Chapter Four
I pitched the hotel over breakfast, and I pitched it to Karl the way I always had to pitch anything to Karl if I wanted him to agree: as something that was good for him.
“I’m behind on the movie work,” I said. “The character bible revisions, the color scripts, the notes Nick’s team keeps waiting on.
I can’t do it here. The phone rings, the house has people in it, I end up on licensing calls I don’t need to be on.
I want to take a suite somewhere quiet and just disappear into the work until it’s done. ”
Karl looked up from his coffee. I watched him run the idea through whatever he ran ideas through, and I kept my face tired and a little embarrassed, a woman asking permission for something she should be able to just do.
“A hotel,” he said.
“The Bel-Air, I was thinking. It’s twenty minutes away, so it’s not dramatic, and nobody bothers you there. That’s the entire business model.”
“You’re sick, Millie. You nearly fainted last month, and now you want to be alone in a hotel room?”
“I want to be alone in a five-star hotel with room service, a doctor on call, and a staff of two hundred people,” I said. “It’s the safest place in Los Angeles. And I’d have Dara checking on me. Obviously.”
“Obviously,” Dara said from the counter, already interested.
“Honestly, if the deadlines weren’t burying me, I’d frame it as a rest.” I rubbed my eyes, which needed no acting at all. “Maybe it can be both. I work, I sleep, nobody needs me to be anything for a week or two. Bill’s always saying I need to reduce stress. This reduces stress.”
That did it. I saw it land in both of them at the same time, and the horrible part was how well I could read them now that I knew what I was reading.
Karl heard: she’ll be isolated, out of the house, out of the way.
Dara heard: I control what goes in her bag.
They exchanged the smallest look across my kitchen, the kind of look I must’ve seen ten thousand times and filed under “my husband and my best friend both love me”. Karl set down his cup.
“I think it’s a wonderful idea,” he said. “You should’ve suggested it sooner.”
Dara packed for me. I let her, because stopping her would’ve been strange, and because Beatrice’s voice was in my head now.
Let her hand you the evidence. She rolled my clothes the way she’d rolled them for every book tour, chose which sketchbooks I’d want, wrapped my pen case in a sweater, and narrated the whole time.
“Chargers, cords, the good lamp because hotel light is garbage. Your vitamin D, your iron, your B-complex, the magnesium for your legs.” Each bottle went into the padded pouch she’d bought for them, the pretty linen one with my initials on it.
“I portioned the tea into sachets, so you don’t have to mess with the strainer.
Two weeks’ worth. Morning blend and evening blend, they’re labeled.
And the greens powder, one scoop a day, I don’t care if it tastes like a lawn. ”
“You’re a full-service operation.”
“I’m the archive and the pharmacy.” She zipped the pouch and pressed it into my suitcase, and then she took my face in both hands. “Come back better, okay? You’ve scared me this year.”
I hugged her. I held my best friend of thirty years in my bedroom while a suitcase full of her poison sat open behind her, and I said, “You take care of me,” and she said, “Somebody has to,” which was Karl’s line.
I wondered if they knew they’d started sharing sentences, and which of them had caught it from the other.
Karl carried my bags down himself and kissed me at the car.
“I put the suite on the house account,” he said. “Don’t argue, it’s cleaner for taxes. And I told the front office there that you’re recovering from exhaustion, so they’ll keep an eye out. Discreetly.”
“You told the hotel I’m sick?”
“I told the hotel to take care of my wife.” He tucked a curl behind my ear, and the gesture ran a cold wire down my back, because it was Dara’s gesture, and I couldn’t tell anymore who had taken it from whom.
“Work well. Call every night. And Millie, take the supplements. You always get worse when you slack off.”
***
The Presidential Garden Suite had a sitting room bigger than my first apartment, a terrace with its own hedge, and French doors that opened onto green.
A man named Marcus showed me how the room phone worked and where the safe was, and then the door clicked shut, and I stood alone in a quiet, beautiful room where nobody was going to hand me anything to drink.
I gave myself one minute of standing there. Then I unpacked the suitcase onto the dining table.
I photographed everything where it lay. Then piece by piece: the linen pouch, each bottle, each label, the tea sachets in their two labeled bags, the greens powder tub, front and back, lot numbers where they existed.
Beatrice had walked me through it on the phone twice, and I followed her instructions in order.
Nothing opened. Nothing tasted. Each item into its own freezer bag from the box I’d bought, sealed, then a strip of tape across the seal with the date and my initials, and the words received packed by D.K.
in my own handwriting, and then everything into the room safe except the decoys.
The decoys were the part I was proud of.
At the pharmacy that morning, I’d bought vitamin D, iron, a B-complex, and magnesium, the same brands, and a tin of plain chamomile.
Every night, I’d tip the right number of clean pills into my palm on a video call if I had to, and every few days, the levels in the visible bottles would go down, because sick, obedient Millie was taking her supplements at the hotel, just like she promised.
I logged all of it in a notebook I kept hidden in the suite. Time received, condition, storage. My handwriting looked steadier than it had in months, and I sat back and understood why. For the first time in a year, the strange things happening to my body had stopped being my fault.
Nick met me at the hotel restaurant that evening. Public, Beatrice had said, and visible, and professional. If anyone was watching, I was having a work dinner with my producer, which was the most natural thing in my calendar.
He stood when I reached the table. He didn’t hug me, and I was grateful, because I was barely holding steady, and a hug would’ve undone me. He’d brought a folder of actual movie notes and set it between us where any passing eye could read the situation.
“You look better,” he said, once we’d ordered.
“I look terrible.”
“You look terrible in a better way. Yesterday, on the phone, you sounded like a hostage. Tonight, you sound angry. Angry’s better.”
“Angry is all that’s holding me up.” I turned my water glass in a circle on the tablecloth. “I keep waiting to fall apart, and it keeps not happening. I don’t know if that’s strength or if the falling apart is just circling out there waiting to land.”
The food came, and I ate, actually ate, because everything on the plate had come from a kitchen Dara had never touched. My appetite came back some time after I realized that. Nick watched me demolish a piece of fish and had the grace to talk about the movie instead of commenting.
“Reyes tested again for Luma,” he said. “The studio’s coming around because their bigger name booked a series, which they’ll pretend was their decision, and I’ll let them.”
“You’re good at letting people think things.”
“It’s most of producing.” He tapped the folder. “You know why I fought for this project? The real reason, not the one in the trades.”
“The trades said four-quadrant appeal and a built-in audience.”
“The trades quote me accurately and miss the point. My niece was eight when The Door Under the Moon came out. Rough year for the family. My brother’s divorce, a move, a new school where nobody talked to her.
She carried that book everywhere for a year.
Slept with it. And one night, she told me why.
She said, Pip always finds a door, even when the room looks closed.
” He shrugged, a little embarrassed, a big man in a nice restaurant admitting to a bedtime story.
“So, when I fight the studio about a mirror scene, understand, I’m not managing an asset. I made a promise to a kid.”
“You never told me that,” I said.
“You never needed to hear it before.”
He turned his water glass once, and then he looked at me straight.
“Which brings me to the one thing I want to say about the rest of it, and then I’ll leave it alone.
You set the pace. On all of our time here.
If you want to talk casting for two hours, we talk casting.
If you want to sit here and eat in silence because it’s the first meal in a year you haven’t had to inspect, we do that.
You’ve got enough people steering you. I’m not joining. ”
I looked at him across the folder of notes, this big, steady man who’d answered his phone at two in the morning and believed me, and I thought about how long it had been since anyone offered me room instead of direction.
“Thank you,” I said. “For listening. For the lawyer. For not doubting.”
“There’s no reason to doubt,” Nick said. “I’ve watched it. It explained plenty.”
We ate. We talked about Luma’s ears, and the mirror scene, and whether Pip’s coat should be red or rust in the final palette, and for an hour, in a garden restaurant twenty minutes from the house where they were plotting against my life, I got to be an artist at a work dinner. It felt so good it scared me.
He walked me back along the garden path as far as the turn to my suite, and stopped there, keeping the distance he’d kept all night.
“Sleep,” he said. “Real sleep. Doctor’s orders.”
“You’re not a doctor.”
“No,” he said. “But you’re getting one.”
Back in the suite, my phone showed a text from an unknown number, which was how Beatrice had said it would come.
Confirmed. Dr. Gillian Parks, tomorrow, 2 p.m.
The address was in the next paragraph.
Bring your notebook, your symptom history, and every lab result you can access from Dr. Bill Kent’s portal. Delete this text.
I read it twice, memorized the name and address, and deleted it. Then I sat on the edge of the bed and I said the name out loud to the empty, safe, flower-smelling room.
“Dr. Gillian Parks.”
Tomorrow, for the first time in a year, a doctor was going to look at me without first checking what the story was supposed to be.