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‘That’s fabulous,’ Jacie whispered, hearing what Ruby had wanted her to hear, instead of the devastating truth – that by getting Luke to watch this movie, they might well have triggered extremely painful memories they had no right to trigger.
‘We can start the schmooze offensive big time next week,’ Jacie added. ‘Who’d have thought a knob like Will Freeman would help save The Royale.’
‘I’ll take Luke out by the fire exit once it finishes and everyone’s left the auditorium,’ Ruby said.
‘Why don’t you ask him to stay for the talent show?’ Jacie said. ‘Now we’ve softened him up we should go in for the kill.’
‘I don’t think so,’ Ruby said firmly, controlling the urge to snap at Jacie. It wasn’t Jacie’s fault Ruby had forgotten about the bloody suicide scene. Or that she felt super-guilty now for trying to use Luke. Jacie didn’t know Luke, not the way Ruby did. Ruby was the one who should have nixed the whole idea in the bud of trying to manipulate Luke into investing in The Royale with the help of a bloody movie. Instead she’d encouraged her staff to believe they could exploit his generosity in agreeing to do the community service. And not even just to save The Royale, but because she had gotten vicarious pleasure out of having him there beside her in the darkness.
‘Ask Errol not to turn up the lights until I’ve gotten him out of here,’ Ruby said.
The least she could do was protect Luke from prying eyes and get him safely out of the building before anyone approached him.
Then she needed to make sure he was okay. And that the scene with Marcus’s mum hadn’t brought back too many traumatic memories for Luke of his father’s suicide when he was only fourteen.
***
He killed himself. Because he was a careless, selfish bastard. It wasn’t your fault. Get over it.
‘Thanks for the movie, it was cool,’ Luke managed round the bitter taste that had been lingering in his mouth for over an hour.
He pushed open the exit door – which apparently wasn’t alarmed after all – and took a deep breath in, his first deep breath for over an hour. Even tinged with the aroma of rotting garbage from the nearby dumpsters and the pungent scent of urine, the lung full of night air was enough to loosen the vice which had a stranglehold on his ribs.
‘I’ll see you Monday,’ he said to Ruby, who had followed him out into the back alley.
‘Yes,’ she said, holding the heavy metal door open so she could slip back inside.
But as he pulled his cap out of his back pocket, she murmured. ‘Luke, I’m so sorry. I totally forgot that scene was in the movie.’
The vice clamped tight again as her eyes darkened with compassion and regret.
She knows? What gave me away?
He thought he’d held his shit together. Something he’d become an expert at as a kid. Ruby Graham, though, was more observant than most people.
He didn’t say anything, because he couldn’t. Instead he concentrated on putting on his ball cap and evening out his breathing. Again.
Should he pretend he didn’t know what she was referring to? Talking about it would only make
him feel more exposed. More humiliated.
But how could he pretend he didn’t know, when everyone knew what had happened to his old man. It had been plastered all over the world’s press for weeks when it happened. And every year since they still held vigils on the anniversary of his father’s death in Falcone’s old neighbourhood in the Bronx. He knew because he filed the invite he got sent by The Falconios in the trash every year. Last year, the damn anniversary had even gotten its own hashtag trending on Twitter.
Ruby only knows what everyone knows. There is no need to freak out.
Ruby was a Falcone nut, all she knew was that his father had killed himself. The familiar anger seared his throat. He swallowed to soothe the raw edge.
You’re not angry anymore, remember?
He was an adult now. What was the point in being angry with a dead guy? And so what if Falcone had been a crummy dad? A lot of people had crummy fathers, like both the asshat and the kid in the movie he’d just seen. Plus, his mom had spent a fortune on therapy to help him get over the fallout from that godawful day.
‘It didn’t bother me,’ he said, determined to mean it as he adjusted the cap. Or at the very least to get Ruby to believe he meant it. He’d revealed more than enough about himself to this woman already, and it made him super uncomfortable. Why had he done that? ‘No need to be sorry. I liked the movie, it was pretty funny,’ he added, which wasn’t completely a lie. Up until that bombshell moment, he had been enjoying it.
What bugged him was the scene had been a trigger, when it shouldn’t have been. Since when did movies freak him out? He’d known since he was a little kid they weren’t real.
Unlike Ruby, who bought into all that woo-woo crap, he knew how movies faked emotion. The moment when the nerdy kid found his mom collapsed on the couch was just a clever plot device used to shock the lead guy into giving a shit about someone other than himself. The guy had been enough of an asshole – albeit a hilarious one – to need dynamite to blast him out of his own orbit, so it made total sense the writers would need a big shock moment to make that happen. Hence the mom’s suicide attempt.
Freaking out about a plot device was beneath him.
