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I try to calm my feverish heart by focusing on the topic at hand so we can finish as quickly as possible. “What does this have to do with you or Jeb?”
“Everything.” Cory drains his glass. “Remember that mob boss my father turned on? He had a son. Named Jeb.”
Forget about acting in a movie; I might as well be living in one right now. Only I hate those suspense crime shows, and that’s where I seem to have landed.
“So Jeb is doing this as some sort of revenge for your father turning on his father?”
Cory shakes his head. “No. Not at first, at least. I changed my name, remember, so he didn’t know who I was. Not until I poked my head up and got noticed. And once I got on his wrong side, his network connections did some digging and figured out my backstory.”
He takes my hand in both of his. He’s so close I can smell the whiskey on his breath, like a campfire on a perfect summer night. “I’m sorry for bringing you into all of this. I wouldn’t have showed up at the reunion if I knew about Lizzie.” He holds his hands up, realizing how this must have sounded. “Not because I wouldn’t have wanted to meet her. I just wouldn’t want to drag her into something like this. Anyway, I saw one of your history lessons on TV a while back. It had been forever since I’d heard from you, and then there you were. I got to thinking about my movie and how no one big (except Sarah) wanted to work with me anymore. I figured you were perfect. I thought, ‘Here’s this girl I used to love’. Then that silly promise we made about you being in one of my movies popped into my head. Then add onto that the fact that you already know how to be in front of a camera. How to smile when you want to cry. I just knew you could do it.”
There’s something missing. Something he skipped over.
“This is all because you were blacklisted by Jeb?” I ask. “What exactly did you do to piss him off?”
“I met Sarah.”
I shouldn’t ask, but I have to. “Did you two ever…you know?”
Cory shakes his head in tight, jerky movements. “No. Absolutely not. And you would get that if you knew how we’d met. You see, I was at Jeb’s place. That’s the one time I ever attended one of his parties. It was just after my first movie, and my name was finally getting around. I got invited, and I leapt at the chance of my first real Hollywood movie, no matter who was hosting it.
“I got to the party late because I didn’t even hear about it until last minute. That’s how these things always are. Nothing planned. Anyway, it was wild. Every celebrity you can think of. I drank so much champagne, and it was starting to get to my head, so I went looking for a bathroom. But what I found was Sarah.”
He bites his lips. There’s a haunted look behind his eyes.
“I wandered into this bedroom that I thought was a bathroom on the second floor. She was unconscious on the bed. Her skirt pulled off. She was—”
I’m glad he doesn’t finish this sentence. I don’t need more details.
“You have to remember this was years ago. Back when Sarah was just getting popular too. When I checked on her, she woke up. She was groggy, but not in the usual way you might be when waking up. There was an extra layer there, glazing her eyes as she looked right through me. It was pretty obvious to me what had happened, but when I went to call the cops, she was lucid enough to stop me. She said if I got the police involved, her career was over. She said I wouldn’t understand because I was a man. But I understood enough. The implications. The man whose house we were in.
“I hate myself for it to this day, but I did what she said. Instead of calling the cops, I found her friends who got her home without anyone the wiser. We didn’t exactly keep in touch after that, but whenever we would see each other at an event or on the red carpet, we’d share this look. That changed last year when Lina Birch came out on the record against Jeb.”
The waiter stops by our table. Cory orders another whiskey. And wh
ile I wasn’t planning on having another drink since Lizzie’s waiting for me, this story has got me nodding along absently when the waiter asks if I’d like a refill.
“Anyway,” Cory continues once our glasses are full once more. “Sarah was the next to tell her story. This was a couple of years after the fact, and she was a big deal by now. So while Lina Birch’s testimony was swept under the rug pretty handily, everyone paid attention when Sarah Park spoke up.
“But like I said, her assault had been years ago. There was no evidence. All she had to go on was her story, and Jeb Eli has people in all the papers. He got them to tear into Sarah, saying that she was just doing this for the attention. That she got her start in Hollywood thanks to Jeb. He claimed this was all over some dispute about money. But what he didn’t know is that she had an eyewitness.”
“You?” I ask breathlessly.
Cory nods. “While I didn’t see anything directly, I could definitely testify to the condition I found her in. Which I did. And the moment I went on record, Jeb made it his mission to ruin me. That’s how he found out our fathers were connected. Without that connection, he might have just stopped producing my movies. Now, Jeb’s got his fingers in a lot of pies, so it definitely would have made it harder to get financing. Harder, but not impossible. But with the way my father ratted out his father, Jeb had to do more to get even.”
He takes a sip at his whiskey. “That’s how Sarah and I ended up blacklisted. No one is financing our movies. Those producers that walked out on you? I thought they were independent, but when they showed up with Jay in tow, I knew we were screwed.”
“Wait. What does Jay have to do with this?”
“Remember me telling you that you had to watch out for him? That’s because Jay is Jeb’s brother-in-law. Married his younger sister. Despite his appearance, Jay’s absolutely loaded, and he’s got this thing for girls half his age. And younger.”
In my brain, lines shoot between dots, connecting them into a picture that finally makes sense. I’m remembering meeting this deceivingly congenial man. Replaying the way that Cory stepped between Jeff and Lizzie.
Nausea rolls through my stomach like I’ve just swallowed a live fish.
“You don’t mean—?”
“Exactly,” Cory says and drains his glass. “He is Jeb’s brother-in-law after all. And trust me, I’ve seen them together. They get along like gin and tonic,” he says, nodding at my drink.
