Chapter 13
Two weeks after I told Lauren about Maggie and Gabe, a photo appeared in Us Weekly.
The two were seen at a lunch spot, shot candidly from the long lens of a paparazzo’s camera.
She wore a massive sun hat and oversize sunglasses, but it was still clearly Maggie, sitting so close to Gabe she might have been on his lap.
The editors had circled their legs under the table and added the caption “Getting close,” and I wanted to rip up the entire magazine and throw it into the fire.
On Honeymoon Stage, Maggie and Jason were still living out their perfect marriage, not just in the Season One episodes we’d filmed six months ago that aired every week, but also in the new footage that I logged and transcribed.
No rocky waters here—just a couple adorably fumbling their way through that first year of marriage.
Trouble in Paradise? read one grocery store headline.
Not according to this hour of Maggie giggling while Jason rubbed her feet.
Jason Dean Dethroned? Only if you meant that he had trouble installing a new toilet in the pool-house bathroom.
At least that’s how they were playing it.
I didn’t know how much Jason actually knew about Maggie’s infidelity.
I didn’t know how much she knew about his.
What did it matter, if they were still raking in cash for Honeymoon Stage?
As long as the viewers saw them as happily married, who cared what was actually happening?
Well, I did. My contempt for Jason knew no bounds, but after the first few days of feeling totally betrayed, I returned to my eternal fascination with Maggie McKee.
She was the one married to a monster. She might have stolen my boyfriend, but she was a victim in this too.
I was consumed with the idea that Jason had done something to Sally Ann.
I wasn’t sure how long I could comfortably keep that information from Maggie.
Cheating was one thing; murder was another.
Although I fell to pieces every time they mentioned Gabe, I kept buying the tabloids.
Tequila salt rims in my wound. My own disillusionment ruining my objectivity, making it impossible to go out to the bars without slurring some crap about how love wasn’t true.
Sherlock Holmes wasn’t sidetracked by ex-lovers.
Or was he? Detective Olivia Benson would never.
Luckily, I was often drunk enough that no one took my ranting about hidden cameras and switched chicken seriously. I still only had suspicions, no actual proof.
About a month into my lackluster detective work, Celia decided she’d had it with my moping around.
“So, the plan is to delete Gabe’s messages and silently pine after him forever?”
She’d caught me flipping through a gossip magazine, slowly eating a Slim Jim, in rolled Soffe shorts and a polka-dotted bathrobe at three p.m. on a gorgeous LA Saturday.
I felt I was taking a perfectly respectable amount of time to grieve my relationship, but I also understood the point she was making.
Wallowing was a bad look. By this point, it didn’t even feel good in the self-indulgent way that justified buying expensive bubble bath and gorging myself on chocolate.
“I’m not sure how he thinks he’s going to explain this,” said Celia, gesturing toward the tabloid I had spread open on our coffee table. “But if you’re going to keep buying these, you could at least hear him out.”
What could Gabe possibly tell me that would change anything?
He was obviously still seeing Maggie, even as he sent me messages claiming to be groveling at my feet.
A fire rose within me. Those messages were bullshit.
Why should he get to keep acting like he was the good guy and I was the one who had done something wrong?
“You know what,” I said to Celia. “You’re right. I’m going to call him right now.”
“Yes, girl!”
“I’m going to tell him to stop bothering me.”
“Yeah, you are.”
“I’m going to tell him that I do not forgive him and I’m totally over him.”
I pulled out my phone, and Celia gave me an encouraging nod. I dialed, and as the phone rang, all my righteousness drained out of me.
“Cassidy.” Gabe answered with an undisguised eagerness. I didn’t know what to say in response. Celia was mouthing something I couldn’t interpret, and I turned my back to her so that she’d stop distracting me.
“Hi.” My stomach jumped into my throat. “I got your messages.”
“I wasn’t—” I imagined him blinking, telling himself to start over. “I know there were a lot. I just want to explain—”
“Okay,” I said. “You can explain it.”
“Like . . . right now? Is now a good time?” I had to ready myself. We had to meet over something totally harmless, like coffee. Coffee in a very public place, with a pressing engagement immediately afterward. No houses. No drinks. Absolutely no touching.
“Tomorrow morning?” I asked. Morning seemed like a safe time, until I thought about his hair, mussed and gold with morning light. Nothing was safe. No time, nowhere.
“Tomorrow morning works,” Gabe said. “How about that trailhead at Angeles Forest?”
“Why not?” I said. “Sure.”
I pulled into the lot by the trailhead twenty minutes early, and Gabe was already sitting on the hood of his car, waiting for me.
He looked as wonderful as he always looked, as wonderful as he did before I’d seen his face plastered across the tabloids as Maggie McKee’s side piece.
This didn’t mean he was the person that I wanted him to be.
The whole time I’d thought of him as this Gabe, he’d been lying to me.
There was no “this Gabe.” I got out of my car.
“Hi.” He hopped off and approached me like he would a wild animal, unsure if I would bolt.
“Hi.” I swallowed the urge to cry. “How have you been?” It had been more than a month since I’d last seen him, and not much had outwardly changed. No new tattoos in fresh Saran Wrap, no wild haircuts or bold statement jewelry. Just Gabe.
“Not great, to be honest.” He clenched the hand nearest me into a fist, and then released it.
“Oh,” I said. Oh, the lamest syllable in the entire English language, signifying, I supposed, that I had heard him and had no other response. Together we started toward the trail.
With Gabe next to me, whatever was left of my resolve fizzled out.
He kept rubbing his thumb and his forefinger together, and I wanted to reach out and hold them still.
Another car turned into the lot. We both paused and turned to look at it, meeting each other’s eyes in the process. His lips twitched. I looked away.
Ahead of us, the yellow scrub gave way to a single patch of green.
“I’m sorry,” Gabe said suddenly. Goddammit. I wanted him to be smug and unapologetic. I wanted him laughing at me for being such a chump.
I didn’t want to want Gabe, but I did.
“I have to tell you—”
“It seems like you—” We spoke at the same time, both stopped ourselves. I waited.
“Okay,” Gabe said. Into the wilderness we went. This was a real trail, for actual hikers. A minute in we saw a guy who likely hadn’t bathed in days hauling a backpack tent and an empty plastic liter of water.
“We’re not going to do the whole hike,” Gabe assured me.
“Yeah, I figured,” I said.
We established a rhythm, slow enough for conversation but not so slow we didn’t have to keep an eye on our feet. It seemed incumbent on him to raise the topic of our breakup, begin the explanation he’d been trying to give me for weeks.
“I’m going to tell you all of it,” he said finally. And then he told me the story of Gabriel Leighton and Maggie McKee.
There is no episode to back this up. No footage. No one sees this part, not even me. I have only Gabe’s word. Gabe is talking in a quiet voice while I trudge next to him. Eventually we come out of the woods to the view.
Gabriel Leighton loved Maggie McKee from the moment he laid eyes on her on a soundstage in Kissimmee, Florida, at callbacks for The Tiger Crew.
She stood stone faced in a corner, getting made up by her mom, and when he saw her, Gabe thought, That girl.
The casting directors did too. Gabe and Maggie were two of fifteen kids cast on the show, so they didn’t always have sketches and scenes together, but Gabe would finagle a way to be next to her at craft services or when they did on-set school, which meant workbooks and essays.
None of the kids were really learning anything academic, not in the way that I’d been pop-quizzed and called up to the chalkboard, but the network tutor did enough to satisfy the lax laws set in place by the state for nontraditional schooling.
How could anyone expect Maggie to know the difference between a syllable and syllabub when she’d been given a word search as her only ninth-grade grammar lesson?
Of course she would become who she became.
Still, despite what traditional education they lacked, The Tiger Crew was getting a masterclass in image control.
They learned how to find their good angles, which colors were slimming, what hairstyles played best on TV.
They also took voice lessons and tap. Maggie was apparently a savant at looking at a sheet of sides and memorizing the whole thing immediately, and Gabe could shuffle off to Buffalo like nobody’s business.