Chapter 1
"See, I told you it would be fun," Angelica said as she plopped her ass into the driver's seat of the red Corvette convertible rental car. She dropped a plastic sack filled with enough junk food to feed a small army into my lap.
I stared at the bag. Twizzlers, Cheetos, gummy bears, pork rinds, and what looked like three different kinds of chocolate bars peeked out of the top. "You realize we're only driving to Tennessee, not crossing the Sahara."
"Road trips require proper supplies." Angelica slid on black, oversized sunglasses that had me worried if she could actually see through them. "Besides, you need to eat. You've lost weight."
She wasn't wrong. I'd dropped ten pounds in the two weeks since that email arrived. The one with the video that could destroy everything I'd worked fifteen years to build.
"Stop it." Angelica snapped her fingers in front of my face. "I can see you spiraling. No thinking about the thing we're not thinking about until we get to Jasper Creek."
"Angie, how am I supposed to not think about it? Someone has a video of me saying things I never said. They're threatening to release it if I don't withdraw from the film before production starts next week."
"Which is exactly why we told my publicist we're having a girls' spa weekend in Miami while we actually disappear to the one place no paparazzi would ever think to look.
" She started the engine, and the Corvette purred to life.
"Trust me, small town Tennessee is the last place anyone would expect Katherine Lord to hide. "
I pulled my baseball cap lower over my blonde hair and adjusted my sunglasses. The Florida humidity was already oppressive at seven in the morning, making my Stanford hoodie cling uncomfortably. I peeled it off, revealing the tank top underneath.
"Smart move taking that off now," Angelica said. "Once we get past Gainesville, nobody's going to recognize you anyway. Rural Georgia isn't exactly reading Variety."
"Now buckle up, buttercup. We've got eight hours of freedom ahead of us."
Angelica peeled out of the rental car lot with enough enthusiasm to make me grab the door handle. Within minutes, we merged onto the turnpike heading north toward Georgia.
"First stop, gas station for drinks," she announced. "Road trip rule number one, you need a Big Gulp."
"We literally just started driving."
"And your point is?"
Twenty minutes later, Angelica pulled into a RaceTrac and emerged with two cups the size of small buckets.
"Coke for you, Mountain Dew for me." She handed me the cup. "Hydration is important."
"This is not hydration. This is diabetes in a cup."
"You need to gain weight." She took a long pull from her straw. "God, I love road trips. When I was twelve, my parents loaded all of us kids into this massive van and drove from Virginia to California. Eighteen kids, two parents, and my grandmother in one vehicle for five days."
"That sounds like hell."
"It was magical chaos. Renzo and Malik got into a fistfight somewhere in Arkansas over who got the last fruit rollup.
Jase had to separate them while doing seventy on the interstate.
Then Nia threw up on Bruno's shoes, and Zuri cried for three states straight because she missed her stuffed elephant that we'd accidentally left at a rest stop in Oklahoma. "
I found myself smiling despite everything. "Your family sounds insane."
"Completely. But in the best way." She glanced at me. "Speaking of insane, you need to tell me more about these videos. I only got the highlight reel when you called."
My stomach clenched. "Someone sent me a video of myself in my trailer, having a conversation with Lu, my hairdresser, on the phone that never happened.
Every detail is perfect. My voice, my mannerisms, even the way I touch my chin when I'm thinking.
But I never called anyone and said those words.
I spent that entire afternoon reviewing script changes. "
"What kind of words?"
I stared out the window at the Florida landscape whipping past. "Racist comments about Marcus Laughton, my co-star.
Horrible things about how he didn't deserve the role, how affirmative action was ruining Hollywood.
" My voice cracked. "Marcus and I have done three films together.
He's the one who recommended me for this role.
He's supposed to be the best man at our friends’ wedding next month, and I'm one of the bridesmaids. "
"Jesus." Angelica's knuckles went white on the steering wheel. "That's not just a deepfake. That's a targeted attack. Someone knows exactly how to hurt you both."
"The message said to withdraw from the film before production starts or they'd release it. No money demands, nothing else. Just walk away from the role of Constance Baker Motley. The role that could finally get me that third Oscar nomination. The one that actually means something."
I touched my chest where I kept the St. Christopher medal Marcus had given me after our first film together, when I'd been terrified of doing my own stunts. "If that video goes public, it won't just end my career. It'll destroy a friendship that matters more to me than any award."
"Which is why we're going to Jasper Creek.
My brother Jase works for this security company called Onyx.
He knows people who know people. Military types who understand cyber warfare.
" She took another sip of her Mountain Dew.
"Plus, there's literally nothing to do there except eat at the Down Home Diner and watch paint dry. Perfect for lying low."
"I can't hide forever, Angie."
"You're not hiding. You're strategically regrouping. There's a difference."
An hour later, she pulled into another gas station.
"Already?"
"Small bladder," she said cheerfully. "All that Mountain Dew has to go somewhere."
This became our pattern. Drive for forty-five minutes, stop for bathroom and more drinks, repeat. By the third stop, I'd given up protesting and started timing her.
"Eight minutes, forty-two seconds," I announced when she climbed back into the car. "You were really slow that time."
"I had to get more gummy bears. We're almost out."
"Jesus, you don't need more food. You've already made your way through the entire sack. When the sugar crash comes, I'll have to peel you from the wheel well."
"See, that's my point. I need to just keep the sugar coming the entire trip, therefore no crash." She waved her hand at me. "You want to hear about the time Gustavo decided he was going to be a stunt man?"
"Was this before or after he became a doctor?"
"During medical school, actually. He figured he could make extra money falling off buildings on weekends. Lasted exactly one shoot before he broke his collarbone and had to explain to his professors why he couldn't perform surgery rotations."
I laughed, really laughed, for the first time in two weeks. "Your family is like a sitcom that jumped the shark in season three and just kept going."
"That's the nicest thing anyone's ever said about us."
We crossed into Georgia as the sun climbed higher. The landscape shifted from palm trees to pine trees, and the radio stations went from pop to country. Angelica sang along badly to every song she knew and made up words to the ones she didn't.
"You realize you're a terrible singer," I told her after she murdered a Miranda Lambert song.
"That's what makes it fun. If I were good at it, I would just be showing off."
At our fourth stop, this one at a Chevron just past Macon, I went inside while Angelica hit the restroom again. I grabbed a bottle of water and an apple, desperate for something that wasn't processed sugar or mysterious meat products.
"Well hello there, beautiful."
I turned to find a man in his forties standing too close, his breath a toxic mix of beer and cigarettes even though it wasn't even noon yet. His confederate flag belt buckle was roughly the size of a dinner plate.
"Not interested." I turned back to the counter.
He moved closer. "You haven't even really heard me talk. How can you know you're not interested?" He smiled and licked his lower lip.
Ewww.
"Look, I'm just trying to buy an apple. Can we not do this?"
"No can do. You're just too pretty. You outshine a sunrise, little darling. Especially with that shirt showing off your tits."
"Are you for real?" My tone turned to ice. "Let me guess, yours is the red truck out there with the truck nuts, right? You need them because you have a wife at home who has your actual nuts in a jar beside her side of the bed."
He reared back. "Look here, bitch, you keep my wife out of this."
His hand moved toward my arm.
"Try it, just try it, and you'll lose a limb.
" I wasn't kidding. After my role six years ago in a superhero movie where I had to learn how to fight, I'd kept up with the MMA training and added weekly sessions with a former Marine who specialized in close-quarters combat.
Turns out, staying fight-ready was excellent for maintaining my action star physique and even better for handling handsy creeps at gas stations.
He must have seen something in my eyes because he dropped his hand.
"You sure are uppity."
"You don't know the half of it," I muttered as I turned to purchase my apple and water.
"I like my bitches feisty and screaming. Makes for better rides."
I whirled around. "Really?" At this point, I needed to take him down for all the women who would come after me. I let my voice drop into what Angelica called my "ice queen" register. The one I'd perfected playing a federal prosecutor in a legal thriller two years ago.
"Bubba, I'm connected to people you can only dream about.
I'm going to write down your license plate.
I'm going to find out your name. Your address, your phone number, your wife's name and her phone number.
I'm going to call her. I'm going to tell her about today's little incident.
I'm going to make sure she understands the uncouth, misogynistic rodent she's married to.
I'm going to give her the name of a divorce lawyer that I will personally pay for, just to take your ass to the cleaners.
You're going to be lucky if you can afford a bicycle. "
His face went white. "You c-c-can't do that, he stammered.
"Watch me."
"My wife, Lisa, she already..." He swallowed hard. "We have kids. She already hates me."
"Lisa's a smart woman."
I put a twenty on the counter and took my apple and bottle of water.
"But you can't do this," he cried after me.
I walked out of the store, pulled out my phone, and took a picture of his license plate. As he followed me, standing in the doorway gaping, I took a picture of him for good measure.
Angelica was leaning against the Corvette, sipping her Mountain Dew and watching the whole thing with raised eyebrows. "What was that all about?"
"I'll tell you when we're on the road. Just how good is your brother at getting information?"
"The best."
"Good." I slid into the passenger seat. "We're burning daylight. Let's start moving."
After the Bubba incident, I didn't think about the video for at least an hour, and it didn't hurt that Angelica kept up with an endless stream of family stories that had to be bullshit.
"So then Bruno says to the TSA agent, 'Sir, that's not a weapon, that's my grandmother's prosthetic leg,' and the agent says, 'Why isn't your grandmother wearing it?
' And Bruno has to explain that Grandma Maureen thought it would be faster to hop through security on one leg than to deal with the metal detector. "
"She didn't."
"She absolutely did. Caused a three-hour security shutdown at Dulles. Made the news and everything."
The mountains rose around us as we entered East Tennessee. The air grew cooler, scented with pine and earth instead of exhaust and swamp. Angelica had to stop two more times, but I'd stopped counting.
"Almost there," she announced as we passed a sign for Jasper Creek, five miles. "Fair warning, this place is tiny. Like, one traffic light tiny."
"Perfect. The smaller, the better."
"Oh, you have no idea. The biggest excitement last month was when someone's cow got loose and wandered into the courthouse."
"You're making that up."
"Ask anyone when we get there. The cow's name was Bessie, and she apparently had very strong opinions about property taxes."
“You’re wasted as an actress, you should be a screenwriter.”
She turned to me with a devilish grin. “I should, shouldn’t I?”
We drove through what Angelica generously called downtown, which consisted of a town square with a courthouse in the middle and small businesses lining three sides.
A hardware store, a coffee shop called Java Jolt, an antiques store, and what looked like a dozen other family-owned shops that had probably been there since the town was founded.
"And here we are," Angelica announced, pulling into a parking space in front of a building with a hand-painted sign reading "Down Home Diner." "Fair warning, I really do need to pee again."
"How is that even possible?"
"Talent." She jumped out of the car. "Come on, you need real food anyway."
I followed her toward the door, my legs stiff from hours in the car. The smell of fried chicken and fresh biscuits wafted out, making my stomach growl. I hadn't eaten actual food since yesterday.
A cowbell clanged as we pushed through the door. The diner was exactly what you'd expect in small-town Tennessee. Red vinyl booths, checkered floor, and a counter with rotating stools. Every head in the place turned to look at us.
"Angelica!" A voice cried out from the hostess stand.
I turned to see the tiniest elderly woman I'd ever encountered. She couldn't have been more than four foot eight, with silver hair pinned up in a bun and wearing a flower-print dress that looked handmade. Her face lit up with joy as she spotted us.
This had to be the infamous Little Grandma.