Chapter 12
12
If there’s one thing for certain about me and the glam team when we’re tucked behind closed doors, it’s that subtlety doesn’t exist between us. My trailer is our cone of silence. In this hallowed space, we can think and feel things out loud—even if that means being loud and wrong. It’s quite fitting, too, seeing as none of us seem to know how to bite our tongue…at least not for long.
“Mm-mm-mm.” Sheryl’s grunts of disapproval come in as if on cue while she pin curls my long silky tresses. “Can’t believe they have me putting in all this good work just for them to go and ruin it by the end of the day,” she scoffs.
Sheryl’s referring to the dramatic effects my music video director, Laurel Chevalier, has planned for the final scene of today’s shoot. She finishes her mini-rant by sucking air through a slit in her teeth, and the resulting sound mimics a whistling tea kettle.
“A little fake rain never hurt anybody,” Rodney chimes in helpfully from across the room, where he’s steaming my last look for the shoot—a slinky maroon dress that hangs off the shoulder, falls to my ankles, and fits me like a second skin. “Besides, I thought we all understood the assignment as given,” he adds. “The Ice Queen said lean in . So that means we gotta pull out all the stops!”
Unfortunately, Rodney’s enthusiasm isn’t contagious. The team’s plan for wrestling back control of the unraveling media narrative might be well underway, as we are on the first day of my music video shoot for “No Ordinary Love.” But I have not so much leaned in as I have disassociated, while I sit staring blankly at my e-reader, sipping from a mug of hot tea.
Only a week has elapsed since Elliot, Miles, and I maneuvered awkwardly like an unwitting throuple in front of a million eyeballs at the Grammys, and I have been taking a beating online ever since. This morning I caved and deleted the social media apps from my phone—but only after I spiraled and spent an hour watching all those TikTok videos of Miles working out to my music that Janet had alluded to.
I’m not proud.
There’s a great gulf between indifference and obsession when it comes to minding the masses and their opinion of me as a public figure. I’ve always fallen somewhere smack in the middle. But whenever I find myself careening further toward either extreme, I shut it down. Total social media cleanse. It’s never been more necessary than right now.
For Elliot’s part, with his intended message sealed and delivered—that he’s not letting go without a fight—he’s already traipsed back across the pond with Miss Thing in tow, but not before having his lawyer serve me an amendment to the divorce papers.
“Has he lost his damn mind?” I recall whisper-shouting at the rectangular device clutched in my palm in the back seat of Rohin’s Escalade on the way to the airport. “Elliot’s threatening to revoke my fifty percent split of the performance rights? Is that even legal?”
“There’s a clause in the prenuptial agreement you likely missed given how deep it was masked in jargon,” Janet went on to explain in her signature calm, clipped competence, “but it details how those rights were always tied to a contingency.”
My heart dropped to my stomach. “What kind of contingency?” I still managed to squeak out.
“One that occasions any public embarrassment of a significant scale…essentially Elliot’s lawyers embedded a one-way morality clause that could be exercised at their client’s discretion.”
“So, you’re saying he doesn’t even have to provide evidence of my wrongdoing? He just has to tell the judge I hurt his feelings?”
Then Janet drove the nail into my coffin. “Honey, the headlines are the evidence.” And that’s when my heart fell to my ass. “I see this often, particularly with men,” she continued despite my distress. “When their egos and emotions get behind the wheel, it’s buckle up everybody ! No one’s safe. And since I doubt we can rely on logic or reason to take the keys back anytime soon, we’ll just have to add this to the list of things we aim to challenge in court.”
Normally, I’d be content with the tried-and-true PR strategy of lying low and praying it all blows over with a quickness. But with so much at stake, I can’t risk any more control slipping through my fingers. The court of public opinion packs a mighty punch, and if the blows keep coming at this steady clip, my chances at winning in actual court against Elliot only diminish with every new scandalous headline.
Before I did the app purge, notorious celebrity gossip account Glitter ’N Dirt had posted a series of anonymous tips from followers claiming to have insider knowledge of my pattern of stepping out on Elliot over the course of our eight-year marriage. Apparently, these “sources” could credibly link me to a string of B-list actors and professional athletes. In GnD’s posts, account owner and soulless Hollywood gossipmonger Rick Fenway had started replacing references to me as Ella Simone with TWW. One quick Google search led me to a cursed Reddit thread explaining that, in my case, the acronym stood for “The Wannabe WAG”—my left eye hasn’t stopped twitching since.
I was already high-key dubious of Janet and Gabriel’s Plan B strategy to give professional context to my relationship with Miles Westbrook before this new development. But now, you could light a match in my vicinity and probably incinerate a city block with the way I’ve been fuming over this whole ordeal.
“Ella, you okay, girl?” Jamie asks, and it stirs me out of a daze. “?’Cause if that eye keeps twitching, this lash is going to end up glued to your retina.”
Suddenly, the levee breaks, and a dam of unshed tears bursts free. Perhaps I could have kept it together, if only Jamie hadn’t uttered the words you okay, girl? Like the wound that only hurts if you touch it, most days I’m fine . Perfectly fine actually—so long as no one pokes below the surface. But something about today, and everything leading up to it, has me feeling rubbed raw, utterly exposed, and totally in over my head. Not to mention the fact that in T-minus two hours, I’ve got to convincingly fall madly in love with Miles Westbrook, while still coming to terms with how I’ve spent the last several years slowly falling out of it with Elliot Majors.
“Oh hell, here we go.” Rodney groans from across the room before rushing over with a box of Kleenex. Sheryl and Jamie both stop their prep work and crowd around me as I crumble in The Chair.
“Go on and let it out,” Sheryl says. “This is what we’re here for, girl. You know we’ve got you.”
“Mm-hmm. Speaking of,” Rodney cuts in. “You may need a shot. Jamie, where’s the tequila?”
This makes me laugh. “Rodney, it’s nine in the morning. You can’t be serious?”
Out of seemingly nowhere, Jamie produces a bottle of reposado. “As a heart attack,” she says, after brandishing four shot glasses.