4. Jameson
Jameson
After the promos wrap in a few months, I'm cutting back. One movie a year, maybe two if the script is perfect. No more love-interest roles — I'm done kissing women who aren't my wife for a living.
I've got enough money now to be picky, enough clout to say no without burning bridges. Maybe I'll try directing. I've been turning the idea over for months, thinking about how I'd frame things differently if I were behind the camera instead of in front of it.
The meeting with the director, Christopher, ran long today, but the reshoot discussion gave me ideas. The way he blocks a scene, the choices he makes about what the audience sees first — I could do that. I want to tell stories from the other side.
My phone is plugged into the charger, finally alive again after dying sometime this afternoon. Notifications are piling up but I haven't checked them. Text messages, missed calls, social media alerts — all of it can wait. I'm mentally checked out, just want to get home and see my wife.
The driveway is empty when I pull in. No porch light, no glow from the living room windows. The house sits dark against the night sky, and I wonder why it's so quiet at nine PM. Andy's usually up, reading on the couch or watching something mindless on TV.
Then it clicks, and my hands go still on the steering wheel.
Dinner. I promised Andy dinner tonight. I was supposed to pick her up at six. It's nine. The meeting went long, and my phone died, and Christopher called right when I thought I was free.
Fuck.
This isn't the first time I've missed a dinner I promised her. But she's always been home when I get back.
I kill the engine and sit in the silence for a second, already rehearsing my apology. The emergency meeting, the phone battery, the director's last-minute panic about camera angles. She'll understand. She always understands.
The house feels wrong the moment I step inside.
Not just quiet — a different kind of quiet. No TV murmur, no reading lamp casting soft light down the hallway. No signs that Andy spent her evening here, no book face-down on the coffee table, no mug in the sink from her after-dinner tea.
I call her name. My voice echoes back from the vaulted ceilings, bounces off the marble floors.
Nothing.
The bedroom is wrong too. I can tell before I flip the light switch — something in the air, the way the space feels rearranged even though nothing's obviously moved. Then I see the closet door hanging open, which is the first real sign that something's off because Andy always closes it.
I walk over and look inside, and my brain takes a second to process what I'm seeing.
Her side is gutted.
Not empty — the cocktail dresses are still there, the gowns hanging in their garment bags, the stuff she wears to premieres and red carpets.
But the jeans are gone. The T-shirts. The sweatshirts she steals from me and wears around the house with the sleeves pushed up to her elbows.
The things she actually lives in, the clothes that are actually her — all of it swept away like it was never there.
My feet carry me to the bathroom without conscious direction.
Her counter is cleared. No face wash, no moisturizer she applies in careful circles around her eyes every night.
No toothbrush in the holder next to mine.
The small everyday things that prove someone lives here, loves here — all of it gone.
The panic starts low in my chest, a cold spreading that has nothing to do with the air conditioning.
I dial Andy's number with fingers that feel clumsy and foreign.
Straight to voicemail. Not her phone turned off — her voicemail greeting in her own voice, cheerful and sing-song, asking me to leave a message.
I don't leave a message. What would I say?
My phone buzzes with incoming calls — names lighting up the screen. Vinny. Jacob. I ignore Vinny and answer Jacob.
"She's gone."
The words come out flat, like I'm reporting the weather. My voice sounds like it belongs to someone else.
Jacob sighs, and when he speaks, there's something heavy in his tone that makes my stomach drop. "Yeah, well. Happy anniversary to you too."
The word hits me like a bag of concrete to the chest.
Anniversary.
Today is our anniversary. I forgot. I completely, totally, catastrophically forgot my own wedding anniversary.
Not just dinner — not just a restaurant reservation I let slip through the cracks.
I forgot the day I married her, the day I stood in front of sixty people and promised to put her first for the rest of my life.
While Andy was — what? Getting dressed? Waiting for me? How long did she sit there before she gave up on me?
The questions pile up without answers. My brain is crashing, not computing.
No rationalizing works here. There's no excuse for forgetting your wedding anniversary.
The excuse machine that's been running just breaks, stops cold, leaves me standing here with nothing but the stupid, brutal truth of what I did.
"Have you seen the news?" Jacob's voice cuts through the white noise in my head.
"No."
"Check it. Then call me back."
He hangs up. That's all Jacob gives me — no comfort, no advice, no softening the blow. Just check it and call back, like he's assigning me homework that's going to destroy my life.
I open my phone with hands that shake just enough to make the screen blur. Social media loads, and the first thing I see is my own face staring back at me.
The photos from last night: me and Selena in the parking lot after dinner.
The hug. Her clinging to me, her face buried in my neck, and me standing there like an idiot with my arms at my sides instead of stepping away.
From the outside, it looks intimate. From the inside, I was counting the seconds until she let go.
The captions are brutal and efficient: "Jameson Rivers and Selena May," "trouble in paradise," "intimate moment caught on camera. "
Then the video from tonight. Me and Selena leaving Christopher's hotel suite, both of us in sweatshirts and caps, trying to be discreet about an emergency meeting that had nothing to do with romance and everything to do with film schedules.
But from the outside — from Andy's perspective, sitting alone on our anniversary — it looks exactly like two people sneaking out of a hotel room after hours.
I see what Andy saw. I see what the whole world saw. And I understand with sick, cold clarity what my wife thinks happened.
She thinks I'm cheating. She saw these photos and this video, on our anniversary, while she was waiting for me, and she thinks I chose another woman.
The truth doesn't matter. The hug was nothing — Selena being Selena, dramatic and touchy in a way that never registered as anything more than her personality. The hotel was Christopher's suite, not some romantic rendezvous. But the truth is irrelevant when the lie looks this convincing.
My phone buzzes again. I try to call Andy back, but Vinny's call comes through and I accidentally answer it.
"The fans are eating it up."
His voice is animated, buzzing with the kind of energy that means he just hit the jackpot. I'm still staring at the photos on my screen, still processing what Andy must have felt when she saw them, and Vinny sounds like he's celebrating.
"What do you mean?"
"Have you seen the news? They're talking about you and Selena. Way before we even dropped the first teaser. This is gold, Jame. Free publicity."
The cold feeling in my chest turns to ice. Vinny is talking about this like it's a campaign launch, like my wife's devastation is a marketing opportunity that fell into his lap.
"Did you plan this?"
"I wish." He laughs, actually laughs. "But we're riding it. Use it to our advantage. The speculation alone is worth millions in earned media."
My voice goes flat. "My wife thinks I cheated."
"She'll come around. Buy her a bag or something. So what I need you to do is not say anything publicly. Straddle the line between admission and evasion. Let the speculation build —"
"Go fuck yourself."
I hang up. The silence after feels louder than his voice did. Vinny's dismissal of Andy — "she'll come around," like her pain is an inconvenience to manage — sits in my chest like a stone. Buy her a bag. Like Andy is some Hollywood accessory who can be placated with leather goods and apologies.
For the first time in years, I see something clearly: no one in this industry cares about my wife. Vinny sees Andy as an obstacle to navigate, not a person who matters. The machine I've been serving treats her like collateral damage, acceptable losses in the pursuit of fame and money.
And I've been letting them.
The house stretches around me. I bought this place and gave Andy the keys and watched her walk through the rooms with an expression I read as awe but might have been something else entirely.
She said she loved it. She said it was beautiful. She never said it felt like home.
I walk through the rooms now and see them through different eyes — the living room with furniture picked by a decorator I hired because Andy said she didn't care what the couch looked like as long as I was sitting on it with her. The dining room we never eat in. The bedrooms no one sleeps in.
All of it left behind when she packed a suitcase of jeans and T-shirts and walked away from everything I thought I was building for us.
I promised her a home when I got famous. I only ever managed to buy her a house.