Chapter 53

“Who’s that?” Cleo jerks her chin at the short, angular woman standing next to the stage curtain. She has a headset on and she’s holding a clipboard, checking things off a list with such fervor I can only assume she’s enjoying herself.

“No idea,” I say. “Never seen her before in my life.”

Mick glances up from his phone. “That’s the new Mags.”

Both of us turn to look at him. “No,” Cleo says. “Did Mags get the boot?”

Mick looks from Cleo to me, his dark eyes catching in the dim lights. “Wouldn’t you fire her, if you were Camilla?”

“I didn’t fire her.”

All three of us whip around to find my mom standing a foot behind us, face calm as ever and hair smoothed behind her ears.

“I—” Mick gulps. “Sorry, I wasn’t trying—”

Mom holds up a hand. “It’s fine, Michael. Could you give Audrey and me a moment, please?”

Cleo reaches for Mick’s wrist, grabby as ever, and yanks him into the darkness behind the stage. Mom and I look at each other. Her eyes flick up at the curtain, like she could look right through it to where the audience waits for us—Dad and Fallon somewhere out there, too.

“So, you didn’t fire her,” I say.

Mom shakes her head. “I sent her home.”

“Forever?”

“I don’t know yet.” Mom adjusts the clasp of her bracelet, like she’s nervous.

“You’re going to let her stay in your life after what she did?”

She looks back at me, letting out a sigh. “It’s not that simple, honey. Magnolia is one of the only people who cared about me before all this.” She gestures toward the curtain, the stage, this sold-out theater. It’s nearly impossible for me to imagine her without the trappings of her life: the fame, the following, the narrative. But she existed that way once. Just a person, like the rest of us. “She’s been my best friend for almost thirty years. And she thought she was protecting me.”

“But she was wrong.”

“Yes.” Mom nods, just once. Final and definitive. “She was wrong. I’ve been wrong, too.”

I bite my lip, nod at her in the quiet dark. She brushes hair from my face and tucks it behind my ear. This is what the past few days have been, mostly: an admission of mistake-making. I’ve spent a lot of time with Sadie and my mom, talking about what comes next. About what comes tonight.

“Are you ready for this?” Camilla says, her eyes flickering toward the stage and then back to me.

This.By which I know she means being honest. Stepping in front of that crowd and telling them the truth. The lie she’s spun since I was born, the someday daughter she’s made of me, is a fiction. But it’s familiar. And I don’t know what it’s going to look like yet, to be honest together. But this is our last show—the very last chance we’ll have to get it right, or to get closer to right.

I say, “Ready enough.”

My mother nods, and when her eyes move over my shoulder I turn to see Silas, emerging from the dark in his black shirt, black pants.

“Where’s your camera?” I ask, and he glances at my mom.

“Not filming tonight.” Silas loops an arm around my waist and reaches ahead of us to part the curtain. Just a little, so the three of us can look out and see the stage. “Just watching.”

The theater lights dim and a giant screen glides down from the ceiling. It crackles with static, then fills with color: the floral blur of my skirt, cutting across the stage that first night in Los Angeles. A close-up of Mom’s hand on my shoulder during the show in San Francisco. Sadie’s face in the audience, thoughtful and focused.

Music swells and it’s all cuts of the three of us—Sadie and I bent over notes backstage, my mom laughing with her hand on Sadie’s arm, our familiar faces looking at each other and looking like each other.

I look up at Silas, his chin tipped toward me in the dark. Think of the past few days he’s spent holed up in his hotel room, editing. “Did you make this?”

Both of his arms are around my waist, his chest warm on my back. He kisses the top of my head and whispers, “Of course.”

I can’t manage a single other word, watching this montage of my summer. These two women I’m connected to in ways I knew and didn’t know, in ways that scare me in all the same moments I want to reach for them two-handed. When the music fades, my mother steps onto the stage by herself.

“Good evening,” she says. Her heels echo across the floorboards. Under the single stage light, she looks holy and lonely. “I’m so grateful to be with you tonight, and to share something I haven’t been brave enough to share until now.”

She glances over her shoulder, her eyes finding mine. I nod at her. Ready. Silas lets go of me, and when I turn to look at him Sadie’s here, standing right next to him in the shadows. She smiles.

“If you’ll be so kind,” Mom says, “I’d like to introduce you to my daughters.”

Sadie reaches for my hand and squeezes it hard in the dark. We set our shoulders, mirrors of each other.

And we step forward, together, into the light.