28. Jasmine
JASMINE
Brendan the real estate agent shook Jasmine’s hand at the front door, said the house was “absolutely stunning,” and then proceeded to walk through it with a clipboard and a measuring device while Jasmine stood in the kitchen.
She already felt like a stranger in her own home.
House, she corrected herself, because once she moved out of Los Angeles, this would no longer be her home.
She’d called the agency four days after she’d come home. It had taken her that long to stop sitting in various rooms of the house feeling sorry for herself and start doing the practical things. It was how she’d been raised and was the only reliable cure for despair.
The mortgage was the immediate problem. Without the franchise, without the salary that would have come with three sequels and the kind of guaranteed work that let you breathe easily for a decade, things looked different.
She wasn’t broke. Not yet. But paying the mortgage depended on her working, and Jasmine had effectively been canceled.
Marco had faith they could build something from the ashes, but the more Jasmine thought about it, the more shame she felt.
Sure, she could do the charity work, make appearances. Maybe write a memoir spinning herself as the victim — a suggestion from her publicist that made Jasmine cringe.
But then what? Her career would never return to what it had been, and she would always walk through this city with shame on her shoulders.
So why not sell the house and leave? She didn’t yet know where she would go. Perhaps back to Arizona. Or somewhere new. Somewhere cheaper.
She’d invested well, and if she combined that with a job — maybe teaching acting — she could live a simple and comfortable life.
A good chunk of money from the sale of her house would go to paying off her mom’s condo, and Jasmine could use what was left over to buy something smaller in a cheaper area.
It was a good plan. A scary plan.
But it also felt like the best choice available to her. This town had chewed her up and spit her out, and she wasn’t going to pretend otherwise.
The trouble was that the house was also the place she loved most in the world.
“The light in the main bedroom is exceptional,” Brendan said, appearing in the kitchen doorway with his clipboard. “South facing. Buyers go mad for south facing.”
“Great,” she said flatly.
“And the courtyard is genuinely unique for this price point. We’ll lead with that.”
“Whatever you think is best.”
He looked at her with what she was pretty sure was concern. Or was it pity? “We’ll take very good care of it,” he assured her. “The right buyer will love it the way you have.”
She thanked him, picked up her keys, and let herself out while he finished the measurements.
She drove to her mother’s without looking back in the rearview mirror because she’d decided in advance that she wasn’t going to do that, and she was a person who kept her commitments, even the ones she made only to herself.
Her mother opened the door before she knocked, which meant she’d been watching from the window.
“Come here,” she said, and pulled her in. Jasmine let herself be held in the doorway of the condo for a moment longer than she normally would have, and her mother didn’t say anything, and that was exactly right.
Inside, the little table by the window had two mugs on it, coffee waiting.
Jasmine sat in the chair that was hers by long habit and wrapped her hands around the mug and looked out at the courtyard below the balcony, the birds of paradise vivid.
Even with everything that had happened — losing Nate, losing her career, now losing her home — there was still some beauty in the world.
Jasmine didn’t know whether to be grateful or angry about that.
“Brendan finished?” her mother asked.
“He’s still measuring things.” Jasmine stared at the courtyard. “He says the south-facing light is exceptional.”
Her mother was quiet for a moment. “Are you sure about the house?”
“No.” She turned the mug in her hands. “But I’m sure about the mortgage, and the fact that I need the money.” She paused. “And I might leave.”
Her mother looked at her. “Leave.”
“LA.” She’d been thinking about it for days without saying it out loud, but now that she was putting it out there, it felt almost like relief.
“There’s nothing keeping me here right now.
No production, no project, nothing in the pipeline that Marco hasn’t already warned me will be slow in coming.
I could go somewhere quiet for a while. Arizona, maybe.
” She glanced over. “Be closer to home.”
Her mother’s expression did something careful. “That sounds like running.”
“Maybe.” She looked back at the courtyard. “Maybe running is the right move sometimes.”
There was a knock at the door, so sudden it made Jasmine jerk in her chair. She’d been doing that a lot lately, spooking at the most normal sounds. To say she was on edge would be putting it lightly. She’d probably slept a total of ten hours in the last four nights.
“That’ll be Eden,” her mom said, going to open the door.
Eden appeared carrying a paper bag that smelled of garlic and something warm and substantial.
“I have dumplings,” she announced. “And spring rolls. And that soup you like from the place on Vermont.” She set the bag on the counter and turned around and looked at Jasmine with eyes that were already too full. “Hi.”
“Hi,” Jasmine said.
Eden crossed the kitchen in three steps and hugged her. Jasmine held on and pressed her face into her best friend’s shoulder and didn’t cry, but only because she’d run out of tears two days ago and her body hadn’t restocked yet.
They ate at the little table, all three of them, the dumplings shared between mismatched plates, the soup poured into the mugs her mother preferred over bowls for reasons she’d never explained. Outside the window, the afternoon moved slowly toward evening.
“Have you talked to him?” Eden asked after a while.
Jasmine picked up a dumpling. “No.”
“Are you going to?”
“No,” she said to the dumpling.
Eden looked at her mother and her mother looked at Eden, the look of two people who had a shared position on a matter and were deciding who would present it.
“Jaz,” her mother said, hands around her mug. “What happened between you and Nate—”
“Is over.” She set the dumpling down. “The arrangement is over. Everything that went with it is over.”
“I don’t mean the arrangement,” her mother said. “I mean the other thing.”
Jasmine looked at the table.
“You came to my home with that man,” her mother continued, “and I watched him sit on my sofa and eat my food and look at you when you weren’t watching him.
And I know what that look is.” She paused.
“I also know what you look like when you’re trying to convince yourself of something. What the two of you had was real.”
“What am I trying to convince myself of?” Jasmine asked, choosing to avoid the other part of her argument.
“That it’s hopeless.”
“It is hopeless.” She picked the dumpling up again because she needed something to do with her hands.
“He created this whole situation. The bet, the emails, the arrangement. Everything that’s happened to me in the last two months traces back to a drunk decision he made in a bar.
And I know, I know he didn’t mean for it to go this way. I’m not saying he’s a bad person.”
She paused. “But I’ve lost my biggest role. I’m selling my house. My name is attached to a story that’s going to follow me for years. And the man at the center of all of that is sitting in his penthouse with his company that’s completely fine and his reputation that’ll recover.”
“He’s not in the penthouse,” Eden said. “He’s been at the house on the ridge. I heard from Carlos. He hasn’t gone back to the penthouse.”
Jasmine looked at her and frowned. “You talk to my bodyguard?”
“Sometimes.” She shrugged. “We go to the same Krav Maga gym, remember? He knows Nate’s head of security.”
Jasmine had forgotten all of that, and that was another thing she felt terrible about. She hadn’t even seen Carlos in a couple weeks because she hadn’t gone to any events since before the beach trip.
Which was fine. She would be moving away from the nexus of celebrity anyway, and a bodyguard was another thing she couldn’t afford.
“He’s not fine, Jaz. From what I’ve heard, he’s working twenty-hour days and barely eating, and the only time he leaves the house is to run.”
Jasmine sighed and leaned back in her chair. These two were relentless. They probably felt sorry for her. No money, no career, no man, living a life of public shame.
Not that she could blame them. It did look pretty pathetic.
“I believe that he has feelings for me,” she said, and it caused her real pain to say it, even in front of the two people who loved her most. “I believe they’re genuine.
But feelings aren’t enough when the damage is this significant.
What am I supposed to do, forgive everything because we had a nice week by the ocean? ”
“No,” her mother said. “But maybe ask yourself whether ‘hopeless’ is really what this is. Or whether it’s just very, very hard.” She looked at her daughter steadily. “Those aren’t the same thing.”
Jasmine didn’t have an answer for that. She folded a napkin in her lap, looked at it, and let the question sit.
Outside, the sky was going orange over the courtyard. Somewhere on the floor above, someone was playing music. Frank, probably, with his balcony tomatoes and his wordless generosity.
She reached for another dumpling and said nothing, and Eden refilled her soup, and her mother didn’t push.
“I’m still moving,” Jasmine murmured to no one in particular.