The Real Thing Read online

  Ian didn’t look happy now.

  Had something happened to his folks? She should have asked about them. That would be neighborly. Or perhaps, if he’d been living next door for eight years, he’d gotten close to Aunt Lolly and he was grieving her loss. He undoubtedly knew about the rift between Lolly and Maggie. Maybe he’d taken her aunt’s side. His voice had been sharp when he pointed out she’d missed the funeral.

  Regret began to rise up, filling her chest like water until she was drowning in it. She hated this feeling. Like she’d said the wrong thing. Or not done the right thing. That she would never be good enough. And that little voice whispering in the back of her mind of course he doesn’t like you, why would he?

  Not that she wanted him to like her. Even if men like that were her kryptonite. She was off men. Maybe forever.

  Celibate had a nice, peaceful ring to it. No more drama. No more rumors.

  Though there would probably always be rumors. She was Maggie Tate now. She’d reached the tipping point in her fame where it had gone from fifteen minutes to eternity. There was no escaping it now.

  It was a good thing she hadn’t come to the funeral. She only would have been a disruption. That was what she was to a normal person’s life. A disruption. She should go back to LA, where her life was built to contain the chaos her fame generated. But the idea of going back made her stomach churn.

  She’d come this far. Might as well see the house.

  Except for the tiny problem that she still didn’t have a key.

  Ian probably knew where the hide-a-key was stashed. He probably knew the name of the estate’s executor too, could probably have given her his phone number and directions to his office if he’d wanted to, but his “enjoy your stay” had been about as friendly as a “piss off” and she was not looking for an excuse to talk to him. She was off men.

  Which meant calling Melanie.

  Maggie didn’t know where she’d put the letter—the one with the executor’s name on it. She didn’t have any clear memory of setting it down, but everything had gone a little fuzzy around the edges after she read that Aunt Lolly was gone.

  The letter had been mixed in with her fan mail. It had all been X-rayed or dusted for bomb residue or whatever the hell her security team did to it before she got it, and was sitting in neat piles in the rarely-used office of her home in the elite Hidden Valley neighborhood, waiting for her to get around to looking at it.

  She still got a surprising amount of physical mail, considering how many of her fans chose to interact with her social media presence—none of them suspecting that she didn’t handle any of that herself. Didn’t even know her own passwords. But she liked looking at the fan letters. Liked the reminder that people loved her—which, yes, was pathetic, but when she couldn’t sleep at four in the morning and that feeling that she would never be good enough was slowly filling her chest, she needed those letters.

  The executor’s letter had caught her eye because it included her real name. Attn: Dolores Terchovsky. She’d done a good job of distancing herself from that name. She’d been Maggie Tate for so long even Wikipedia had forgotten that she was once the Lori Terchovsky who spent a few summers with a great-aunt in rural Oregon.

  She’d opened the letter, expecting a particularly dedicated fan, and found legal jargon instead. Aunt Lolly was dead. The house was hers.

  She didn’t need it. The word “need” had changed its meaning in the last seven years, since the Alien Adventuress series really took off. Money stopped being about needs and wants and became a competition instead. About proving she could draw better than Jennifer or Angelina. About showing her worth. An extra two million on a contract mattered if it proved she deserved it.

  It was silly for her aunt to leave a shack like this to a woman who’d made eight million dollars in the last six months alone.

  But Maggie had wanted it. She’d wanted to see the house. To walk inside and feel the way she’d felt when she’d come here as a kid. Lolly had given it to her. Not to her father or any of his kids from his other family. To her.

  She hadn’t thought. She hadn’t planned or discussed. She’d simply grabbed her purse and the car keys dangling off a hook in the garage, loaded a sleepy Cecil B. DeMille into the hot pink convertible, and started to drive.

  Her phone had buzzed to life a couple hours later, about the time Mel must have woken up and realized the golden goose was gone. After ignoring the fifth call and fifteenth text notification, Maggie turned the cell off, enjoying the quiet, the strangely luxurious feeling of disconnecting and finding her way north by instinct and memory. She’d taken a couple wrong turns, but she’d made it to Lolly’s place without any help from man or Google.

  She’d just wanted to see it. And now she didn’t know what to do.

  The idea to clear it out and fix it up to sell hadn’t occurred to her until she was talking to Ian and even when she heard herself say it, it didn’t feel like her thought. Like one of those improv classes she’d taken when she was first starting out where the words coming out of her mouth seemed to come from some other source because she hadn’t had time to think them. Her instructors always said she was quick, thinking on her feet, with great instincts for moving a scene forward, but it always felt more like her brain had shut off and she was just along for the ride.

  It had stopped raining, though the air still held that cool dampness like it could start again at any time. Maggie made her way back to the car, the wet gravel shifting beneath her feet. Cecil was still sleeping on the passenger seat, but he lifted his head when she opened the door, emitting a small, questioning whine.

  “It’s okay, baby,” she soothed him, climbing back into the car. She shivered as she shut the car door and turned on the engine, cranking up the heat before fishing out her phone.

  Mel answered in the middle of the first ring. “Where are you?”

  Maggie ignored the question, trying to pretend she was the authority in her own life. “I need you to get a name and an address for me. There’s a letter from a lawyer in Oregon—I think I dropped it in the office.”

  “Maggie! You’ve been missing for two days!”

  She might have had more sympathy for her manager if she’d sounded worried, but Mel sounded more put-out than concerned. “I’m not missing. I’m in Oregon.”

  “This isn’t the time to run away, Maggie.” Ah, there it was. That lovely tone. Frustrated patience with a dash of patronization. “We need to make a statement.”

  “We always need to make a statement.” She was having a hard time caring about the latest scandal. Thinking about it left her numb. “Could you get that name for me? Or the address on the envelope?”

  “What are you doing in Oregon?” Mel demanded, catching up. “How did you even get there?”

  “I drove.”

  “You drove?”

  “I do know how to drive.” Though she was glad she hadn’t had to deal with rush hour in Los Angeles. She hadn’t actually been behind the wheel of a car that wasn’t on a film set in years.

  “Your driver’s license expired while we were shooting in Budapest last month. Getting a new one is on my to do list, but it didn’t seem like a high priority since you never drive.”

  “Oh.” Probably a good thing she hadn’t gotten pulled over then. Though she’d heard from her costars that getting out of a ticket usually only involved an autograph or a selfie. Still, she should have checked her license.

  The windshield had fogged over so she hit defrost, watching the shape of the house slowly emerge through the white. Aunt Lolly would have known the exact date her license expired. She was so independent. So capable.

  So opinionated. Never one to pull punches. Would she have been ashamed of the person Maggie had become?

  Maggie couldn’t actually remember the last time she’d done anything for herself. She could use her celebrity as an excuse, but not all celebrities were completely divorced from reality. She had a team
of people who had made themselves indispensable to her, taking care of every detail of her life so she could focus on her work, but she’d let them. She’d let herself become helpless.

  “What are you doing in Oregon?”

  “My aunt died.” It was the first time she’d said the words out loud and they seemed to echo, hollow.

  “Oh, Maggie. Why didn’t you say something? I can arrange a security detail for the funeral. I’m sure Bree would be willing to act as a decoy for you under the circumstances—”

  “I missed the funeral, actually.” Apparently it had happened three weeks ago and she hadn’t known. The woman who had, at one point, been one of the most important people in her life had been laid to rest and she hadn’t known.

  Maggie shivered, cranking up the heat another notch inside the car. It was cold, but it often was in Long Shores when it rained, even in the summer. The blue-grey water of the Pacific would feel like ice on her feet, the soft, silty sand so cold her toes would start to go numb as she ran the swath of beach that seemed to stretch for days and was as wide as forever when the tide was out.

  “If not for the funeral, what are you doing there?”

  “She gave me a house.” At the answering silence, Maggie repeated, “My aunt left me her house.”

  “A house,” Melanie echoed—and Maggie could hear what her manager was thinking as clearly as if she’d spoken the words aloud. You have a house. One of the nicest houses in the Greater Los Angeles area.

  “I thought I’d fix it up. Get it ready to sell,” Maggie said, trying out the improv line on Melanie and liking the sound of it even more the second time.

  “We can do that,” Melanie said—she’d always been quick to adapt. One of her great strengths as a manager. “I’ll hire a local contractor—”

  “No. I want to do it myself.”

  “Yourself.” Doubt saturated the single word—and Maggie couldn’t really blame her. She hadn’t exactly been a paragon of self-sufficiency in the last decade. “Maggie,” Melanie said slowly, patiently. “I know this stuff with the book has been hard, but this is not the time to be hiding in the Pacific Northwest. We need to make a statement. Shift the narrative. The contract for the next Alien Adventuress film is being negotiated as we speak and you need to be visible in a positive way as the studio is evaluating your box office draw. The last thing we need is a rumor getting out that you ran off to hide in the woods because of one little tell-all.” A pause. “I didn’t want to tell you this, but there’s been talk they might go with someone younger.”

  Maggie stared at the house, trying to figure out how she felt about the franchise that had made her famous replacing her with a younger model. She ought to be outraged, she knew that, but all she felt was…tired.

  It wasn’t the first time she’d felt this way. She often felt drained of energy after she wrapped filming on a movie—like all of her emotions had been hollowed out. Or she’d used them all up on camera and didn’t have any left over for real life. She’d crawl into bed, sometimes for days, and wait to feel—but it had never happened during contract negotiations before. The numbness was spreading, like frost on a pond, reaching icy fingers into more parts of her life.

  “We can still sue him,” Mel tried again when she was met with only silence. “I know Alec is hiding behind the fact that it’s a ‘fictionalized’ account, but the legal team thinks we have a solid case for damages.”

  Her brain felt foggy and thick. Maggie touched the steering wheel, feeling the firmness of it beneath her hands. She’d liked driving. It had been peaceful. Freeing. The miles passing under her wheels. Maybe she would keep driving. Washington. Canada. Alaska. How far could she go before she ran out of road?

  “Maggie? Come back to LA. I can have a jet pick you up in Portland. You can sleep in your own bed.”

  Just the thought of going back to her life made her feel heavy. Exhausted until her bones ached with it. “I’m not ready yet. Can you send me that name? The lawyer? And don’t send anyone up here. I want to do this on my own.”

  “Maggie…”

  “I can do this on my own, Melanie.”

  It was a lie, but it sounded good. Strong. Confident. Maggie Tate had always been good at playing a part. For the next few days she would play the role of a world famous actress who had her shit together. Starting as soon as she got that lawyer’s address.

  Chapter Three

  Ian pulled his truck into the line of vehicles already tucked against the curb waiting for the final bell at the St. Vincent Academy. The battered pick-up looked as out of place as always in the row of Lexus SUVs and Tesla sedans, but he’d long since gotten over feeling self-conscious in front of the other parents at the elite private school—at least that’s what he told himself.

  He draped one wrist on the steering wheel and one arm along the back of the bench seat, half-turning to watch the double doors. A cluster of moms in yoga pants and full make-up waggled their fingers at him and he lifted one hand in a half-hearted wave, hoping none of them decided to be “neighborly.”

  Long Shores was an hour drive from St. Vincent’s and the physical distance had helped him keep his distance from the other St. Vincent parents—and given him a ready excuse to turn down playdates with Sadie’s school friends. It might be the best school in a hundred mile radius, but half the student population was on anti-anxiety medication because they’d been training to get into Harvard and Stanford since birth. He wanted Sadie to stay a carefree tomboy who ran in a pack with the other kids on the shore as long as possible.

  Even if lately he’d started to wonder if he was fighting a losing battle.

  His phone rang as he was debating with himself for the ten thousandth time if he’d made the right choice in enrolling Sadie in St. Vincent’s. When he fished his phone out of the cupholder, the word “Mom” flashed on the screen and he grimaced. It had been her idea to send Sadie to the damn academy in the first place.

  He tapped to connect the call. “Hey, Ma.”

  “Did you know Lori’s back in town?”

  He sighed and rubbed a hand down his face. “How did you hear about that in Seattle?” His mother still lived in the house she’d shared with his father, but somehow she managed to be more plugged in to the Long Shores gossip network than he was. “And she isn’t Lori anymore.”

  “I know that. Ellen called me. Apparently, she was taking selfies with people in the Safeway. Have you seen her yet?”

  “Just for a few minutes,” he admitted. “I saw a car at Lolly’s place and went to check it out.”

  “And?”

  He pinched the bridge of his nose. “And what?”

  “How did she look?”

  “Like Maggie Tate.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean? Did she recognize you? You two used to be so close.”

  Ian arched a brow at the hopeful note in his mother’s voice, even though she wasn’t there to see it. She must have started binge-reading romance novels again. “She looked like someone who was going back to LA as soon as she sells that house.”

  “Oh.”

  “Don’t sound so disappointed.”

  “I’m not disappointed. I just remember how much you used to like her when you two were kids. She was such a sweet girl.”

  “And now she’s a movie star.” The double doors of St. Vincent’s opened, disgorging a flood of students, and Ian jumped at the excuse to get off the phone. “I gotta go, Mom. Sadie’s coming out. See you Friday.”

  His mother made an irritated sound in her throat and he had a feeling this was far from the last he was going to hear on the topic, but he was already disconnecting the call and tossing the phone back into the cupholder, his gaze on a single sloppy brown ponytail making its way through the crowd. It didn’t matter how neatly he did her hair each morning or how tidy her uniform was when he dropped her off, by the time Sadie checked out with the pick-up monitor and ran to his truck every afternoon, her monogrammed navy
St. Vincent’s sweater would be hanging off one shoulder and half of her curls would have escaped.

  Ian’s chest ached with the now-familiar panic/affection he’d never felt before he became a parent—terror that he was screwing up every day mixed with a love so complete it seemed to swallow his whole heart. He shoved the feeling down beneath a slight quirk of his lips, lifting his fingertips off the steering wheel in a wave to acknowledge the pick-up monitor who checked them off her list.

  The passenger door creaked as his daughter hauled it open. “Greetings, Paterfamilias.” She threw her bulging backpack onto the floor of the truck before clambering onto her seat.

  “Greetings, spawn. I take it you had Latin today?”

  “You take it correctly.” She slammed the door, reaching for her seatbelt as he flicked on his turn signal and waited for his turn to crawl out of the parking lot. “I aced the test. And in math Mrs. Pellman said I have a knack for percentages. A knack,” she bragged with a complete absence of humility that made him want to smile, though he kept his expression sober, nodding sagely.

  “I knew the obsession with baseball statistics would be useful someday.”

  “Precisely,” his nine-year-old said with a gleam in her eyes that let him know he’d played right into her hands. “And speaking of baseball and my continued mathematical education,” she added, smiling with exaggerated sweetness, “Lincoln’s parents have box seats to the Mariners game next Saturday and she’s allowed to invite one special friend—she hasn’t decided if she’s inviting me or Brooklyn yet, but if she does invite me I wanted to be sure I could accept on the spot because I’m not allowed to have a cell phone so I can’t text you for permission like any normal kid would.”