Chapter 30

30

S ince Sol was still very much jobless and her job search hadn't borne any promising results, she decided to catch one of the mid-morning classes at Josie's. Sol had never been an early riser capable of being fully awake—let alone moving—before eight in the morning and a slow breakfast ritual. Pilates classes at 11:30 seemed to be designed for people like her.

She was a bit jittery and needed the pleasant endorphin release that came with strength training. Plus, if she was going to be flying to Los Angeles soon, and that was still up in the air, she wanted to feel well-exercised and properly stretched before the long flight.

Of course, there were other reasons to head to Josie's that morning. Sol had promised Luke she'd talk to the Pilates instructor and explain what was going on, asking her for that recording of the February 23 class. That would hopefully help her get closer to clearing her name from the Meshflixx investigation.

Mid-morning classes tended to be less crowded, which gave her a better chance to talk to Josie alone. That wasn't always possible during the more popular afternoon sessions because the most impassioned members at the studio tended to want Josie's attention by the class's end. They were a bit like groupies, hounding Josie for her longtime early morning meditation technique or the recipe for her latest antioxidant-packed green juice.

When Sol got to the group Pilates mat class, only Mark was there. He was an incredibly affable person with a long career in Hollywood, and Sol liked chatting with him.

"I'm glad to catch you here," she told him, placing her mat close enough to have a conversation with but prioritizing the most optimized view of where Josie would be. First things first. "I'm supposed to interview your old pal Richard Fynn in Los Angeles."

Richard and Mark had worked together in a series of immensely watchable, if not creatively compelling, action movies in the late 1980s with Mark as the director and Richard producing. That had been before Richard made his directorial debut.

"Oh gods! Why would you subject yourself to such a thing?" Mark asked, half genuinely concerned, half joking. Sol remembered reading something about their parting as working partners not being necessarily amicable.

"He's promoting this upcoming release," she said. " Revengers Reunite Redo or something like that." She couldn't remember the title of the movie because it had sounded too silly to be true the first time she'd read it.

"Did he finally manage to produce a sequel to that bloody bore Revengers Reunite ?" Mark seemed a bit more interested now. "I quit reading the trades ages ago, so I know nothing about what gets produced these days until it shows up at my local movie theater or on my streaming device."

Mark had mentioned before that he no longer bothered reading all the showbiz news. But he still loved gossiping about anything and everything industry related.

"He did. He also directed it—and wrote the script," Sol explained.

"Oh gods! He wrote it!" Mark chuckled. "Don't tell me you'll have to watch it."

"Fortunately not," Sol said, amused. "They'll play a trailer and the first twenty minutes of the movie for me before the interview. But that's it."

"Those are twenty minutes of your life you'll never get back," Mark warned her.

"I know. Well, that's if the interview ends up happening." Under normal circumstances she wouldn't share that many details, but she knew Mark was discreet. And it was always therapeutic to talk to someone who understood her struggles. "The interview has already been postponed once, and you know that sometimes when they start moving things around on the calendar, they end up never happening…"

"Yes," Mark admitted. "But don't be too concerned. If there's anything Richard loves, it's the limelight and feeling important. Nothing gives that illusion more than talking to a journalist."

"I see." Sol felt relieved after Mark's words. "Thanks again for the Hollywood perspective."

" Old Hollywood perspective, but anytime," he said with a smile. Mark seemed happier—and much healthier—since his retirement a decade earlier after a cardiac event, but Sol knew he still missed certain aspects of the industry. "One last thing about Richard. He can be a total tosser with pretty much anyone, so…"

"Papa, please don't tell me you're pestering your Pilates colleagues again with old stories. Nobody cares!" Oliver, Mark's son, interrupted.

If Mark was one of the most agreeable, nice, and even modern-thinking people—especially for a sixty-something cisgender, heterosexual, white man—Sol didn't quite comprehend how he could have produced a little rich brat of a son like Oliver. Fortunately, the thirty-something-year-old who claimed to be a documentarian but whose filmography was nonexistent only joined his dad at Josie's sporadically.

"Mark wasn't pestering me at all!" Sol said.

But she didn't have time to add anything else. Josie entered the practice room then and the unspoken rule at the studio was to shut up and stop what you were doing when she did so. The following fifty-five minutes would be focused exclusively on Josie's teachings, breathing and adapting to the increasing difficulty of the exercises. And Sol, evidently, did that.

She would talk to Josie and tell her about what she'd privately been alluding to as the TDS Mess after class.

…

"Do you have a minute?" Sol asked Josie at the end of class.

"Sure, but I really don't recall where I got this," Josie said, referring to the breezy V-neck tunic-like dress she wore over black leggings and a sports bra. She was used to Sol harassing her about her clothing.

"That's a pity," Sol said, and she really thought so. It reminded her of something she'd seen on the streets of Mallorca the previous summer that she hadn't been able to track down. "But that's not what I needed to tell you."

"Do you mind talking while I occupy myself with my middle-of-the-day strengthening routine?" Josie said as she unrolled her extra thick Manduka mat. She contorted her slender body in a stretching position Sol would never dream of achieving.

"Should I also have a middle-of-the-day strengthening routine, you think?" Sol asked, forgetting her initial intention for talking to the Pilates instructor.

"You just took a strength training class, Sol," said Josie, opening one eye to look at Sol while she did leg raises over a one-legged plank.

"I know, but I was wondering."

"Was that what you needed to talk to me about? I can draft something for you, if you need," said Josie with the extremely patient tone she used with all her pupils.

"No, but yes. Thank you," said Sol. "What I meant to talk to you about was Greg." She was glad she could easily recall Luke's fake name.

"Greg?" Josie was perched in a side plank, one leg and one arm in the air. "Brand-new divorcé with a less-than-healthy lean-body-mass percentage and the worst case of midlife crisis we've seen at the studio in a while? And we see lots of those."

Sol wondered where exactly in the mild-to-severe scale Josie would classify Sol's own midlife crisis, but she decided not to ask. Sometimes it's better to live in ignorance, she thought.

"No, that was Craig ," corrected Sol. "I meant Greg. Tall, sun-kissed, and very sexy guy answering to the classical canon of male beauty but who looked like a posh, out-of-his-element lawyer or banker."

Josie, going through the flow of her routine, paying attention to her breathing with her eyes closed, opened one of her eyelids again to direct an interrogating stare at Sol.

"I don't recollect," she said.

"Doesn't matter because, the thing is, he's actually not called Greg and he isn't a lawyer or banker either."

"Oh, you mean the Italian model look-alike who is extremely clumsy and can't move through a sequence even if he tries," said Josie. She had finally remembered Luke. "I knew there was something shady about him."

"So he didn't fool you?"

"Sol, at my age and with everything I've seen and lived, nobody can deceive me anymore." Josie had been holding a forearm plank for a good two minutes and was still talking—and breathing—easily.

Before telling the Pilates instructor the whole TDS Mess, Sol wondered, once again, about Josie's age. And whether she herself had any chance of becoming such an unafraid and poised woman.