by Gina LaManna
Ryan was everything Roman wasn’t. A struggling actor in his late twenties, Ryan had booked one national commercial three years back, and he clung to those fifteen seconds of fame like a lifeboat.
Where Roman was quietly confident, Ryan was uncertain and timid. Where Roman was darkly alluring and dangerously out of reach, Ryan was delightfully boring and a little too available. Ryan was her age. He was appropriate to date. He was safe.
In falling for Roman, Penny had set herself up for failure. She reckoned he knew how to listen and when to speak. He sure as hell wouldn’t forget her name. Penny was also willing to bet that Roman Tate could make Penny forget her own name with one kiss, one touch, one stroke of a finger.
As Ryan rolled onto her, Lucky banged on the ceiling from his apartment downstairs. Ryan grinned as Lucky shouted something about there being kids in the house.
“That was amazing,” Ryan mumbled. “How’d you like it?”
Penny stared blankly at him. She wondered what he’d say if she announced that the experience had been somewhat endurable.
“It was…” She hesitated. “Yeah.”
“Glad to hear it.” Ryan grinned, stroked a thumb down her cheek. “I was wondering if I could make you breakfast in the morning?”
“Actually…”
“Sorry, I get it. Too forward.” Ryan flashed her a quick smile. “My bad. I’ll get out of your hair.”
Penny merely raised her eyebrows as Ryan skedaddled out of bed. She studied him as he moved, thinking that most women would find him attractive—striking even—with his dirty-blond hair and piercing blue eyes. Yet Penny couldn’t muster any enthusiasm for Ryan Anderson whatsoever.
Eventually, Ryan let himself out of the apartment with a wink. Penny gave a half-hearted wave, not bothering to get up and lock the door after him. She lay in bed until his footsteps faded. Then she sat up and thrust the window open in hopes the fresh air would wipe away the stench of sex.
Penny stared outside at nothing in particular, frustrated that even her evening with Ryan hadn’t taken her mind off the one man she couldn’t have. She’d come so close, and yet her kiss with Roman had made him seem that much more unavailable.
There was an ache inside Penny that longed to pick up her phone and call Roman for no reason at all. She wanted to tell him all the little things about her day, to share the simple things that wound up being the foundation of a real, true relationship.
Penny longed for those moments, for the teensy moments that created dazzling memories. She wanted to whisper her brilliant new ideas for a television pilot late at night as she lay next to Roman in bed. To send him the stupid memes that reminded her of him when she listlessly browsed online. To go grocery shopping with him in sweatpants before retiring to the couch with a bottle of inexpensive wine. She wanted it all. And couldn’t have any of it.
Another same-but-different niggle of guilt crept down Penny’s spine as she closed her eyes and relived the moment in Roman’s office when they’d kissed. It’d been soft, sweet. Short. Almost a mirage, and on some days, Penny found herself doubting it’d ever happened.
They’d never spoken of it again. Roman and Penny simply existed together, floating through the same plane, catching each other’s eyes now and again as a shared memory flitted between them, fleeting as a firefly, before it disappeared again. In those brief moments, the guilt vanished.
And then there were moments like these. Moments where Penny’s palms grew clammy and her stomach wriggled with disappointment. What had she done? To herself? To Roman? To his wife? The only saving grace was that Penny already had a relationship with guilt; she was no stranger to it.
In fact, Penny had all but accepted guilt—distantly, like an annoying second cousin she saw at holidays. A nuisance she’d gotten used to, acknowledged, and then dutifully ignored time and time again because if she didn’t, she’d fall apart.
Penny knew, too, that if she pushed the incident in Roman’s office out of her mind, the guilt would eventually tamp down to a manageable size. When she’d started taking other people’s things in high school, guilt had come around then, too.
But with time, patience, and a good bit of stubbornness (along with a long thread of rationalization), that guilt had subsided. It had gone from crashing ocean waves to the faint whisper of the ocean one hears when holding a seashell to their ear. And with time, their kiss would be nothing but a distant tremor, the seashell that housed it long since forgotten on a faraway beach.
For now, however, the waves raged strong and hard, fast and overwhelming. Penny gulped, found it hard to breathe. She picked up her phone and scrolled until she found her mother’s number—the one person who could center her and help plant her feet on firm ground instead of the ever-shifting sand on which Penny stood.
Curling around herself, Penny hit Dial. The evening breeze was warm, tasted of desert air and dust, stilted by floral tones from the blooming bush that insisted on surviving in the alleyway beneath her window. Penny studied it, feeling a bit like the plant herself. Left alone without much in the way of sustenance, expected to thrive amid rocky darkness. If only she were strong enough to bloom.
Amy Sands cut to the chase after a quick greeting. “What’s wrong, honey? You sound upset.”
Penny flipped a pen between her fingers. The pen didn’t technically belong to her—it was a little trinket she’d adopted from Roman’s desk. She might not be able to have him, but she had something of his. A small reminder that there was a chance. A teensy, tiny chance they’d met for some cosmic reason.
“There’s this guy,” Penny said with a sigh. “I think I’m in love, but I can’t be. He’s married.”
“Oh, honey.”
Penny felt her throat closing at the stroke of kindness in her mother’s voice. Amy Sands was a heavyset woman, each of her two hundred pounds packed with love and warmth and hominess. Suddenly, Penny felt herself crumbling toward tears, wishing her mother’s soft arms could wrap around her, protect her from the mess her life had become.
Penny had moved to Hollywood to make a name for herself. Yet here she was, toiling away at a job that barely classified as legal. She showed up to work at a casting company every day and sat behind a miniscule desk in a grody room with carpet that looked as if it’d been molding since the eighties.
The man in charge—Jack Hardy—hadn’t bothered to learn her name. On her first day of work, Jack had listed her duties (check people in and ignore phone calls), then punctuated it with a grunt and a tilt of his chin. His partner, a petite woman who probably weighed eighty pounds soaking wet—with about twelve of those pounds being foundation and mascara—had introduced herself as the casting director. Together, they cast extras for obscure reality TV shows that nobody had heard of. It was an ugly business.
“If you’re not happy out there,” Amy Sands said after a pause, “then why don’t you move home?”
Penny warmed with the idea of her old job, her old life. Her cozy little existence in a cozy little town. She missed every inch of it. She missed the smell of the small local newspaper office where she worked. She missed her daily lavender latte from the café down the street, a place where she didn’t need to order because they knew her by her approaching footsteps.
She missed the short drive home to be with her family for every little holiday. She even missed the sporadic blind dates her friends would set her up on—dates with insanely average men whose biggest crime was that they still called their mothers once a day for advice on clothing choices.
A huge part of her, most of her, in fact, wanted to turn tail and return to Iowa. Pretend the last month or two of her life had never happened and start fresh. There, she knew which way was up and which was down. Out here, there was no road map. Her life was an unfinished script waiting to be finalized. The possibilities were both equally thrilling and terrifying. Would she fly? Or would she fall?
“I miss home,” Penny admitted. “But I can’t come back.”
“Why?”
Penny tapped the pen harder and harder against her leg in agitation. The question was a simple one, but her mother’s tone was layered and complex, a kaleidoscope of questions all balled into one. Penny tried to put her feelings into words, but for someone who claimed to be creative, she hopelessly failed.
Finally, she whispered, “I don’t know.”
Her mother heaved a guttural breath, and Penny could practically see her nodding in their tiny little kitchen in their tiny little house in their tiny little town. Amy would be sitting at the table with her hands wrapped around a cup of peppermint tea, staring at the dusty pink curtains draped across the window over the sink.
There would be clutter from a day’s worth of homemade cooking, the smell of something sweet hanging in the air from her latest bake. The linoleum floor would be cracked with age but tidy and swept, the dishes put away, and the herb pots near the sink freshly watered. Penny longed for home so much that it hurt.
She wouldn’t mind heading back for a visit, but her bank account couldn’t handle a foot-long sub for lunch, let alone the cost of a cross-country plane ticket. Not to mention if she went home, there was the legitimate fear that she’d never leave again. She’d stick there, like a fruit fly to a trap, dying a slow death because she’d chosen a life that wasn’t hers to live.
Somewhere, deep down, Penny believed she was different. She had to believe it, or there’d be no reason for her to suffer in an apartment complex that served as home to more rats than humans or to work a crappy job when she’d held a perfectly respectable position at a perfectly respectable newspaper in a perfectly respectable town.
Penny vaguely wondered if it was all an illusion. If she was as deluded as Ryan, claiming his way to fame from a dandruff commercial. Did he feel the same way, that he was special? Did everyone? Or was there a reason behind Penny’s belief? It was imperative she believe that she was one in a million or nothing else made sense. But what if she was wrong?
“I’ll be home for Christmas,” Penny said. “Anyway, I should let you go. I just wanted to hear your voice.”
As Penny lay on her secondhand mattress, she stared up at the stars through her window. If she couldn’t have Roman Tate, she’d have to start taking drastic measures to forget about him, at least until she could swim. As it was, the cloudy waters soared around her, roared in her ears, blurred her vision. It was with a touch of anger that Penny realized the situation was anything but fair to her.
She had been ready to give Roman everything. And he’d led her to believe it might be possible. With that kiss, he’d crossed a line—a line that had sent Penny’s heart into tachyarrhythmia with the thought that they might be possible. Together might be possible. Then Roman had all but ignored her in the following weeks, sending Penny into a dangerous spiral that left her motivation weak and her heart frayed.
Penny was anything but weak. When people stole from Penny, she stole back. Next week, she would take a stand. She’d go into Roman’s office after class and cancel her remaining sessions. See what he had to say about that. If he let her go, then her answer would be sparkling clear, and she would be free to lick her wounds, regroup, and focus on Penny Sands.
She perused her emails, stopping when one caught her eye.
[email protected] glared at her from the screen, the simple subject line taunting her as if he’d somehow read her mind: Class Next Week.
Her finger hovered over the Delete button. It would be so easy to say she hadn’t gotten it. That the message had been trapped in her spam filters, and she’d missed it completely.
But Penny knew from the moment she laid eyes on the name that she was weak. Her finger twitched, clicked. Her resolve to be rid of Roman—so strong just seconds before—crumbled like dust.
TRANSCRIPT
Defense: Why did you fire Olivia Moore as your babysitter?
Anne Wilkes: I, er, I didn’t fire her.
Defense: Ms. Moore testified yesterday that you fired her in June 2018.
Anne Wilkes: Okay, well, I did fire her. But I later apologized. She’s not…fired. She just didn’t want to come back after I accidentally fired her.
Defense: Why did you fire her in the first place?
Anne Wilkes: She overstepped her bounds. She and Mark were ganging up on me, and I didn’t like it.
Defense: Ganging up on you?
Anne Wilkes: There was an incident a while back that my husband can’t get over. I thought we’d moved on, but he still doesn’t trust me. I found texts on Mark’s phone from Olivia. He’d obviously asked her to report back about me. I hired a babysitter for the kids, not for myself.
Defense: Mrs. Wilkes, I’m sorry to be blunt, but I have to admit, your husband’s concern for you seems legitimate. After all, what sort of mother disappears for three days without a word?
ELEVEN
Six Months Before
August 2018
Hello, there. I’m looking for Mr. Hamilton.” Anne approached a young woman with curly dark hair seated behind a standard metal desk littered with file folders. “I’m sorry, I’m a little late for my eleven o’clock appointment. I had to pick up my son from daycare last minute. He wasn’t feeling well.”
“Mr. Hamilton is expecting you,” the woman announced cheerfully. “Feel free to take a seat. He’s just on a phone call now. Can I get you something to drink?”
“No, I’m fine.”
Luke Hamilton—Eliza’s private investigator—was headquartered in one of a million Los Angeles strip malls, the small suite flanked by a Zankou Chicken on one side and a Laundromat on the other. There was no indication whatsoever on the outside that Suite 101 would hold the answers to Anne’s biggest questions.
Anne sat, bouncing Harry on her lap. His face was flushed, and she put her cheek to his forehead to check his temperature. Her daycare provider had called an hour earlier and informed Anne that her son had been sick and needed to be picked up immediately.
Dragging Harry along to this meeting was the absolute last thing Anne wanted to do, but what choice did she have? She couldn’t reschedule—she’d never get the opportunity to be alone again. Plus, she couldn’t wait one more damn second.
Clutching her baby to her chest, Anne rocked him until he got bored of the sticky closeness and wiggled backward. He clapped his hands, and Anne reached for her purse and pulled out a baggie of Goldfish. She fed him one after another, continuously checking his forehead, until the curly haired receptionist announced that Mr. Hamilton would see her.
She really should have turned around and walked away then. She should’ve taken Harry home, measured his temperature, and cuddled him until he felt better. It was time for the madness to stop. If only Anne could confront her husband and get to the meaning of his evenings away, her life could return to normal. Or whatever the new normal would look like.
But she couldn’t risk it. What if Mark gave her an answer that she wasn’t ready to hear?
Anne stood, stretched her legs, and wobbled on low heels as she followed the young woman down a short hallway and into a private room. She’d dressed up for the occasion, a thought that struck her as quite sad. The last time she’d worn pantyhose and a black skirt had been before she’d gotten pregnant with Gretchen.
“Good afternoon.” Luke Hamilton greeted her once his receptionist had left the room. His eyes shifted toward Harry, though he didn’t offer commentary. “Thank you for taking the time to come see me.”
“I’m so sorry I was late. My son got sick at daycare this morning. He’s not sick sick, nothing contagious, just something he ate. My husband couldn’t pick him up because he’s a cop and, well, I’m sure you know that.” Anne stopped. “I’m sorry. I’m a bit flustered.”
“That’s natural.” Luke gave a kind smile. “As you can imagine, I don’t have loads of happy clients considering my field. I’m used to a bit of nerves.”
“Of course,” Anne gushed. “Thank you.”
Luke cleared his throat and pulled a stack of
papers toward himself. He appeared to be nearing his late fifties, a trim, dark-skinned man who was handsome in a stately sort of way. His hair was cut short, his clothes well fitted though casual. Wire-framed glasses covered his eyes.
“You said you had news for me?” Anne pressed when Luke didn’t look up from the pages on his desk. “I guess I should start by saying thank you for taking my…er, my case. Eliza speaks very highly of you.”
Luke gave a faint smile, his eyes flicking up for a brief second, then back down at the file before him.
“Right, I should probably keep my lips zipped about your other clients,” Anne said quickly. “Privacy, top-secret stuff, and all that.”
Luke glanced once more toward Harry. “I do have some updates for you. Are you sure now is a good time?”
“It’s best if I know sooner rather than later.”
Luke ran a hand over the top page of the report, seeming to consider his words carefully. “I was able to look into your husband’s Tuesday evening activities, and I believe I can shed some light on the situation.”
Anne’s heart pounded.
“The apartment where he spends his time…” Luke looked at Harry yet again, then finally brought his gaze to rest on Anne’s. “The lease is in his name.”
“What do you mean, in his name?”
“Mark has rented the apartment for the last five months,” Luke clarified. “He’s been paying for it.”
“How has he been paying for it?” Anne massaged her forehead with one hand. “I mean, I understand he’s using money—our money—but we have bills! We have—” Anne stopped herself. She scooted Harry closer, smoothed the thin tufts of hair back as he pounded a fist against her shoulder. “Forget it. Was there anything else?”
Luke looked truly sorry as he glanced down at those dreaded pages on his desk. He seemed to hate what he had to say next.
