“You always knew how to disappear.”
She opened her eyes and turned around slowly.
Zay stood a few feet back with his hands in his pockets. His gaze steady on hers. He wasn’t smiling, but he wasn’t cold either. He looked . . . curious. Cautious, even.
“So your name’s Mrs. Tate now?” he asked. His eyes flickered down to her name on the event badge clipped to her dress.
She nodded. “I changed my last name when I got married.”
He tried not to react, but that hit him hard somewhere behind his ribs. Of course, she got married. Of course, somebody else got to come home to her laughter. She was always the kind of woman you stayed for.
“Mrs. Tate,” he repeated with a faint smile. “Sounds . . . grown.”
“I am grown,” she said through a soft shrug. There was a flicker of nervousness that passed through her voice.
“Yeah,” he said quietly. “You are.”
A pause fell between them for a moment. They both knew too much to pretend they were strangers, but not enough to act like they weren’t.
Love looked down at her phone again. “I had to step away for just a second. My daughter texted me, and I just needed to make sure it wasn’t an emergen?—”
“You have a daughter?” he asked. He didn’t mean to cut her off, but that sudden news overwhelmed him.
She bit her bottom lip and looked at the floor for a moment. She lifted her head and looked back at him. “Yeah. She just turned fourteen.”
Zay’s expression shifted. Something that Love couldn’t quite place pulled in his face—like a thread got tugged from the inside.
“Fourteen,” he repeated. He glanced away briefly but quickly looked back at her. “She’s lucky. Bet she’s beautiful.”
“She is.”
“Like her mother,” he said before he could stop himself.
Love looked at him for a second longer than she meant to, then cleared her throat and stepped back.
“I should go. She’s probably waiting on me to text back.”
He nodded. His hands were still buried in his pockets. “Yeah. Course.”
With that, she turned and walked off before anything else could fall from either of their lips. He stood in place and watched her trot down the hallway, bend a corner, and then, she was gone.
Zay turned around and returned to the group. Just as he walked up, Tara was flipping through details on her tablet.
Kam beamed. “Malcolm’s going to get the paperwork started on Monday. This that new era we been talkin’ about, bruh.”
“Your sound on a film like this?” Simone added. “That’s legacy shit. This gonna be the modern dayWaiting to Exhale.”
He barely nodded. His mind was still down that hallway. Stuck on the look in her eyes. He wondered if her daughter laughed like she used to.
He looked around the room. For the first time since he’d walked in, he felt the energy. He could feel the opportunities. Not only for the success of his career or the film, but for something else too. Another opportunity at another shot . . .
Then, he looked at Malcolm.
“I’ll do it.”
Spring 2008
The glowfrom Princess’s desktop lit up her bedroom and cast a soft shimmer across the walls. The night air drifted in through the cracked window, and the buzz of crickets hardly competed with the sound of two teenagers that held their breath.
