Chapter 1 #2
Home. The word snagged in her chest, a hook she’d thought she’d removed years ago.
Home was her house in Venice Beach with its bamboo floors, floor-to-ceiling windows, and bespoke interior design.
Home was this chaotic set with its familiar rhythms of celebrations and meltdowns.
It was not the small community island in San Diego she’d fled a week after high school ended.
But hospital and doesn’t have long were words that overrode fifteen years of practiced avoidance. Fuck.
“Get me off this island.”
* * *
The Sterling house sat at the end of a narrow lane on Coronado Island, half a block back from the beach.
It was a 1920s Spanish-revival cottage Maddy’s parents had bought the year before Maddy was born. White stucco walls. Terracotta roof tiles. A porch lined with hanging baskets of bougainvillea.
Maddy had called her mom nine times when she’d gotten to the Nadi International Airport in Fiji. It went straight to voicemail every time—you’ve reached Bunny Sterling, leave something fabulous.
Each message Maddy left was a little less composed than the last. By the seventh, her voice was doing the thing she’d spent eleven years training contestants out of: pitch climbing, sentences breaking apart, words coming faster than her mouth could organize them.
She’d called the Coronado Hospital, and a nurse named Patricia confirmed Bunny had been seen and discharged—no further details. No condition. No prognosis. Just discharged. “HIPAA, you understand,” Patricia had said.
The fuck she did. She was her daughter. A daughter who evidently was not her mother’s emergency contact. Granted, she wasn’t Maddy’s either, but still. Patricia could have given some indication of why the hell she’d been discharged.
Was Bunny at home, marginally injured, high on painkillers, barking orders to a well-meaning neighbor named Lorraine who had catastrophized the situation?
Or was there simply nothing else they could do, so she’d been transported home with a morphine bag and a hospice nurse to die peacefully in her own bed?
As Maddy pulled up to the curb, she saw a modest gray SUV parked in the driveway next to Bunny’s cherry-red convertible, and Maddy’s chest tightened. A palliative care aide. That had to be what it was.
Maddy got out and walked slowly up the front walk, up the three porch steps, and placed a hand on the doorknob. She paused, steeling herself with a shaky breath, then turned the knob.
The door was unlocked. Bunny had never locked a door in her life.
An affront to the community spirit, she claimed.
Maddy crossed the threshold, and two Pomeranians darted towards her feet—the smaller one launching into a bark that could shatter crystal, the larger one pressing her entire body against Maddy’s calf like a cat.
She heard muffled music coming from somewhere deeper in the house. Strange. They did say music helps coma patients, so maybe it was the same for hospice patients.
She had rehearsed this moment over and over on the eleven-hour flight across the Pacific. She was ready for the machines. The tubes. The thin, terrible hush of a room where someone was preparing to take their last breath. She took two steps toward Bunny’s bedroom—
Laughter rang out from the kitchen. Bunny’s laughter, full-throated, the kind that could be heard from the street and possibly from across the Bay.
Maddy stopped cold. What the fuck?
Her bag slipped down her shoulder. She caught the strap in the crook of her arm and let her feet carry her toward the sound.
She paused in the kitchen doorway, and so many things hit her at once.
Memories she didn’t want to think about. Confusion about what the hell she was seeing. Anger—because, again, what the fuck?
Bunny was perched on a stool at the kitchen island on a bright pink donut pillow, an ice pack held in place over her silk caftan by a wrap around her waist. She looked like she’d had a full glam squad on call—her bleached-blonde hair pinned back with a jeweled clip, makeup immaculate.
She was flushed with laughter, swaying her arms to the music while holding the rest of her body perfectly still.
In the kitchen, pulling fresh cookies from the oven, was a woman with dark, wavy hair cascading down her back, olive-tanned skin, and bare feet with dark red-painted toenails on Bunny’s tile floor. She was swaying her hips to the music, spatula in hand.
Then the woman turned. And Maddy’s jaw locked.
Aspen St. Claire.
In her mother’s kitchen. Baking cookies. Barefoot. Laughing. Like she belonged there.
Maddy had figured out by age six that you could not out-Bunny Bunny—who was the gravitational center of every room she entered.
Maddy hadn’t been born with that same natural charm, so she’d built another way to be seen.
Achievements. Awards. Winning. Collecting accolades had been her only source of sanity.
The one thing she knew Bunny could never take from her.
Then Aspen St. Claire had stepped up to the debate podium across from Maddy a month into freshman year, and every head in the room had turned.
Maddy had been dealing with the Bunny phenomenon her entire life; she knew what it looked like when someone was about to sweep the rug out from under her and steal the spotlight.
So Maddy had walked into that room with a strategy preloaded every day for the next four years as she fought tooth and nail to hold on to the one edge she had.
The one that Aspen St. Claire seemed dead set on taking from her.
She shouldn’t even be surprised that Aspen would swoop in and take over the role of the perfect daughter to Maddy’s own mother, too.
Aspen’s eyes landed on Maddy in the doorway, and the smile that had still been on her face abruptly dropped. Her dark eyes went wide, mouth hanging slightly open, spatula still in the air.
The bag on Maddy’s arm dropped to the floor with a thud, drawing Bunny’s attention.
“Darling! You made it!” Bunny beamed from her donut pillow, arms spread wide, radiating pure delight from the five-foot-one frame that had never once stopped her from being the biggest presence in any room.
“I was beginning to think my message vanished into the ether, you know how it is with those poor unpaid interns of yours, bless them, they mean well, but you simply cannot trust a child that age to relay such important matters, and yet here you are—”
“What the hell is going on?” Maddy brushed past the correction she wanted to make that Lexi was her assistant and paid quite well by industry standards. Now was not the time to get into that particular argument. “I thought you were in the hospital?”
“I was, sweetheart! I absolutely was, I did my time in that dreadful little ward—” Bunny gave a small, brave shudder.
“But oh, honey, those gowns, they tie at the back and are scratchy as a burlap sack—” She plucked at the air near her shoulder, demonstrating the offending fabric.
“—and don’t even get me started on the overhead lighting.
” She flattened a hand over her eyes, shielding them from a sun that was not there.
“It’s an X-ray, not an interrogation for Pete’s sake.
No woman should be made to suffer fluorescent tubes after the day I’d had—”
Maddy took a calculated step closer, her eyes scanning the scattered pieces of evidence: the ice pack, the donut cushion, the card game on the table, the laughter, the fresh-baked cookies. “What, exactly, is wrong with you, Mother?”
Bunny lifted her chin in the air. “I shattered my tailbone.”
“Bruised it.” Aspen corrected easily as she scooped cookies off the baking sheet and placed them into a Tupperware.
Maddy’s eyes cut to Aspen. She didn’t want to look at her because looking at her meant acknowledging that Aspen was here, in this room, correcting Bunny like it was something she did regularly. And Bunny had let her without so much as a dramatic gasp.
Aspen met her gaze. Steady. Unbothered.
Fifteen years, and Aspen St. Claire still had that same infuriating composure as if the world rearranged itself pleasantly around her without requiring effort. She hadn’t changed at all.
“She fell doing paddleboard yoga for her two-hundred Instagram followers.” Aspen continued with a pointed look toward Bunny. “Caught the edge of the board on her way down.”
“Two-hundred and forty-seven, darling.” Bunny lifted one ringed finger with pride.
“And it was crow pose, mind you, not some beginner’s downward dog—the crow, balanced on my two hands—” She mimed it, both palms hovering over the island, fingers spread, holding the invisible pose.
“Like a woman half my age. It was a triumph. It was art. It would have gone absolutely viral and put your little reality program to shame—except a rogue wave, a monster, came out of nowhere and conspired against me.” She gave a slow, mournful shake of her head.
Maddy narrowed her eyes at Bunny. “I’ve been trying to call you for thirty-six hours.”
“Well, my poor phone is resting at the bottom of the Bay communing with the fishies, honey. RIP.” She drew a small, grave cross over her chest with a manicured finger, eyes briefly closed in tribute.
“We had two beautiful years together.” A delicate, recovering breath.
“The new one arrives tomorrow, God willing. And I shall try to love again.”
Eleven years in Hollywood and she had never met a more dramatic actress than Bunny Sterling. “I thought you were dying, Mother.”
“We’re all dying, dear,” Bunny said with a dismissive flap of her hand. “Every one of us, every single day, a little bit at a time—that’s simply the human condition. Don’t be morbid about it, sweetheart. It doesn’t suit your face.”
That’s when Maddy felt it. The crack in the carefully maintained composure that she’d been holding across an ocean, three time zones, nine voicemails, and a fishing boat that smelled like diesel and fish guts.
And it hit her. “Who is Lorraine?”