It was reckless, I knew, but my fingers danced across the keyboard as I typed my name into the inbox search bar.
Doesn’t everyone want to know if they’re being talked about? Even in the most monotonous ways.
There were heaps of calendar invites from me and scheduling emails I was already on. A delivery confirmation for flowers he’d sent me and Ruby after Mom died.
My chest tightened. They had been beautiful, but the thing I’d never considered about flowers and funerals is that eventually the flowers die too and throwing them away is depressing as hell.
Then I spotted an email from his business manager/professional leech and former fraternity brother, Dalton.
Subject: Q4 Reorganization Plan
From:[email protected]
B-man,
I’ve got Mallory contacting the staffing agency re: assistants. Moving on from Vera and hiring two or three part-time twenty-somethings will cut some costs on the overhead and eliminate the need for employee health insurance if we can get everyone on a part-time payroll. (I’ll make sure they send over some cute girls too.) If we want to move forward with this production company plan, we need to keep looking for ways to cut corners and keep things a little lean for the first few years. Also, this won’t affect your monthly take home, which is ideal.
Subject: Re: Q4 Reorganization Plan
From:[email protected]
Let’s hit pause. V’s mom isn’t doing great, but we can follow through once things settle. Maybe before I leave forWarbringerfilming. I hate to lose her, but she’ll understand. Vera’s a good girl.
My second Pop-Tart crumbled in my fist. Brody had plans tofireme? Me? The most consistent and stable person in his life. The person who often took pity on him and invited him over for holidays when the thought of going home to Kansas was too much. The same person he’d been fucking on again and off again since college.
Vera is a good girl?A good girl, really?
The blood in my veins was steaming. Sizzling. How could he? Howdarehe?
I’d been there for Brody from the very beginning when he dropped out of school after landing his first big role. I found him having a panic attack outside of the registrar’s office. We were good friends before then, but it was at that moment when I stopped and crouched down on the floor next to him to help him breathe through the panic of dropping out before senior year and disappointing his family when things between us changed. Heneededme suddenly, and being needed was an absolute drug. Especially after the fallout of that disastrous trip to Vegas just a few months prior. We were both adrift and found that clinging to each other could afford us each some amount of solidity.
But now? I was just some disposable “good girl” who was nothing more than a line item.
I let the anger consume me, because if it didn’t, I might feel the deep embarrassment and shame burrowing under my skin. The number of times I’d hooked up with Brody in a trailer on set only for me to run over to craft services and get his lunch when we were done, or the times he’d gone out to be publicly seen with a female costar only for him to text me on the way home to see if I was awake. The delusion of what we could have been was quickly falling away and now all I could see was the reality of what we were.
I took the carcass of my Pop-Tart and hauled ass back over to the pool house before digging around for my charger and plugging in my laptop.
Ruby, my owngrandmother, had dumped me, and I wasn’t about to let Brody do the same. I refused to let him see me as pathetic. Somehow the fact that he’d drawn this out for months and let me move into his backyard made this all so much worse. What must he think of me?
Never mind. I knew what he thought.Poor Vera and her sad little life living with her dying mom and has-been grandmother. Poor Vera tinkering with the same screenplay for years.
I was promising once. I was the student professors doted on.
Beside me, Marlon stood, turned in a tight circle, and sat back down in his exact same spot with a huff, like he could and never would know comfort.
“I know, buddy,” I whispered, feeling restless. Like it was impossible to ever feel fully settled.
I opened my laptop and began to type my formal and immediate resignation.
Chapter Three
Should I have waited to quit my job until the next morning? Or maybe even a few days later? Yes. Would I have chickened out if I hadn’t just done the damn thing? Also, yes.
So, when I woke up, I was immediately grateful to my former rash self while simultaneously freaking the fuck out over hitting the self-destruct button on my whole life with zero backup plan.
While I double-checked and triple-checked the pool house for any last-minute things I might have left behind, Marlon snoozed in the backyard. The gardener, Sammy, tended to the raised vegetable beds that Brody had envisioned but never actually maintained himself.
I eyed the comforter and the pillows once more.
