42
And so, there we were again on a private jet, Tess absentmindedly flipping through the in-flight menu as if she were long accustomed to choosing between vintage champagnes and tuna tartare at three in the afternoon, while Bernie slept diagonally across two seats, the seatbelt fastened around his ankle.
I watched the scene, wondering at which point our lives had become indistinguishable from a three-act absurdist comedy.
Landing in Montana was a brutal return to reality.
This time, the limousine took us up a dirt road to a mountain “cottage” so oversized that calling it a cottage felt like a crime: big enough to host a small international summit.
Dark wood, sloped roof, multiple fireplaces, and that luxury rustic vibe that makes you feel guilty just for breathing the air.
Outside the fence, a compact wall of paparazzi and gawkers moved like a pack of hungry wolves: cameras, long lenses, flashes primed and ready to explode at the slightest flicker of movement. A gossip battalion with their fingers permanently on the trigger.
Tess saw them and lit up.
Not poetically. Chemically. Like a light bulb surging to full wattage.
“There they are,” she whispered, clutching her coat around herself like a thief studying the museum blueprints the night before the heist. “This weekend… I could close the game.”
I eyed her sideways. “By ‘close the game,’ you mean…?”
“I mean get the shot . The definitive pose. The one that leaves no doubt. The one that makes you spit your cappuccino all over the morning paper.”
It was the same tone other people reserve for lines like “we’ve found the antidote” or “the spaceship is saved.” Except she was talking about flashbulbs, scandal headlines, and the supreme art of being seen at the exact second you want to be seen.
The driver, a man with the weary gaze of a war veteran, bypassed the main gate and slipped into a side driveway. He parked behind the cottage, strategically shielded from the paparazzi’s lightning storm.
As soon as we stepped out, Tess stretched, inhaled the crisp mountain air, and declared with the certainty of someone who sees the exit to the labyrinth: “This is it. Perfect.”
I looked at her and realized that whatever she had planned, she had never been this close to tightening the net around Zane Ryder.
The rockstar wasn’t home. According to the driver, he was rehearsing for the next night’s concert. Which meant, for now, the entire mountain cottage was ours.
Naturally, Tess withdrew immediately to her room to prepare for dinner.
“An incredibly luxurious restaurant,” the driver had said, with the same reverence as if he were announcing the Queen of England’s arrival.
I had no doubt it would be a place with tablecloths pressed by laser beams and waiters trained to vanish into thin air after pouring your wine.
Bernie and I, however, had far less refined plans: he immediately found the cottage’s bar, I found the sauna. Don’t ask me which one we started with, but eventually we both ended up in bathrobes, sipping whiskey in the jacuzzi while snow fell lazily outside.
Bernie didn’t say a word the whole time — just a couple of grunts that might have meant “pass the glass” or “this is the life,” but it was impossible to tell. I, on the other hand, decided that, in that moment, whatever Tess was scheming could wait.
There, sunk in hot water, mountain cold pressing at the windows, with a hot-tub partner who resembled a commemorative statue of a disgraced jazzman, I thought that maybe real luxury was exactly this: doing absolutely nothing useful.
Then Tess appeared in the doorway of the living room.
She wore a long black dress, perfectly fitted, with a slit designed less to break hearts than to violate several traffic laws at once.
Her hair was swept up into a chignon that screamed “I’m here to conquer the world,” and her lipstick was so red that, if I’d been a paparazzo, I would’ve risked my eyesight trying to focus on it.
She gazed at us calmly, but her eyes held a peculiar light.
Bernie, slumped like a commemorative statue in honor of forgotten hangovers, let out a guttural grunt that could have meant anything from “nice dress” to “turn up the temperature.”
Tess didn’t react. She just stepped forward, her heel striking the parquet like the gavel of a judge sealing a verdict.
“It’s time,” she said, without raising her voice.
Then she turned, the slit of her dress swaying like a curtain ready to rise, and disappeared down the hallway.