“Fine. Your brother is here, by the way. He brought KFC, but he’s already eaten half the biscuits.”
Quinn could always be relied upon to bring junk food. Rose sighed, feeling a small knot of tension loosen. At least she wouldn’t have to cook. Quinn’s battered truck was already in the lot when she pulled in, parked crookedly across two spaces. She looked up at her second-story windows. The TV light flickered inside.
The door opened before Rose could even reach for her keys. Quinn stood there, leaning against the frame with a piece of fried chicken in one hand and a napkin in the other.
“Well? Did you impress the Hollywood star, or are you back to planning Sweet Sixteens for the Valley elite?”
“I don’t know yet,” Rose said, pushing past him.
“But something happened. You’ve got that look. Like when you knew you got an F on your math tests and didn’t want to fess up until Dad got home because you knew he’d go easier on you than Mom.”
Rose went straight to the kitchen and took a long drink of water from the tap. “Something happened. Not quite an F-in-math level bad but… complicated.”
Her mother appeared from the kitchen, a wooden spoon in hand like a scepter. “Sit down. Tell us.”
Rose sat. She laid it out: the icy atmosphere of the estate, the crushing pressure of the reality show, and the moment Lizanne had looked at her like she was a bug under a microscope. She edited the edges, of course. She left out the way Lizanne’s voice had dropped that octave, and the strange, electric thrill Rose had felt when their eyes met. Those details stayed tucked away in a private corner of her mind.
The rest she confessed, including the “Derek” of it all.
Quinn started laughing halfway through. He tried to stifle it with a biscuit, failed, and eventually just leaned back and let it run its course. “Derek the Attorney? Rose, that’s awful.”
“Quinn. Stop it.” Her mother did not laugh. She stood by the counter with her arms folded over her apron. “You lied, Rose. To a client. To afamousclient.”
“I improvised, Mom! She was done with me. I had thirty seconds before she thanked me for my time and I drove home to spend the next four months explaining to Meridian Credit Services why I needed more time.”
The mention of the debt collectors was a low blow, and she knew it. Her mother’s face softened.
“One lie becomes two,” her mother said softly. “Two becomes a problem.”
“The problem is the sixty thousand dollars Jeremy left on a credit line in my name before he vanished into the ether,” Rose said. “If I get this job, that problem goes away. I can get us out of this apartment. I can put Daisy in a better school. I can stop jumping every time the phone rings.”
A brief silence followed. Quinn had stopped laughing. He looked at his sister, really looked at her, and saw the desperation behind the purple lipstick. He changed the topic to his latest gig—a commercial for a lawnmower company where he played “Man in Background #3.”
Dinner was a quiet affair. Daisy joined them in her pajamas, looking pale but her eyes were bright. It wasn’t until her mother had taken Daisy back to bed that Quinn brought the conversation back to the cliffhanger.
“What are you going to do if she wants to meet him? If she asks ‘Derek’ to join you for a drink?”
“She won’t. She’s too busy planning her own wedding. She wants a huge wedding in less than six weeks. What I’m worried about is the digital footprint. If she looks into this wedding and sees there’s nothing online, the whole house of cards collapses.”
Quinn leaned back, eyes wandering to the bookshelf in the corner. “You know you could use the scrapbook. Turn it into a Pinterest page.”
Rose looked up, confused. “What?”
“The wedding scrapbook. The one you made when you were fifteen. The one you used to hide under your mattress. Winter theme. Candles, white flowers, that glass building situation. You described it to her today, didn’t you?”
Rose stared at him. “You’re right. But I need some sort of photos of Derek…”
“You could use some of you and Jere…”
“No!” The word came out more like a bark than anything else.
“Alright, how about one with me? From behind?”
She thought about that. “I have that New Year’s Eve one. The one where you have that beard.”
“My beard was glorious that year,” Quinn said, grinning. “I’d make a very convincing Derek.”
He stood up, grabbing his jacket. He paused at the door, his expression turning serious. “You know, you could’ve gotten this job by just being great at it, Rose. You didn’t need a pretend wedding.”
