Blair:Anyway, that’s all I really want to say about that.
He laughed. What did the Rolling Stones say? You can’t always get what you want?
Blair:Except I will add: thanks for knocking some sense into me.
Jack:Thanks for believing in me.
Blair:We made a good, if unlikely, team for a while there.
The past tense of that statement made Jack feel wistful. It made him regret, not just in passing, but truly deep in his bones, that he’d passed on Books with Blair.
Chapter 21
Another Proposal
A month later, Blair called Jack. Not a FaceTime, an old-school telephone call.
“Hello?”
“Is it weird that I’m calling you?”
It was weird that she was calling him. “No.”
“I need some advice on location scouting forGreen Light. I thought I’d start with my Minnesota connection.”
“Did you get the vampire guy?”
“No, alas. He had scheduling conflicts.” She went on to list the people who were playing the major roles, including one name he gathered he was supposed to be impressed by.
“That’s great,” he said, because it was, independent of his own ignorance of the celebrity world.
“You have no idea who that is, do you?” she said, reading his mind.
“Am I that transparent?”
“To me you are.”
That was a little unnerving. “How can I help?”
“I need a not-too-fancy cottage, which I gather y’all call a cabin, on a lake.”
“Yes. You could have a ten-bedroom, four-season mansion, but if it’s on a lake, especially if it’s a second home, it’s a cabin.”
“Right, so the problem isn’t finding one, it turns out. It’s sifting through the zillions of options. You have a lot of lakes.”
“Tell me more about what you’re looking for. I know lake people.” His father among them. Of course, he would never ask his dad if Blair Kellermoon could use his cabin to shoot a movie.
“You’ve readGreen Light. The vision I see in my head, which doesn’t have to be the be-all, end-all, is a wood-paneled place. Very tidy but not modernized, if that makes sense. Maybe some taxidermized fish on the wall, clean but fraying furniture. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Those kinds of interior details don’t matter—we can decorate. The exterior and the setting are more important. It doesn’t have to be totally isolated, but no immediate neighbors in the shot, you know? And a dock, of course. We can bring in the boats we need. I assume. I don’t know anything about boats, but I can learn.”
Jack liked this version of Blair, undaunted by the idea of figuring out how to acquire and move boats.
“And then, in a perfect world,” she went on, “there would be a view of another dock across the lake.”
“That would be the dock with the green light on it.”
“Yes.”
“I have some ideas. Let me talk to a few people.”
