2. Miles

2

MILES

"Ten minutes!" Marissa, the PA assigned to me, announced from the doorway of my trailer. "We'll be ready for you to walk in ten minutes."

"Thanks." I smiled before glancing back down at my notes as she shut the door.

Even though my lines were going to be scrolling on a teleprompter, I still needed to have them memorized. With dyslexia, I always had in-ear prompts. But with live shows, technical difficulties were a very real possibility, so I relied on memorization. It was a lot more work on my part, but it saved me from looking like an idiot in front of millions of people.

Interviews, red carpets, and awards shows were three of my least favorite parts of my job as an actor, and tonight combined all the above. I was hosting an award show, which meant I not only had to walk the red carpet but also had to stop and be interviewed by each and every person with a mic in their hand.

"Just got an email. Your call time has been moved up to 4:00 a.m. tomorrow." Braxton was typing on her phone as she walked back into the common area from the back room of the trailer where she'd been on a call.

"Did you get a hold of Zoe?" I knew that I was not going to like the answer before I asked the question.

In the five years since I'd hired Braxton Davis as my assistant, I'd learned her tics and tells. If she had good news, she would have led with it. Since she didn't mention anything about the call the moment she came in, I knew it wasn't what I wanted to hear.

"I did." Braxton lifted her head. Her almond-shaped, brown eyes softened as she sat down across from me on the bench. "She has reservations."

I stared at her, waiting for her to continue.

Braxton's shoulders squared as she sat up a little straighter. "She doesn't want to speak to you."

"Why?"

"She didn't specify."

Taking my career from teen heartthrob to serious actor did not come without sacrifice and growing pains, and this was one of them. As a twenty-six-year-old, apart from Long Way Home , I continued to receive offers for high school roles, so I'd decided to take matters into my own hands.

After spending eight years as the lead on the teen soap opera Happy Trails and booking several international clothing and fragrance campaigns, I'd invested my money well and started my own production company. When I read the script for Fallen Hero a year ago, I auditioned and got two callbacks. I was shortlisted for the lead role, but, as with a lot of projects in this business, the movie stalled when funding fell through.

So, last week, I bought the rights and cast myself as Austin James, the lead. This was going to be my breakout performance. I was not only acting in the movie; I was also producing and co-directing the film. There was a lot on the line.

The movie originally came about after one of the men in Austin's squad, Lance Corporal Anthony Brown, wrote an op- ed piece for The New York Times detailing the mission where Austin saved not only fellow Marines but also over a hundred civilians at the peril of his own life. I'd spoken to all the other men in Austin's squad, and they all said the same things about him: he was smart and funny, the kind of guy that people gravitated to. A man who was easy to follow. He had innate leadership qualities. He was hard-working and held himself to a higher standard than he would ever hold anyone else to.

They all agreed that Zoe was the sole reason he was who he was. She and their son AJ were his entire world. Apparently, he got a lot of attention from females, but he never even noticed. Zoe was the only woman that existed for him.

Every single man said the same thing. Zoe was everything to Austin. He lived and breathed her. She was his why. She was his everything.

And she wanted nothing to do with this movie. She didn't want it to happen. She'd been against it from the very beginning.

After securing the rights, I'd spoken to the producers who had been attached to it from the beginning, and they'd forwarded the emails they'd exchanged with her. From the very first correspondence, she'd stated unequivocally she'd wanted no part of it.

I had hired two writers, Andy Carpenter and Shania Thomas, and they were working on the final draft. We needed the script locked by the end of the month. But I still felt like there was something missing. I needed to include Austin's childhood in the film. Although the story was predominately focused on his heroic efforts in Afghanistan, where he saved both civilians and his fellow Marines' lives, I needed to show what shaped him into the hero he was.

The other thing his fellow Marines mentioned was his grandfather Walter, who raised him after his mom left when he was three years old. None of them knew anything about his father. They talked about how much he loved his hometown, Firefly Island, and his friends there. A few of them remembered their names from when they spoke at the funeral: Harlan Mitchell and Jack Dawson.

I knew that Austin's story would not be complete without digging deeper. If I was going to inhabit Austin James and do his life and his story justice, then I needed to get to the heart of the man, who he was, and that meant learning about his wife, his son, his grandfather, his friends, and his hometown.

Braxton's phone vibrated, and she turned off her alarm. "Okay, we're up. Last looks."

I stood and glanced in the mirror. My brown hair was a little longer than I typically wore it. And my trademark clean-shaven square jaw was peppered with stubble. It was part of my attempt at rebranding myself as a grown man and not a teenager.

"All good?" I turned to Braxton.

"You don't have food on your teeth or anything in your nose, which are really the only things that can make you look bad since you are nauseatingly attractive."

"Aww, thanks." For Braxton, that was actually a very sweet compliment.

"It's so sad that it's wasted on you."

"Wasted?"

"All this." She waved her hand up and down. "Wasted."

"What?"

"When's the last time you've had a date?"

I tried to remember the last time I'd gone out with someone. My last relationship was with my co-star, Courtney Simms. That was two years ago. But that ended up being more of a showmance, at least on her side. I thought it was something more, but as soon as we wrapped the movie, she called a wrap on our relationship. I was sure I'd seen someone since then, but I couldn't remember who.

"If you have to think that hard about it, then it's been too long."

"What about you?" I turned the question back on her. "When's the last time you've been out with someone?"

"Last week," she quickly shot back.

"Seriously?"

She tilted her head to the left. "You don't know my business."

Apparently not.

Three rapid knocks sounded on the door.

"Come in." Braxton called out.

Marissa stuck her head in. "We're ready for you."

Braxton and I started toward the door, and Marissa did a double, then a triple take.

"I'm sorry." Her eyes were wide as she stared at Braxton. "Has anyone ever told you that you look exactly like Rihanna?"

"Yes, they have." Braxton glanced in my direction with a twinkle in her eye.

Braxton was named after the singer Toni Braxton, who was her mother's favorite R&B artist, but she was the spitting image of Rihanna. We had a running tally of how many times she was told that she looked like the singer. When I first hired her, she said she'd be rich if she had a dollar for every time someone told her that. So, as a joke, I started sending her a dollar every time someone did. Last year, it ended up being close to five thousand dollars. One day alone, at the Sundance Film Festival, there were over two hundred people at an after-party who all chimed in about her look-alike appearance.

We followed Marissa out of the trailer. On the way to the red carpet, Braxton walked beside me. During these junkets, she stayed close so she could feed me facts about each interviewer before I stepped up to the mics. Something I learned a long time ago was that the press treated you a lot better when you treated them well. They had a lot more power than people believed they did.

If it were up to me, I would take the time to get to know each person I met, to learn their life story, and save it in my memory banks. But unfortunately, that was impossible to do with the sheer number of people I met on a daily basis. Which made Braxton even more indispensable to me, considering she had a photographic memory.

As we approached a tall woman with a blonde bob and sharp features, Braxton quietly conveyed, "Kelly, two kids. Boy, Parker. Just had a baby girl, Natasha. Husband Jack."

"Miles Ford, how are you?" Kelly tilted the microphone toward me.

"Great. How are you doing, Kelly?"

"Good, thank you!"

"How's Jack and the new baby girl?"

Her face brightened even more. A niggle of guilt tightened in my chest. This was the Hollywood game, but I hated the game. I wanted to have real, authentic, connected conversations with people or not have any at all.

The truth was, I did care about Kelly, Jack, their new baby Natasha and their son Parker. However, the fact that Braxton had to tell me all their names made this interaction insincere and transactional. It made me feel like a fraud. Like I was a fake. My entire life had been spent in front of cameras pretending to be someone I wasn't.

I started acting at the age of five. It hadn't been my choice. My manager scouted me in a shopping mall and sent me on a commercial audition the following day. I booked it. I'd been a working actor ever since.

My mom, a single mother, who came from an abusive childhood, relied solely on me for financial support from that day forward. I'd never minded the responsibility, but lately, I was starting to wonder if there was more to life than just the facade of make-believe. My life felt empty. I wanted something real. I had a feeling that the only way I was going to find what I was looking for was if I made this movie. And the only way I could make it was if I had the cooperation of Zoe James. She was the key to finding my peace.