Chapter Eleven

Wil stood up from the creaky leather chair in Sam's office, unable to sit there for one more second waiting for Sam and Cord to finish reading her law school file.

Cord laughed. He leaned forward to put his copy of the file down on Sam's desk. "You want to know what we think of these application materials."

"Yes." Wil had moved around to the back of the chair so she had something to hold on to. "Please."

Cord crossed his ankle over his knee and settled back with a particularly loud creak. "I think if I'd had your chances when I graduated from Carnegie Mellon with a transcript you had to squint at to see the potential, I would've been ordering rounds for my friends. But you look like most people do when they're coming to deal with a dead relative's probate."

Wil squeezed the chair again so she wouldn't sigh or roll her eyes. Or run away. It was difficult to subject herself to this kind of scrutiny. It had been extremely difficult to call Sam and Cord to ask for this meeting—to take up their time on a Saturday, to accept the help they'd generously offered.

But she was trying to find her way out of the tangle she'd gotten herself into, and she understood that she was going to need other people's assistance to beat a path through the overgrown mess of it.

She made herself say the thing that was bothering her the most. "I've talked to four people from as many law schools in three different states in the last twenty-four hours." Wil's chest was tight. "It turns out that all of them knew my dad, even though he'd spent all but three years of his career here in Green Bay, Wisconsin." Wil picked up her folder from the corner of Sam's desk and tucked it into her bag beside her laptop. "It's a lot."

"Sure." Cord nodded. "But you're not on this earth to replace your dad one-to-one."

Now it was Wil's turn to nod as though she knew this.

She did know. Knowing it wasn't the same thing as feeling it, it turned out.

"What's interesting," Cord went on, "is you and Jasper have both told me the same thing. You said it in this draft of an application essay—that people will always ask for less for themselves than what they'll ask for on behalf of someone else. That it's easier to fight someone else's fight, and it feels good to fight a good fight. That the law solves problems other institutions can't, so you better get there first with a worthwhile problem before someone uses it to do harm."

Wil blinked. She hadn't understood herself to be saying any of that, but on the other hand, it sounded correct. It was why she'd once spent a long weekend poring over the TikTok terms of service—because she wanted to be in a position of knowing what she had and what she could ask for.

"Your paper," Sam broke in. "The one you wrote as an undergraduate and was published in Michigan's law journal? I've never seen better thinking about NDAs, and I'm a corporate law partner." He smiled. "I've bookmarked it."

Wil cleared her throat. "My dad wasn't sure about that paper. He never said so. He didn't say anything but how proud he was, but I could tell. But it's strange for me to look at it now, to look at all of this"—Wil indicated the folder Sam was holding—"and think about how much I put aside. I feel almost ashamed. Like I'm not up to the person I was then."

"But you liked talking to everyone, I've gathered. Delilah at Pepperdine called me to tell me how much she enjoyed talking to you." Cord's phone buzzed where he'd set it on Sam's desk, and Wil watched him pick it up, glance at the notification, and set it back down.

Because he didn't want to interrupt their meeting. He felt that their meeting was important enough not to be interrupted.

This was a very intelligent person, here, making time to talk to her. And he was correct. Wil had enjoyed talking to Delilah at Pepperdine very much. "For real, I didn't come for a pep talk, but yes. Okay. There is clarification." Wil schooled her movements while putting on her jacket and slinging her bag over her shoulder, even though she felt shaky.

She hadn't told them that two of the people she'd talked to also knew who Wil was. For her paper and for her TikTok project. They'd been equally delighted about both, which was surprising. Their delight brought into focus what Wil had been thinking about lately—how she would like to use the gifts her parents gave her alongside the ones she had been developing herself, even sometimes without realizing it, for years.

Tackling this project was making her feel more whole, more integrated. It made her feel more like she'd always been heading for something, not running away, not ducking an invisible monster—and that was surprising.

The ambition was surprising.

The future was surprising, all by itself. Even after Wil had learned she had one, in the basic sense that her heart would keep beating, her breath would sustain her, she hadn't considered yet what it looked like, could feel like, could contain. Or that she, in any way, was its designer.

Last night, Katie had said her screenplay was going well. She'd told Wil that she'd recently had a private showing of a special exhibit in the Los Angeles Public Library of Carrie Fisher's papers. Katie had spent her entire time looking at how Fisher had doctored and revised scripts. Important, famous scripts. She'd said that learning from Wil how it was that she could write, what she could get on the page, how vision and editing worked together, was the first time she'd understood that she could be capable of something at the standard of Carrie Fisher.

That was what Wil had done for Katie.

But Katie had done something a lot like that for Wil, too.

Later, after Wil had finished talking with Cord and Sam, she climbed into the Bronco and started it up. She stared at the small mountain of snow that the plow had made at the edge of the parking lot outside Sam's office, smelling Katie's perfume in the cab of the truck, or maybe what she used on her hair, something ambery and faint that made sense for Katie and the way her hair shifted color from gold to soft browns. She thought of what it felt like when Katie's attention was on her, the dip above her upper lip and her arched eyebrows arrowing right into every word she said.

Thoughts like these introduced problems.

As she was pulling into own driveway, she got a text from Katie to pull up more because Katie was right behind her. Katie touched her dad's Highlander's bumper to Wil's Bronco and dropped out of the SUV with a big FedEx box, wearing another wig, the big coat, and a slouchy beanie hat.

"Hello!" Katie smiled. "I am extremely early for your TikTok shoot."

Wil took a deep breath of the cold air. The TikTok shoot. Right. "You are! But you're a professional."

"Yes. And I wanted time with you in your house. I'm starting to be very much over my suite. The whole time I've been here, they've had it at icy-cold conservation temperatures. Or maybe menopause temperatures, I'm not sure. Then, today, somebody really cranked it up. But their Nest thingy or their Alexa thingy, whatever they have, refuses to recognize my impression of either Diana or Craig, both of which are excellent, and I can't find the manual thermostat. I'm sweating through my coat as we stand here in twenty-degree weather."

"Do you want an ice cream sandwich?" For whatever reason, Katie's nervous ramble regulated Wil's heartbeat.

"Yes."

Wil toed off her boots off and shrugged off her jacket to hang up on the coat tree beside the door while Katie watched her somberly.

"I really, really, really want to erase this day and pull you into your bedroom and not come out until Christmas morning," Katie said. "But I understand that isn't the thing to do here. Can we go in your bedroom, though?"

Wil felt everything low in her pelvis swoop and thud. "Should we eat the ice cream first?"

"No, we should eat the ice cream in bed." Katie took her big coat off, then slid her wig and beanie off together to hang both next to Wil's coat. Her hair was in double French braids, a style Wil hadn't seen since they were in high school, and she wore a huge black sweatshirt with a bit of cat hair clinging to its front. She'd put on baggy jeans. She shouldn't be so beautiful, but she was. She was.

Katie followed Wil into the kitchen, looking around while Wil tried not to be self-conscious. The house she rented was very ordinary for Green Bay: a big Victorian four-bedroom with squeaky wood floors that needed refinishing, a collage of windows that mostly worked, and lots and lots of woodwork. None of the furniture matched, all the art was from different eras of housemates, and when it rained, it smelled like the incense a housemate from five years ago had liked to burn.

Wil tried to remember that she found her house comfortable, even cozy, but it was hard not to be self-conscious with Katie looking at where she lived and possibly comparing it to her unimaginable home in Hollywood. While Wil pulled the paper-wrapped ice cream bars out of the freezer, she made herself think instead about why Katie wanted to go to her bedroom.

And why Wil wanted Katie in her bedroom.

They made their way up the stairs, Katie already unwrapping her sandwich. As she led Katie into the bedroom, Wil mentally thanked Beanie Greene for imprinting her with tidiness. Almond Butter rose up from her nap at the end of the bed and arched into a perfect stretch to meow at Wil.

"Almond Butter!" Katie put her hand out, and Almond Butter very obligingly rubbed her head against it, meowing again before flopping to her side and demanding a full pet. "Oh my God, you perfect baby." Wil watched as Katie put her ice cream sandwich down on the bedspread to scritch through Almond Butter's fur with her full attention. "She still makes air biscuits when you scratch her armpits! She did that when she was a bitty baby widdle kitten!" Katie leaned over and kissed Almond Butter's forehead. "You are an elder cat now. You must know so many cat mysteries."

Almond Butter looked at Wil over Katie's shoulder with a vaguely accusatory expression, as if realizing Wil could have been showering her with this kind of attention all along. Even though Almond Butter slept curled around Wil's head when she wasn't napping in her heated cat bed or perched on top of one of the three cat trees in Wil's room, contemplating the view out the windows or the oil painting of herself that hung over Wil's desk.

Katie climbed onto Wil's bed, her ice cream back in hand, to lean against Wil's pink cabbage-rose-print pillows. She patted the spot next to her.

Wil peeled off the sweater she'd put on to meet with the lawyers and crawled into her bed with Katie.

"Scout's honor, I won't take advantage of you," Katie said as Wil lay next to her on her side. Wil wasn't sure how to feel. Even though she hadn't forgotten that Katie was coming over to film the kiss today, she hadn't exactly been thinking about it, either. She'd been preoccupied with law schools, her dad, the future. This plan she'd made with Katie just a few days ago had snuck up on her.

Katie reached over and trailed her finger on Wil's bare waist where her shirt had ridden up. "The problem is, I wasn't a Girl Scout."

Wil laughed and leaned up on her headboard to unwrap her sandwich. "I think I can take care of myself." She deliberately licked her sandwich provocatively. "Also, I won my Girl Scouting Gold Award, so. You're safe."

Katie snorted, then adjusted her position and put her feet in Wil's lap, the same way she always had when they were in high school.

"Okay. I'm ready," she said.

"For?"

"To tell you about Ben." Katie finished the last bite of her sandwich. Wil could tell she was trying to keep things light, her calves pressing against Katie's thighs, but her eyes were sad.

"You don't have to."

Katie looked down and laughed, but it sounded more like a big sigh. "I do, because…" Katie didn't look up. "Because I don't want it to be thirteen years again. I don't seem to know anything right now, but I know that. I know I want you to know me. Like we knew each other."

"I'd like that." Wil swallowed over a lump in her throat.

Somehow, the way Katie had said I want you to know me, the translation wasn't, From now on, I want you to know me.

It sounded a lot more like, For right now.

Wil wasn't sure what part of her heart had gotten ahead of the basic facts of Katie's visit and Katie's life, but it was a very big part of her heart.

"I've never talked about him anywhere," Katie said. "I've told my mom a few things, but I know she wouldn't have shared." She looked at Wil with her eyebrows drawn together. "What do you know?"

Wil thought about that for a moment. "The official story, I guess. That he discovered you at summer stock when you were eighteen years old and he was thirty, but you were wise beyond your years and so wildly talented you would be wasted in North Carolina, and so he had no choice but to whisk you away to Hollywood."

"What did you hear from Beanie or my mom?"

"About the breakup? Only that you were having a very hard time. Beanie told me not to believe anything I saw or I read, but she also didn't provide any alternate explanation. I did ask her if I could go out and see you or call you or write or something. I was in college. I wanted to. I'd missed you, and knowing you were hurting was awful. But Diana told me it wasn't a good idea. Through Beanie."

"God, really?" Katie looked away and squeezed her eyes shut. "I would have loved so much to see you. I probably would have climbed into your lap and cried all over you and not even been able to tell you what happened, but it would have been so good to just have you."

Wil put her hand on Katie's foot, finding a rapid pulse. "I'm sorry, then. I'm so sorry." She didn't let herself get distracted by the small flare of frustration that Diana had prevented her from comforting Katie. It was a long time ago, and everyone had been doing their best.

After what Wil had seen in Chicago, she got why Diana protected Katie so fiercely.

"It's so much the most ridiculous, worst pile of crap and doom." Katie sighed. "What did you gather from what you read and saw all this time? Go ahead. Say the whole thing."

"Well, when you made it to Hollywood, he got you your first movie, which you were nominated for an Oscar for, and he introduced you to everyone important because he's one of the most important men in Hollywood, and he fell in love with you and was your first everything. He gave you your career. He gave you love as the other half of one of the most glamorous couples in the world."

Katie wrinkled her nose. "Go on. You can say the rest of it."

"And then you became wildly ambitious, jealous of his costars, immature, and you left him. You haven't been able to have a normal relationship since." Wil said this in a rush, her nose burning because it felt like a betrayal.

But of course Katie smiled.

"You're right," she said. "That is the official story. Ben's story. It's a love story." She met Wil's eyes. "My story is an abuse story."

Wil squeezed Katie's foot, keeping steady pressure so Katie would know that Wil wasn't afraid to hear this. She wasn't afraid to know.

She'd suspected, of course. More than suspected. But to hear Katie say it rearranged so many things inside of Wil at the same time, it felt like her heart would have to learn how to beat again.

Wil leaned up and reached for Katie, who came to lie beside her. "You don't have to talk about it," she said. "I would never make that a condition of anything. Of friendship. Of anything."

They were side by side, facing each other, inches apart. So many times, they'd lain like this as girls, talking to each other. Telling each other everything.

"I know," Katie said. "But I'm going to. Tell me first, though, what your number-one question is. That will help me start, because I don't like this. I like being in your bed, and how your pillow smells like you, and how much light is in this room, and the way Almond Butter is snoring like she needs an oil change. But this is a story I hate."

When Wil thought about the trauma that had happened to Katie, there was one mystery that made it easy to know what to ask. "Why is a forty-year-old man still making statements about a relationship he had with a kid ten years later?"

Katie huffed. "Everything is always about Ben. He is the protagonist. And the antagonist. I didn't say anything, and he told our story over and over again, until there wasn't any room left for anything but the story he'd made."

"When did you know he was like that?"

Katie looked at the ceiling, thinking. "He was filming Creatures out in the desert about a year after we were together, and he came home the day his costar…"

"Alec Wilde." Wil supplied the famous actor's name without thinking. What had happened on that set was still brought up in almost every Wilde interview.

"Yes. That day. The day Wilde insisted on doing the car chase stunt himself, with Lila Watson in the front seat with him, and killed her."

"God." It was one thing to read about something like that happening to people you couldn't imagine. It was another thing entirely to hear it from someone who carried some of its aftermath. "Awful. That's all I got. So awful. Did you…?"

"I didn't know Lila. I hadn't even met her. And Ben wasn't on set yet when that happened, he was on his way. But he was so excited to tell me." Katie rose to one elbow, putting herself closer to Wil. "His phone was blowing up. He was reading me every message, putting every call on speaker, and he couldn't stop telling everyone, telling me, that he ‘should've been there.' I realized he didn't mean he should've been there to save anyone, but because he wanted to be part of it."

"Wow. God."

"Yeah. He didn't care that Lila had died. I could hardly think of anything but how tragic it was, how completely awful for her to lose her life on set, doing a stunt, but Ben would change the subject if I tried to talk about it. He didn't even care that Alec's life was probably ruined, and Ben had been friends with Alec since they both came to town when they were seventeen. Ben would've taken any role in it. Alec's, Lila's, the director's. He just wanted it. He hated that he wasn't there. And then I realized he was telling the media, letting it leak, that he was there. That meant it was impossible to get at what the fuck happened, this terrible thing that every studio is supposed to protect you against and tell you could never happen."

"I remember how confusing the stories were."

"Yeah, because he was making things really fucking confusing, spinning this awful thing that happened to Lila into a way to elevate his own position. He eventually had to stop lying about it after law enforcement and lawyers wanted to talk to him. Even though so much had already happened between us, that was the first time I was scared. That was when I knew I was involved in something I had no control over."

Wil closed her eyes against imagining that feeling. The sick terror of realizing who one was sleeping with. Living with. "Katie."

She leaned against Wil's shoulder, and Almond Butter picked her way up through their legs until she found a place half on Katie's chest and half on Wil's shoulder to loaf herself. "Thank you, Almond Butter." Katie stroked her hand over Almond Butter's fur for a few long moments. When she spoke again, her voice was low and soft. "The two years that came after that were, for me, so hard. So, so hard. But not hard in a way that was unique to me. I've learned that what he did to me was very, very ordinary. Because abusers all do the same things."

She looked up at Wil as if for confirmation, so Wil nodded. She didn't know from personal experience, but she'd talked to, lived with, and known a lot of people.

"Abusers tell you stories about your friends and your family that make them sound like they don't have your best interests in mind," Katie said. "Then they call you stupid for calling those friends and family, and they make you doubt yourself, doubt your people, until you don't call anymore. They all have so many endless, important, sensitive needs and opinions that it's just so much easier to make sure everything is done or said or anticipated for them. Because you just don't care as much."

Wil put her hand on Katie's shoulder. It was hard to know this. Hard to think of Katie Price telling herself that her own opinions, her own wants and needs, were less important than Ben's.

"They all apologize and are so tender after you mess up and react or do something like you used to, before him." Katie said this in a bittersweet way that made Wil's heart hurt. "They all kiss you and keep their arm around you in public, every minute, so you won't talk to anyone or make them look bad. And they all tell anyone who will listen, when you're getting kissed in a gown he told your stylist to dress you in, everything that's wrong with you. Like it's a joke."

Katie's eyes were shining. Wil squeezed her shoulder.

"And they all forget you're real," Katie said in a whisper. "But you are. You're real. You're real, and they forget that right up until they can't reach you except through your new agent, and all they have left is the media's attention." Her voice had more power now. She gave Wil a small smile that made Wil miss the chip in her front tooth. Made Wil wish she'd been able to keep this from ever happening.

"It's how ordinary it all is," Katie said, "that helps me keep him as small as I can in my head. So I can be as big as I will let myself be."

Wil slid one trembling hand to Katie's neck and met her eyes. "You have never, not once in your whole entire life, been ordinary. Or small. And I hate that this small and ordinary man tried to make you both, like he ever, ever could." Wil felt her jaw lock tight, as though it would keep back the flash of rage Katie didn't need.

"Wil, you look like you're ready to…"

"I'm just fucking saying." Wil relented to her impulse, and Almond Butter jumped off both of them in alarm. "Let him try to fucking say anything to me. I would like that. That would be so good. I am ready."

Katie laughed. "Oh, you would lawyer him so good."

"I would Midwestern shun him so fucking good, is what I would do." Wil sat up. She was too angry to be prone.

"Yikes. Cold."

"He doesn't even fucking know how cold it can get. Where is he from? Jersey or some shit?"

"Pennsylvania. Harrisburg."

"Exactly. Exactly. He never had to come home in the middle of the night with beer breath with Beanie Greene as his mother to have her turn on the living room lamp where she was lurking in the dark and have her say his whole Christian name, not loud, but softly. Kindly. He doesn't know the terror."

"Never leave me," Katie said, laughing, but then as soon as she said it, right against Wil's neck where she had fallen over laughing, the words hit Wil's skin and traveled over her whole body in a wave. Katie must have felt the strength of Wil's reaction, because she stopped laughing, but she didn't move her face from Wil's neck or ease her body away.

"Katie." It was the only word Wil could manage to say.

"I fought with my mom," Katie whispered. "My agent flew in and surprised me, and I had to talk to her and my publicist without any warning, and my mom didn't offer you anything to eat or drink."

"I noticed that. It wasn't a full Midwestern shun, though." Wil was trying to keep it light with a joke, but she didn't feel light.

"Because the thing is, Wil." Katie had a grip on Wil's sleeve, and she tightened it, then let go and smoothed down Wil's bare arm. "I can't. We can't."

"Yeah?" Wil tried to find some fucking purchase. God.

"Everything I do is connected to everything else. And there is no way for us to have this"—she smoothed her hand from Wil's shoulder to her wrist, then touched her fingers to Wil's—"that doesn't also involve the whole entire world."

Katie's life with Ben was why they hadn't talked to each other in thirteen years. That wasn't what Katie had wanted. Or Wil. It was something that had happened to them.

What Wil had been avoiding thinking about—not now, not during this perfect, stolen handful of days and weeks when everything was so good—was if it was too late.

For them.

Both times.

Katie took a deep breath, and then the doorbell rang.

Wil tried to remember what it sounded like when Katie said Never leave me, but it had already slipped away from her. "That's Noel. Do you still want to film?"

"Yeah." Katie smiled at Wil, her full Katie Price smile that Wil had seen hundreds of times in magazines and ads and movies and on the internet. "Don't answer the door until I get my wig."

She scrambled over the bed, just like she had years ago, so many times when she realized how late it had gotten. Except instead of running home, she was putting on a disguise so no one would know who she was.

Wil reassured herself that no matter what, she would always know.

And maybe that would ache more than it ever had before, but that was okay.

It would be worth it.