Chapter 30 Maren
Premiere day started with a custody exchange.
Eleanor and David collected Keith at midday with a tote bag of his preferred toys and the air of grandparents accepting a grandchild.
"He will be returned spoiled beyond rehabilitation," David said, deadpan, clipping on the leash. "I want that understood going in. There will be a steak. Possibly two."
"He's on a diet," I said.
"He's on vacation," David corrected. "Diets don't apply on vacation."
Getting ready became a four-person operation conducted at the volume of a small war.
Inez worked the gown. Brady ran a steamer in one hand and a monologue in the other, narrating each wrinkle's surrender like a sports commentator. Damian performed the radio check with the gravity of a man launching a shuttle.
"Comms check, comms check," Damian said into his sleeve. "Confirm you read."
"We're standing six feet apart, Damian," Brady said.
"Confirm you read!"
"I read you, you absolute lunatic. You're in my eyeline!"
"Then we have redundancy."
Thomas appeared in the doorway in a tuxedo, and I briefly lost the thread of the sentence I'd been in the middle of. He clocked it, and he had the insufferable calm of a man who knows exactly what he looks like in a tuxedo and has decided not to mention it.
"You're staring," he said.
"I'm assessing for threats. You're a threat, to my composure."
"Noted," he said, and adjusted his cuff.
In the car, I sat between Thomas and Damian while Brady drove and narrated the route like a tour guide on a bus that nobody had boarded by choice.
"On your left, the dry cleaner where I had a spiritual experience over a blazer. On your right, the intersection where Damian once evacuated a farmers market over a bag of jam."
"It was an unattended bag," Damian said.
I laughed, and I felt my pulse come down a notch. I understood, clearly, that they were managing my heart rate with comedy, that the whole bit was a kindness wearing a clown nose.
The red carpet was a wall of light.
I worked it the way I've worked a hundred of them, the smile, the turn, the pause for the cameras, except that this time I could feel the net humming around me.
Chen's people in vendor polos at the edges.
Damian's voice low and steady in my ear, calling positions like a stage manager running a show only we could see.
"North entrance clear. Press riser nominal. You're doing great. Two more, then inside."
Thomas was a constant six feet of stillness in my peripheral vision, a load-bearing wall in a tuxedo, and I never once had to look for him to know he was there.
The film screened, and within twenty minutes I understood it was the best thing I'd ever done, and the audience understood it with me.
The cornered-apartment scene played to a silence so total I could hear the projector running. Six pages of a woman pinned in a small room by a man who'd decided he loved her, and the room full of people did not breathe.
I'd put everything into it. I felt the audience feel it.
The standing ovation went on long enough that the director, teary again, had to wave the house lights up to make it stop. I took the applause holding his hand, and I did not look at the credits.
I looked at the back of the orchestra section, where three men stood, none of them watching the screen, all of them watching me.
The move came at the after-party, and it did not come through the hole.
I was working the room when Damian's voice changed in my ear. The forged catering credential had pinged at the loading dock, and the net had contracted around it, and for a stretch the operation believed it was winning.
Then his voice went flat and fast, the way it goes when the floor has moved.
"It's a decoy," Damian said. "The credential's on a hired nobody. Paid cash. By a voice. Maren, it's a decoy, hold your position."
And in the same minute, a venue staffer appeared at my elbow.
Perfect uniform. Right lanyard. A clipboard. The right vocabulary, the right unbothered walk, the exact bored authority of a person who belongs at an event and is mildly inconvenienced by you.
"Ms. Calloway?" he said. "Press line needs you in the green room corridor. This way."
He had everything right. He also had, pinned to his lapel where venue staff wear nothing at all, a single white orchid.
My blood went to ice. And then, on purpose, with everything I had, it went to work.
I did not run. The corridor he was steering me toward was long and empty. Running would have turned it into his scene, the one he'd been writing for months, and I was done being in his scenes.
So I did the only thing I'm actually good at. I performed.
"Of course," I said, warm, easy, a woman being mildly put-upon by logistics. "Let me just grab my clutch first, it's the silver one, I left it by the bar and I'll never see it again if I don't."
The duress phrase. Folded into a sentence so smooth it had a crease. Straight into the hot mic in my ear.
I slowed my walk to soften his urgency. I asked him small questions to keep his hands busy with the clipboard, the kind of harmless craft chatter a famous woman makes to staff, and I let him believe the scene was going exactly the way he'd written it, because I have played this woman before, and this time I was not the woman.
This time I was the actress, and I knew where the cameras were.
He talked as we walked, low and reverent, in the cadence of a man picking up a conversation he believes we've been having for years.
"I knew the film was for me," he said. "The minute I saw the teaser. You were speaking to me. You've always been speaking to me. I just had to be patient enough to come and answer."
"Hm," I said, the way you agree with nothing. "Tell me which part. I'm curious which part landed for you."
The corridor door at the far end opened.
And Zack Reiss stopped, mid-sentence, between me and the exit, the orchid on his lapel and the whole rehearsed speech behind his teeth. From somewhere just past his shoulder came the small particular sound of a service door being opened.