Chapter 12
Rose
Rose slowed as she turned onto Lizanne’s street, counting at least thirty paparazzi clustered outside the gate, their lenses pointed at her car before she’d even pulled up to the intercom.
Someone shouted something she couldn’t make out.
Another one pressed close to her window, and she jerked back instinctively.
She lowered the window an inch. “I’m expected,” she told the security panel.
The gate opened and she pulled through, watching in her rearview mirror as the photographers surged forward before the gate closed them out. One of them shouted something about Lizanne. She parked and sat for a moment.
Mel met her at the door. Before she’d taken three steps inside, Pat appeared from the side hallway, moving fast.
“Rose.” Pat took her arm just above the elbow, steering her toward the living room. Her grip was firm. “Good of you to come so quickly. I do hope this will be the beginning of a very successful collaboration.”
Rose looked at her. “We’ve already been collaborating.”
“Mm.” Pat smiled, which Rose had not seen her do before, and which she found unsettling. “Do sit down. Can Mel get you anything?”
“A Pepsi Max would be great.” She sat. “Pat. What’s going on?”
“Lizanne will be right with you.”
Pat disappeared. Rose looked around the living room — the piano, the photographs, the single framed picture of Trina that was still on the shelf. She pulled out her phone and opened her notifications.
She’d gotten through two headlines before she heard footsteps on the stairs.
Lizanne looked terrible. She’d lost weight — visible even across the room, in the way her collarbone sat too sharp above the open buttons of her shirt.
Her second thought, arriving immediately after the first and with considerably more inconvenience, was that Lizanne also looked extraordinary.
White button-down, silver buttons catching the light.
Dark jeans. Hair freshly blown out, makeup immaculate.
She had assembled herself into someone who looked like nothing was wrong, and the effort of that was more revealing than if she’d come downstairs in sweats.
Rose stood. “Are you okay?”
Lizanne crossed to the armchair across from her and sat. “No,” she said. “But I’m managing.” She folded one leg over the other. “Have you seen the coverage today?”
“I was doing the school run.”
“Pat will catch you up on the details. The short version is that Trina and I are over.” She said it the way someone said a thing they’d already said many times that morning, worn down to its bare shape.
“She’s been seeing someone else. That part is everywhere.
What isn’t everywhere yet is the story we’re putting out. ”
Rose waited.
“The narrative, as of this morning, is that Trina and I ended things mutually several months ago. We stayed quiet to protect our respective new relationships. The press is buying it. Trina has agreed to it, which is the only decent thing she’s done recently.
I guess she didn’t like being cast as the one who broke the Gilden Duchess’ heart.
” A pause. “The network has also signed off. They want the show to go ahead. A breakup followed by a new relationship is, apparently, better television than a straightforward wedding.”
“Okay,” Rose said slowly. “So the wedding —”
“Goes ahead.” Lizanne looked at her. “With some adjustments.”
Something in the way she said it made Rose set her Pepsi Max down.
“The network wants a wedding,” Lizanne continued. “The contract specifies a wedding. None of that has changed. What has changed is the bride.”
“Who’s the lucky woman?”
Lizanne smiled. “I’m glad you think she’d be lucky. Because it’s you.”
“Me?” Was she crazy? “I can’t marry you for show. I’m engaged.”
“Are you?” The sly smile told Rose that she was in trouble. Deep, deep trouble.
Lizanne opened her laptop and turned it toward her. Rose looked at the screen.
It took her a moment to understand what she was seeing.
A wedding registry. Their wedding registry — hers and Derek’s — the one she’d built from a childhood scrapbook and misplaced hope.
And beside it, a photograph. She and Quinn, taken from behind on that New Year’s balcony, his arm around her, her head tipping toward his shoulder.
Then Lizanne picked up her phone and placed it next to the laptop. She didn’t recognize it at once, but then it came to her. It was taken in the back of her car on the way back from the vineyard. And it showed her and Quinn in almost the same pose as in the New Year’s photo.
Rose stared at both images.
“The jawline is identical,” Lizanne said. “There’s a scar on his left ear. It’s in both photos.” She closed the laptop. “Quinn is Derek. And unless you’re planning to marry him on a Wednesday in December, I think we can agree that the engagement isn’t real.”
Rose said nothing. There was nothing to say. She was watching the floor open up beneath her chair and doing the mental arithmetic on how bad this was, which was very bad, which was career-ending bad, which was —
“Pat,” Lizanne said.
Pat materialized in the doorway with a folder.
“Jeremy Planter,” Pat said, opening it. “Father of Daisy Delaney. Left the state five years ago. Outstanding child support, none of which has been paid. Joint loan with your name on it — sixty thousand dollars, currently held by Meridian Credit Services.” She turned a page.
“Before him, Julia Zelenskyy. Two years. Before her, Victoria Harvard. Eight months.”
Rose stood up. “How do you know any of that?”
“I have resources.”
“That’s my private —”
“Yes,” Pat agreed. “It is.” She closed the folder. “The point, Rose, is that there’s no reason to say no on grounds of preference. You’ve been with women before. This wouldn’t be a hardship in that sense. People would believe it if they went digging.”
The word hardship landed somewhere between offensive and absurd. Rose looked from Pat to Lizanne. “What exactly are you proposing?”
Lizanne leaned forward slightly. “We get married. The wedding goes ahead as planned. The show runs for one year. At the end of it, we divorce quietly, the show wraps, and we both walk away.” She paused.
“In exchange, I pay off your Meridian debt in full. I establish a college fund for Daisy. I buy you a house wherever you want, outright, no mortgage. A new car. A monthly allowance for the duration of filming. And you receive the full fee Trina would have drawn from the network contract.”
The room was very quiet. A bird tweeted somewhere in the distance.
“No,” she said.
Lizanne didn’t blink.
“No,” Rose said again, standing. “This is insane. I’m not going to marry you. I don’t care what you’re offering.” She picked up her bag. “I’m sorry about Trina, I genuinely am, and I understand you’re in an impossible position, but the answer is no. I’ll see myself out.”
She got as far as the doorway.
“Rose.”
She stopped. Not because she wanted to. Because Lizanne’s voice had that tone that stopped people, and Rose was not immune to it.
“If you walk out,” Lizanne said, “Pat calls three journalists she has on speed dial and tells them that you fabricated a fiancé to secure this contract. The fake registry, the brother in the photo, the wedding that never existed. All of it.” She didn’t raise her voice.
She didn’t need to. “You’ll never work in this industry again. ”
Rose stood in the doorway with her back to the room.
“I don’t want to do that,” Lizanne said. “I want to be clear about that. This is not my preference. But I need a solution because if I back out of this reality show, I’m screwed and you are the option available to me.”
Rose turned around.
Lizanne had stood up. She crossed the room and stopped a few feet away, and up close Rose could see what the makeup was covering: the shadows under her eyes, the tight set of her jaw, the evidence of several days of holding herself together through force of will alone.
She held out her hand. Not to shake. A gesture toward the sofa, an invitation to sit back down.
“Think about it practically. You need the money. I need a bride. Daisy needs stability. This solves all three.”
Rose looked at the outstretched hand and did not take it. “Don’t tell me what my daughter needs.”
Lizanne dropped her hand. “Fair. I apologize.”
The apology was unexpected enough that Rose’s anger lost some of its footing. She stood there for a moment, recalibrating.
“One year,” she said.
“One year.”
“And after that it’s done. Clean. No complications.”
“My lawyers will draft it. You can have your own review it. Every term in writing.”
Rose looked at her for a long moment. Lizanne returned the gaze steadily, the performance of composure holding by a thread that Rose could now see clearly.
“I need twenty-four hours,” Rose said.
“Alright.”
Rose picked up her bag. She walked to the door, and this time Lizanne didn’t stop her. The photographers surged when the gate opened, lenses everywhere, voices overlapping, and Rose walked through it with her eyes forward and her face giving nothing, all the way to her car.
She sat in the driver’s seat. Put both hands on the wheel.
Outside, someone was still shouting her name.
She thought about the debt. She thought about Daisy in that small bedroom, the nightlight, the faded rabbit. She thought about the look on Lizanne’s face when she’d said I need a solution — not cold, exactly. Cornered. The look of someone who had run out of other options and knew it.
She started the engine.
She had twenty-four hours.