Chapter 36
They packed their bags on Sunday afternoon and left the apartment exactly as they’d found it, except for one new addition.
The midnight-blue bowl with lava-orange marbling, now sitting in pride of place on the coffee table beside the matching vase in the lounge.
It was the closest Charlie could get to giving a birthday gift to his father.
They sat side by side on a bench beside the river, car loaded ready to go, neither of them sure what to say. As they’d turned the key in the lock of the apartment, the door inside Kate’s head had cracked open under the weight of reality piled against the other side of it.
He turned to her with a quiet sigh. “Kate…”
She put just enough space between them to allow for the conversation they needed to have. “Can I go first?” she said. “The thing about a deleted scene is that it isn’t supposed to knock on to the main story, is it? It sits between the pages unseen, informing the story in ways no one else can know.”
He watched her and waited for her to go on.
“We’re grown-ups with crazy lives. Responsibilities, people who are relying on us. Can you imagine what would happen if we rolled back into London now and decided to make this, us, part of the plot?”
“I had the KISS acronym framed on my office wall in L.A.,” he said.
“Keep it simple, stupid. It’s an old military saying, but it works for script writing too.
Don’t overcomplicate things. Don’t make your characters TSTL.
” A resigned half smile ghosted his lips.
“Too stupid to live,” he explained. “Don’t have them run upstairs to escape danger instead of out the door. ”
“I hate it when that happens,” she said. “It makes me want to throw things at the screen.”
They fell silent, watching a family of ducks emerge from the riverbank.
“It wasn’t stupid to come here,” he said.
“But it would be stupid to let it define the story when we leave,” she said.
“There’s something else.” He turned his mobile over in his hands, looking at it. “I had a text last night, while you were sleeping.”
He’d been quiet over breakfast. She’d assumed he was recalibrating, as she was, because they needed to press “reset,” but perhaps there was more to it. She waited, knowing he had something else to say.
“There’s interest from a major studio in a script I worked on a couple of years ago. The project faltered at the final hurdle last time. It was pretty crushing for everyone involved.”
Kate didn’t know what to say. He’d told her the L.A. part of his life was over. That he never wanted to see those hills again.
“What will you do?”
“I don’t know.” He looked away, sighing into the morning air.
“I figured that part of my life was done with, but if I’m brutally honest my gut reaction to the news was elation.
An emotional muscle memory, maybe, because writing is a tough gig and chances of success are vanishingly small even with connections.
Good stuff doesn’t happen often. I sat outside on the balcony for a while after reading the message, trying to work out whether to take the stairs toward potential danger or head out of the front door to safety. ”
The conversation had gone so far away from where Kate had expected that she wasn’t sure how to respond. “Was the text from your ex-wife?”
He nodded. “We wrote the script together.”
“What about Fiona and the agency?” she said, when what she really wanted to ask was What about me, what about the book, what about the landslide I’m caught in the middle of?
He closed his eyes, and she could see the strain he was under. “I need to go home and think.”
It felt, in the moment, as if his news had wiped their deleted scene from the script altogether. She drew in a breath and gathered herself, feeling as if she needed to rebalance the scales.
“I’ve been thinking about what to do next too,” she said.
“I obviously don’t plan on living above the shop forever—I’m basically borrowing Liv’s life.
More than that. I’ve taken it over. She’d never say it, but she and Nish have spent years building their family together.
They don’t need me setting fires underneath them all the time. ”
“What are you saying?”
She shrugged. “I’ve scuppered my chances of acting with everything that’s happened with the book, but in all honesty I’ve changed my mind about the idea anyway.
I’ve had enough of London. It’s too big, too all-consuming.
Once all of this is over with the book I might rent a place down south. Cornwall maybe, I love it there.”
She wasn’t lying, exactly. She’d thought all of those things in recent weeks, but not in any solid form.
They looked at each other steadily, moments of silent connection and then disconnection.
“We should hit the road,” he said, sliding his aviators over his eyes.
“Liv’s expecting me,” she said, getting to her feet and dusting herself down.