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“Shallow?” Harper read, sprawled across the bed in her robe, her hair twisted up in a towel.
I leaned over her to read the article and scoffed. “I’d like to see them try to dig a full six feet in the dark.”
She shut the newspaper and tossed it onto my bedside table. She came to mine now, never the other way round and always under the cover of some sort of ruse. Her house was presumably bugged. And it wasn’t just the press we imagined were watching her movements. Ruchi and Adrian were the only things making eventhispossible—sneaking us across the threshold in the backs of cars and shielded garages. Like fugitives.
Like criminals.
“Do you think I should go to this premiere?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said at once. “The only way to suffocate this trial by media is to not give it any air. Treat it like a ridiculous rumor and people will come to believe it is exactly that.”
The thought of Harper Moore—the reported good girl in this rivalry, the fun one, the nice one—committing murderwas, after all, ridiculous. No one spouting these headlines actually believed them; it just sold papers. It was a fun little distraction from boring lives.
The woman had just lost her husband, and there was no sympathy to be found.
“I wish you could come with me,” she said, reaching for my hand and tugging sharply once she had it. I fell half on top of her. “One day we will, when all this dies down. You and I, hand in hand on the red carpet.”
“You want that?” I asked, though it was difficult to think with the way her breasts pushed against mine, her fingers still grasping my own.
Her long lashes fluttered as she attempted to look away, but as close as we were I could still see her gaze even as she averted it. “I think I’ve already hit the pinnacle of damaging accolades. Besides, I’m reaching my limit of … things to keep secret. I don’t want to hide you.Us. So yes, if you still want that and don’t mind being tarnished by my rumors, I’m not adverse to claiming we’vejuststarted dating one day.”
Just—when we were approaching an anniversary we couldn’t even acknowledge, because it would mean tracking the anniversary ofother eventstoo.
“The world is enraptured,” she said quietly. “Friends, enemies, rivals—we might truly break it with this. There might never be another headline about anyone but us ever again.”
“What an ending that will be.”
“Ending,” she scowled. “Please, that will be the start of everything.”
Would it? It seemed ludicrous, really, to believe it might ever be possible. What if, ten years down the line, someone connected that we had been in the same hotel, that my timeline for the night did not entirely make sense, that our relationship itself might be motive to be rid of him, even if it wasn’t why, even if he had nothing to do with us …
“It’s going to be a miserable evening without you,” she said.
It would be a miserable evening regardless. The release ofBroadgatewas already marred in scandal. The promotion leaned heavily into Harper’s character holding a gun, trying to pull those headlines into box-office sales. It would work, too, so they’d never stop doing it. The weight of the mystery would forever hang over her.
“Come back here tonight,” I suggested. “I’ll wait up for you.”
Even this was dangerous. What if someone saw us together? Or witnessed Harper pulling past my gates? Would anyone truly believe we were friends again?
She stared at the ceiling, curling a lock of my hair idly around her finger. “I just don’t understand how the press can say whatever they please without consequence. They don’t care about what’s true, just what will sell papers.”
“Harper, what’s true will sell far more papers, and we’d better make sure they never find it.”
But I was starting to wonder that myself, to forget, to believe the lies we were telling ourselves.
That was the power of film, of Hollywood, of the whole damn performance of Harper Moore and Nadine Heywood: The truth was only ever what we decided it.
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Harper was not quite unraveling, but crumbling. The weight of the speculation was crushing her, sapping her relentless amusement and previously unflappable belief that everything in life was funny if you just laughed hard enough.
