Chapter 25
Chapter Twenty-Five
“You don’t change a winning formula,” Doug-from-the-network said, turning his bourbon a slow quarter-circle on the tablecloth without lifting it.
It was his third. Maddy had been counting since the amuse-bouche. Three deep, Doug got agreeable, and an agreeable Doug she could work with.
Margaret had booked this particular restaurant for exactly this reason.
Dim, leather, no prices printed anywhere on the menu, a speakeasy-type back banquette you had to know to ask for, where your liquor was refilled before you ever reached the bottom.
The four of them were folded into a booth: Margaret at the inside corner, Maddy beside her, Doug and Reese-from-Programming across the table, a parade of tasting plates going cold in the middle.
Maddy’s phone buzzed from where it lay face-down on her thigh under the table.
Her pulse jumped, even though she knew it wouldn’t be Aspen.
She turned it over and looked anyway. Noa.
She pushed the disappointment away like she’d been doing an average of six times per hour for the past ten days since she returned to LA.
Noa had been texting her memes almost every day, mostly rubbing in the fact that Maisie still thought her job was cooler than Maddy’s. But Maddy saw it for what it really was. Noa checking in. Noa cheering her up the only way she knew how—by being a little bit of a dick about it.
This one was a screenshot of a casting call. Seeking emotionally unavailable women in their thirties. And under it:
Noa: Found us a fun bonding activity for when you’re ready, love you.
It was the first direct reference anyone had made to her non-break-up break-up.
She knew Noa was kidding—although she was also fairly certain that if she said yes, Noa would jump on it in a heartbeat— but still, even the idea of moving on, of sitting across a candlelit dinner table from someone who wasn’t Aspen, made her want to throw up.
Not even Bunny had brought it up during their phone call that week.
Maddy had gotten a thirty-minute monologue with an update on every living soul on Coronado: the Peepin’ G’s latest efforts to marry off their grandsons, the new umbrella situation on Olly’s deck, CoCo and Chanel’s salon visit rendered in full.
And somehow, across thirty unbroken minutes, not one word about the person Maddy actually wanted news of.
Jake’s name sat just below Noa’s in the thread.
They’d been texting regularly too, mostly about Chloe—like what he should wear on their date that night, what emoji he should use in his texts to her, or whether a single x read as flirty or unhinged.
Then, two nights ago, came a string of texts, the grammar falling apart because of how excited he was.
Jake: Mads!! I did it! she said yes shes my girlfriend like officially my girlfriend Chloe St Claire is my girlfriend!!
Then, two minutes later, because he was Jake:
Jake: sorry if i made it weird
He said nothing about why it might be weird, because unlike Noa, Jake was too polite to say it directly.
But she knew. Jake had wanted a St. Claire and gone and gotten her, poor grammar and all.
Maddy had had one and driven away from her without a word, and lost her.
She’d ignored his last message and responded, That’s incredible, Jake, I’m so happy for you!
She’d meant it, and then she’d sat on the end of her bed and stared at the wall for twenty minutes.
She’d started probably two dozen texts to Aspen over the past ten days. I crushed my first meeting and Margaret said—I keep thinking about—I’m sorry, I’m so—She’d gotten very good at the part where she typed them and very bad at the part where she sent them.
For seven weeks, Aspen had been the one whose name lit up her phone at odd hours with back-to-back texts, Cup-intake reports, and wink emoji’s Maddy had pretended to be annoyed by.
Now Maddy was the one wanting to initiate a conversation between them and wait to see the notification with Aspen’s name pop up on her screen in response.
But Aspen had asked for space. So not a single one of them ever got sent.
She turned the phone back over in her lap, and kept her face pleasant and engaged and pointed at Doug.
“People come back for the thing they already love,” Doug went on.
“You give them the alpha male on one team. You give them the hometown sweetheart who cries at the merge on the other. You give them the schemer who’s playing both sides the entire time.
That’s the show. That’s the brand.” He pressed two thick fingers flat on the tablecloth, side by side.
“I’m not telling you not to be creative. I’m telling you, don’t get cute.”
What he was actually telling them was to shoot the same season for the seventeenth time and bill it as new.
Across the table, Reese laughed at don’t get cute like it was a real joke, which told Maddy most of what she needed to know about Reese.
Twenty-nine, three months into a title that still seemed to startle her a little when somebody said it out loud, and watching Margaret to find out what her own opinion was going to be.
Margaret stirred her tea with a tiny spoon and never drank it. “We could run it back,” Margaret said easily. “We’d do it beautifully, just as we have for sixteen seasons.” She set the spoon down. “Or.”
She let the or sit.
The whole dinner had been built for this: walk a person right up to the edge of the better idea and let him believe he jumped there on his own.
Maddy knew it well because she’d learned it from Margaret herself and deployed it countless times with a one-hundred percent success rate.
Persuading people who didn’t want to be persuaded was the only thing in her life still going to plan, professionally speaking.
Next week, the season identity went to the formal room, with the deck and the lawyers and the people Doug answered to. But Doug was the play-it-safe guy—the one who had been convincing the board that straying from the formula was too risky to the bottom line year after year.
Margaret and Maddy were the creative leaders for the show, but creative leadership always answered to the ones with the checkbook.
Margaret had never taken any credit for Maddy’s promotion.
She’d never once mentioned recommending her to the execs, but Maddy knew she was sitting where she was because of Margaret.
And tonight, Maddy needed to prove that Margaret had made the right choice in picking Maddy to be her right-hand.
It was the least complicated thing she wanted tonight.
Everything else she wanted was a hundred miles south and had asked her for space.
“We try something new,” Margaret said it without lifting her voice. “We let the audience cast it.”
Doug’s eyebrows moved. Margaret kept going before they could decide which direction.
“They pick one returning player from every season we’ve ever aired.
Sixteen total, plus two wildcards to round out to eighteen.
No winners—nobody wants to watch a champion take a victory lap.
We want the ones who got robbed. The ones who came one move short, trusted the wrong person, got blindsided.
The players your audience is still fighting about online five years later.
” She let it breathe. “We call the season Redemption, and we turn casting into an eight-week national voting campaign that becomes a part of the season before we ever set foot in Fiji.”
Margaret picked the spoon back up and looked at Maddy.
That was the handoff. Margaret got his attention, and now she wanted Maddy to close it.
Her first pre-production meeting as Co-Executive Producer had been four hours after she’d kissed Aspen goodbye and driven away from her.
Margaret had laid the problem on the table: season seventeen needed a new identity that was so appealing that even Doug-from-the-network couldn’t pass it up. Then she’d asked the room what it had.
Maddy had glanced at her notes. She listened to others pitch their ideas—which were all essentially some variation of "make the alpha cockier, make the sweetheart sweeter, make the schemer smarter." Same formula, better casting.
She’d had a dozen ideas ready to pitch and cut it to three for the meeting. Redemption was the one she led with. The others were safer, more Doug-friendly ideas, but Redemption was personal.
Because she had been sitting there in her first creative leadership meeting—the thing she’d been working toward for fifteen years—with her heart feeling like it had been ripped out of her chest, and hoping beyond all measure that she’d get a chance to redeem herself with Aspen.
She didn’t know how or when, but she knew that it couldn’t be the end.
Maddy just needed to find her footing and figure out what she could offer Aspen in a relationship, and hope it would be enough.
She needed a concrete plan before breaking Aspen’s request for space, or she’d just be setting them up for failure.
Redemption was also the season her dad would have been obsessed with.
The audience getting to pick the contestants?
If one of their shows had done a season like that back in the day, the two of them would have spent hours upon hours scouring over past episodes, creating charts, and strategizing about who should be pitted against each other.
Margaret had listened to her pitch, her eyes on the proposal Maddy had slid across the table, and then looked up and said, “That’s the season.”
And the first thing Maddy had wanted to do, before the meeting was even over, was call Aspen and tell her everything. She’d had the phone halfway out of her pocket before she remembered she didn’t get to do that anymore.