red carpets, the sex scenes from Waverley , and the amorousness she sensed between Jaime and Scarlett.
If Grace Choi could be relentless in pursuing an actual news story, she had nothing on Lana Larkin’s nose for sensation.
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Scarlett replied, in a tone that suggested she very much did know but wasn’t going to say anything else about it. The kind of thing that sounded as if she’d told you something, when in reality, she’d told you nothing. She deployed it with the press a lot. “But the short version is that I never would’ve let anyone else adapt my book except for Jaime.”
For better or for worse, Jaime had done so, and they’d come crashing back into each other’s orbits. At the moment, he felt much like the asteroid that had taken out the dinosaurs. He’d asked Scarlett for too much, and he’d destroyed himself in the process.
Everyone around the shiny table was looking at him expectantly. They wanted him to weigh in on Scarlett’s version of things.
“Yup,” he said.
The members of the Hear Her panel all blinked. Apparently, that wasn’t enough to satisfy them.
“Scarlett and I were ... real good friends. And in Queen’s Kiss , she told one heck of a story. I disagree with you a little, Grace, because there are parts of what Scarlett wrote that resonate with my previous work. I think we both feel protective of the people in Musgrove and places like it. One of the many, many things about Scarlett’s career that I find impressive is how her success demonstrates you don’t have to be born with a silver spoon in your mouth to make something of yourself. That even if you’re born poor or if your dad’s in prison, you can still become a chess grand master or get nominated for an Emmy, you know?”
“I agree, Jaime,” Denise put in. She was the grande dame of Hear Her , an actress of so much talent and gravitas, she’d become a certified living legend before joining the talk show. “But with all that shared history—and everyone who’s read Queen’s Kiss knows about your temper, Scarlett—there wasn’t any conflict on set?”
Ha. In the end, it had been his temper that had been the problem, but he wasn’t going to offer that juicy detail for public consumption. “We both cared a lot about getting the show right. We want it to be accurate to Scarlett’s experience, but also a good ride for viewers. Whatever little speed bumps we may have hit along the way, Scarlett handled them like a total pro.”
Jaime . . . less so.
“Whatever Jaime says, I’m sure,” Scarlett said, and all the hosts just whooped.
She sure was good at playing the press. Even if Jaime had loathed the stunt she’d pulled with the Musgrove Messenger , it had worked. She was as good with it as she was at everything else.
Everything except letting him in. And if that was her only flaw, surely it didn’t matter in the grand scheme of things.
“When it all drops on Videon, we’ll have you back,” Denise said, “and you can tell us about all the dirty laundry.”
Scarlett only smiled serenely. “No, honestly, it was amazing to watch this kid I sat in English class with manage a film set. He’s great with the talent; he’s amazing behind a camera. I loved watching Jaime do the thing he always wanted to do.”
“And tell your story?”
“And tell my story,” Scarlett echoed.
When Jaime had been working on The Devouring Sun , he’d realized how sacred that act was and why storytellers had been priests in ancient times. In giving him her book, Scarlett had trusted Jaime with so much. He could only hope that he’d managed to do it justice, even while he’d acted like such a dirtbag.
“And that story will continue in a few days as the first stage of the world chess championship gets underway,” Grace said. “Tell us about it.”
Scarlett nodded. “Well, the Candidates is held every other year—”
“And there was some controversy when you didn’t make the last one.”
“Yes. Chess rankings are ... well, Byzantine is a mighty fancy word, but I think it’s the right one. The first time I went to Candidates, I was only the second woman to get an invite. Ever.”
Grace shuffled the papers that rested in front of her. “We reached out to PAWN, and they insist that there isn’t gender discrimination in the sport. Their spokesman told me that it’s a math question. If more women were ranked in the top ten, then more women would be competing for the open-division world championship: that’s their claim. They maintain that the protected class is the best way to grow the women’s game.”
“Oh, I’m familiar with how they defend their system. And I would love for more women and nonbinary folks to get into chess. But if chess doesn’t feel inviting or safe to them—and if they see that there isn’t diversity at the top, it probably doesn’t—then there’s not much reason to. Why devote yourself to a sport that doesn’t want you and won’t welcome you? That’s why I wrote the book, and it’s why I’m putting myself out there like this. Honestly, it’s wild that I need to expose myself in ways a man never would, in order to promote my career or for the sake of other people in the sport.”
Denise leaned forward. “Did writing the book or making the show expose things you would’ve rather kept private?”
Scarlett’s knuckles tensed for a second. It was an almost imperceptible tell. If Jaime had been seated across from her rather than next to her, he wouldn’t have seen it. She wasn’t excited about answering this question. “Well ...”
Jaime couldn’t do much for Scarlett, but he could help here. “If I could weigh in, Grace. Fans of the book might be surprised that the show lightly fictionalizes things and makes some cuts and changes. But we did that to give Scarlett some cover. She shouldn’t have to give people anything she doesn’t want to give them.” Because they, like himself, might not be worthy.
“That seems pretty chivalrous,” Lana said, waggling her brows at him.
“I promise, it wasn’t.” No, Jaime hadn’t even managed to be polite to Scarlett, in the end.
“But Jaime really does know how to listen to someone,” Scarlett put in.
Except not how to handle how he might feel afterward, and right now, what Jaime felt was guilty.
Denise smoothly steered the conversation back to the fields at the Candidates Tournament, and Jaime was able to play backup to Scarlett for most of the rest of the segment as she talked about how she prepped for matches, her tips for kids who might want to take up chess, and how it had felt to watch someone else play her.
When it was done, Jaime followed Scarlett off the Hear Her set. When they’d returned their mics to someone on the production team, Jaime said quietly, “I hope that was okay.” He was certain Videon would be pleased, but the only person whose response he cared about was Scarlett’s.
“It was fine.”
Fine was not really a Scarlett word. Someone else might use that to deflect or hide the truth, but if Scarlett was mad at you, she didn’t bother stabbing you in the back; she drove the knife straight into your sternum.
“I just assumed that you wanted to make nice, not fight in front of Denise Strong,” Jaime said. Arguing in front of her seemed like a rude thing to do—the woman had won an Oscar. It’d be akin to throwing a hissy fit at his mother’s dining room table.
“Sure, whatever. But Jaime?” Scarlett waited until he was looking her in the eye to finish her thought. “I’m done fighting with you, in public or in private.”
Why did Scarlett refusing to holler at him feel like the saddest thing he’d ever heard?