Chapter Fifty-Four
“Mr. Turner will be with you in just a few minutes,” said Holly. Or maybe it was Molly.
Brody had hired three new assistants since I’d left and they were all girls under the age of twenty-two with names ending in Y who wore clothing so trendy that it was ugly in an ironic way.
(At least, I thought so.) Or maybe I was just uncomfortable with how reminiscent it was of something I would have seen in a dELiA*s catalog in high school.
“Does he have you call him that?” I asked.
She blinked at me blankly. “By his name?”
“Well, yes, but Mr. Turner. He doesn’t go by Brody?”
“I was raised to respect my elders,” she said.
I choked back a laugh. What would Brody say if he knew one of his little hottie assistants referred to him as an elder?
I sat at the kitchen island, waiting for Brody, and I tried not to judge the disorganized piles of PR packages. It required even more effort to not sort them myself.
Brody had sent a black car service to pick me up and drive me back to LA. If his attempt at wooing me saved me gas money and let me nap for the whole car ride, then consider me reluctantly wooed.
It had been six days since my argument with Eli and some part of me held on to hope that his anger would pass.
But when bedtime came, he closed his door for the first time in weeks, and I retreated to my own room.
The longer the wall between us stayed up, the taller it became.
We barely spoke for the next few days as he shuttled boxes in and out of the apartment and I was left to imagine what a future without him would look like.
I hadn’t decided on accepting Brody’s offer, but Eli seemed so sure that I would. The more distant he felt, the more likely it seemed that I didn’t have anything to lose in coming here. But I couldn’t help but wonder if I would always regret not hearing Brody out.
Then there was Leonard and the box of his scripts.
So here I was.
A hand settled on my shoulder and there was Brody, hovering behind me. “I’m so glad you’re here,” he said.
I swiveled around. “Thanks for having me, Mr. Turner.”
He rolled his eyes. “The staffing agency has them call me that. Makes me feel old as fuck.”
“Brody, we are old as fuck.”
He shook his head. “I pay good money for those microneedling sessions.” He stepped back from my chair so that I could stand up. “Come on. We have a lot of work to do.”
“This isn’t me accepting your offer,” I told him as I followed him into the more comfortable of the living rooms, furnished with cream sofas with modern lines that were actually comfortable.
It was so bizarre to be back here again.
Like revisiting a childhood home and finding you don’t fit inside of it in the same way you once did.
And yet everything was eerily similar, especially Brody in his athletic shorts and T-shirt with the sleeves cut off.
He’d obviously come straight from working out.
He sat down across from me, his elbows braced on his knees. “I want to talk about The Wunderkind.”
“Yes, I too would like to talk about how you broke into my laptop and read my work without my permission.”
“The laptop you left on your car before driving away?”
He did have a point there. I leaned back against the sofa and crossed my arms, refusing to smile or give any indication that I was warming to him.
“I want The Wunderkind to be our debut project, Vera.”
“Brody, I’ve been dabbling with that script for twenty years. Why now?”
“Well, first of all, you never let me read it, and second . . . it’s not bad.”
“That’s it?” I asked. “It’s not bad?”
He shrugged. “Well, yeah. But it feels right too. You’ve been working on this project since we were in school, Vera. It feels right that the first project out of the gate should be one you’ve dedicated half of your life to. It’s the right thing to do.”
Half of my life. Jesus Christ. That sounded bleak. This didn’t feel the same as the effusive praise from his phone call. This felt like Brody trying to make up for something that could never really be recovered. Time. The right thing to do.
And then something that scared me almost as much as losing Eli struck me.
I hadn’t read The Wunderkind in full in years.
Just bits and pieces here and there. What if it was awful?
What if this was my big chance and I wasted it on some script I started when I was twenty-one and never let go of because I was scared that I would never be able to create anything else?
“I need to read the script,” I told him.
“Of course,” he said, and leaned toward the coffee table to grab a spiral-bound printed copy, which he handed to me. “I want you to be sure, okay? But my investors are also in a hurry to announce while I’m in the run-up to Cactus King. They want to capitalize on the publicity. We’d like to—”
“I get it,” I said. “Just give me the afternoon.”
He stood. “I guess you know where everything is, so make yourself at home.”
I glanced around at the plush sofas and the artfully placed overpriced bottled water on the coffee table. I didn’t feel . . . clear-headed here. “I think I might need to . . . get out of the house. Away.”
“Ruben can take you anywhere you want to go,” Brody said, seemingly unbothered. “Do you have a place in mind?”
INT. MONTAGE—DAY
The summer season is ending. The ice cream shop is closing for the year.
The boardwalk is quiet. Seasons change. So do Poppy and Arlo.
Poppy has become distant. She has missed calls and text messages from him.
She sees him walking alone one day while she drives home.
She wants to call his name. She doesn’t.
POPPY (V.O.)
Some people don’t ghost you. They haunt you.