Chapter 14
Rose
The pool cover was off again, which meant Rose had now asked four times to have it put back and been ignored four times. The crew member currently walking past the rack where it sat folded wasn’t going to be the one to change that streak.
She set her coffee down.
“Quinn, can you put the cover on, please?”
“It’s a nice day. I might take a dip later.” He didn’t look up from his phone.
“Daisy can’t swim. The gate latch is broken and that cover has been sitting on that rack for three days.”
He put the phone down and went outside.
Her mother was on her second cup, standing at the counter with her coat still on, the way she always stood when she was making clear she wasn’t staying.
She’d driven over at nine. She’d drive home after dinner.
That’s what she’d done for the last five days, after returning from Acapulco after reading the news that her daughter was getting married to an international movie star.
Rose would never hear the end of the fact that she’d not managed to get to her mom before the tabloids did.
The clip of her mom in her bathing suit at the beach bar in Mexico, being asked how she liked her new daughter-in-law had been played over and over.
Fortunately, she’d quickly recovered herself and said ‘I wish both my children nothing but happiness’ – right before rushing back to the hotel and then yelling at Rose for twenty minutes.
“Three vans now,” her mother said. “I counted on my way in. Two men on the footpath with the long cameras, just standing there.”
“I know.”
“How long do they just stand there?”
“Until something happens.”
Her mother’s mouth pressed into a line. She refilled her cup from the pot on the counter.
Lizanne’s pot, Lizanne’s coffee, Lizanne’s kitchen visible through the pool house window, Lizanne’s gardeners moving across the far lawn in a slow, unhurried line.
Rose’s mother had opinions about all of this and had been expressing them daily, in rotating order.
“I’m supportive of you,” she said.
“I know you are.”
“I think you’re handling it better than most people would.” She paused. “It’s still complete and utter madness.”
“Also noted.”
Quinn came back in, wiping his hands on his jeans. He picked up his phone and checked it before looking up.
“The trailer numbers are in,” he said. After it had been revealed to the network that the plan was going ahead, they’d sent a crew to do a few candid shots of Lizanne and Rose to create a new trailer for the new show.
“I don’t want to know.”
“Rose—”
“I don’t want to know, Quinn.”
He held his hands up.
A golf cart with two production assistants rolled past the pool house window. Rose tracked it without meaning to.
“From Wedding Planner to Bride,” Quinn said, with the reverence of a man reading scripture.
“I know what it’s called.”
“As a title it really—”
“I signed the contract. I have no vote on the title.” She picked up her coffee. It had gone cold while she was watching the pool. She drank it anyway. “Anyway, where’s Daisy?”
“Playroom. Been there since breakfast. There’s a life-size mini pony now.”
“I saw it.”
Rose had stopped trying to work out the logic of Lizanne’s approach to Daisy.
While Rose, Quinn, and Daisy would live in the pool house, Daisy had a playroom/bedroom in the main house for show.
She would not be on the show, but they would shoot in the rooms to give the impression a child actually lived there.
Lizanne had spent what looked like a considerable amount of money on a child she’d spoken to six times. Not only to redecorate a room into a kid’s bedroom, but to fill another empty room with an assortment of toys.
Daisy had arrived here ten days ago without any of her mother’s reservations and had immediately started treating the place as her permanent residence.
She was thriving in a way that Rose found both genuinely relieving and quietly inconvenient to her position that this whole situation was a disaster.
Kayla’s car pulled up outside; Rose saw it on the surveillance camera.
She got out, spotted the camera crew setting up near the rose garden, and put her phone up instead of checking her reflection in the window.
Three weeks ago she’d have done it the other way around.
She was learning the geography of this fast — which angles the cameras covered, which conversations happened in the gaps, how to look like herself while knowing she was being watched.
Rose had hired her as her assistant and the show had taken her and made her the loyal best friend, the voice of reason.
Apparently, with Katrina out, a number of supporting cast members had also vanished and therefore the inclusion of Quinn and Kayla – as well as their mom on occasion – had been welcome.
In addition, Craig, Lizanne’s agent, would be featured every now and then, along with Pat and some of Lizanne’s acquaintances.
“She’s a natural,” Quinn said.
“Don’t tell her that.”
“Too late.”
Five minutes later, Kayla came in with two iced coffees, kissed Rose’s mother on the cheek, and waited until she’d confirmed there was no live mic nearby before she spoke at full volume.
“Production lead wants your confessional moved to today. Something about the lighting in the room they’ve set up. The producer just stopped me to tell me.” She handed Rose a coffee. “And they’re fully rigged in the rose garden.”
Rose had seen the rig going up. “Those are my favorite flowers.”
Her mother said nothing, which said quite a lot.
“Lizanne said they’ll replant anything that gets damaged,” Quinn offered.
“That’s not the point.”
Nobody argued with that, which she appreciated.
She’d rebuilt this entire wedding in the past few days.
Every element that had been Trina’s was gone.
The florals, the lighting, the timeline, the table plan — all of it reconstructed around a woman Rose understood in one register and barely at all in any other.
She’d done it efficiently and she’d done it well, and she was aware that the competence with which she’d thrown herself into the work was at least partly because the work was the only part of this she actually controlled.
Heels on the stone path outside. Rose recognized the pace before she saw her.
Lizanne came around the side of the pool house with a stylist a step behind, which was standard. She took in the covered pool without comment. Rose noted that.
“They want to shoot in the kitchen with both of us making breakfast,” Lizanne said, stopping at the door. Her voice was low, the cameras not yet in range.
“I ate.”
“It’s for the pilot episode. We have to look like we live together without looking like we’ve been told to look like we live together.” She paused. “How’s Daisy this morning?”
“She’s renamed the pony twice already. It was Gerald, now it’s Biscuit.”
“Gerald didn’t suit it?”
“Apparently not.”
Lizanne’s mouth moved, not quite a smile. “I saw her in the hall earlier. She told me Biscuit had strong opinions about the curtain color in the playroom. Biscuit doesn’t like pink. I could change it.”
“It’s not about the curtains.” Rose said it quietly, and Lizanne held her gaze for a moment and didn’t push it.
That was something Rose had started to notice: Lizanne knew when to stop.
She pushed constantly and in every direction and then, occasionally, she just stopped, and those moments were harder to dismiss than the pushing.
“Five minutes,” Lizanne said.
She turned and went back toward the main house. Rose’s mother waited until the footsteps faded.
“She seems—”
“Don’t.”
“I was going to say organized.”
“You were not going to say organized.”
Her mother picked up her cup and looked out the window at the main house, where a lighting assistant was now crossing the lawn with a cable reel over each shoulder. Kayla was on her phone. Quinn had drifted back to his, the ambient performance resuming.
Seven days to the wedding. A year sitting on the other side of it, in rooms that didn’t belong to her, under lights that were pointed at her life and calling it content. Rose picked up her cold coffee, finished it, and went to get ready.