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“Yes, Minty.”
“Rayna, do you want to play with me?” I asked in a high-pitched voice, prancing Minty around.
Rayna giggled, then began playing with her own pony. We played together for several minutes before I remembered Carla.
“Just a minute, sweetie. Mommy has to make a call.”
I lifted the receiver from beside me on the sofa and punched in the digits to Carla’s number.
“I’m sorry, Carla,” I said after I filled her in. “But you know my sister. And I can live without the headache of her freaking out when she comes over and finds I’m not here.”
“I understand,” Carla said.
“Next weekend?”
“It’s a date.”
I brewed a fresh pot of coffee, figuring I’d need the extra caffeine if I was going to have to spend the next several hours drowning in a sea of my sister’s issues.
Not something I relished, considering I had enough problems of my own.
I waited.
And waited.
Nikki didn’t show.
3
By the next morning, I still hadn’t heard from my sister—but I also hadn’t heard from the police with any bad news. I was pissed that she’d had so little regard for my time that she didn’t have the decency to call and say she wasn’t coming over.
I wondered if she’d even given me a second thought. If she’d considered, even for a moment, that she’d done anything wrong.
But I soon stopped thinking about Nikki when I got to work and saw the temp receptionist behind the desk in the entrance to the office. She had frizzy red hair and a face full of freckles, and looked nothing like the woman she was filling in for. Though the temp had been there for the past two weeks, it still caught me off guard to see her sitting behind the broad desk.
Still made me feel a moment of sadness and anger that she had to be there at all.
Alaina Rivera, my good friend and the agency’s regular receptionist, was home recovering after a vicious attack by her jealous and out-of-control ex-husband. She’d been banged up pretty good, had spent a week in hospital, and God only knew how much longer she would be off of work due to her injuries.
I pushed aside my feelings about Alaina and smiled at the temp as I strode past the reception desk. “Good morning, Nora.”
“Good morning.”
I was almost fully out of the foyer when I heard her ask tentatively, “Um, Ms. Cain?”
I halted, turned back. “Yes, Nora?”
“There was a call for you about ten minutes ago. From a Bradley Harris? He’s from—”
“Harris, Lawton and Stein. Yes, I know.”
“Oh. Well, he said that you two have been playing phone tag and it’s crucial that you call him back today.”
Bradley and I had not been playing phone tag. I’d been avoiding him after his phone call a week and a half earlier, when he’d told me that Tassie no longer wanted me to buy out Eli’s share of my condo—she wanted me out, period.
The way I saw it, I didn’t have much to say to Bradley Harris on the matter, because I wasn’t planning on moving.
Nora extended a sheet of paper to me. “He, uh, left numbers where you can reach him.”
“Thank you.” I walked back to the reception desk, where I took the slip of paper from Nora, though I didn’t have any intention of calling Bradley back.
I mean, what was the point? We didn’t see eye to eye on this issue, and likely never would. I figured if I avoided him long enough, Tassie would give up on her demand and they’d disappear from my life forever.
A girl can hope, can’t she?
I continued on to my office, where I crumpled the note with the lawyer’s phone numbers and tossed it in the trash.
I didn’t want to call him. I’d played nice, danced around like a puppet as Tassie pulled the strings and got a good laugh out of making my life hell. Trying to “come up with a solution,” as the lawyer had suggested, had resulted in Tassie changing her mind. So really, could my plan to ignore her and her lawyer put me in a worse position than I already was in?
Though I’d had that nightmare about being forced out of my home, I didn’t believe for a second that was going to happen.
I settled in behind my desk and booted my computer up. It was a Monday morning, and I needed to get schedules in order and start on the mid-month payroll. Agent expenses had to be calculated. There was a lot to do, and calling Bradley Harris simply wasn’t on my list.
But first, I allowed myself to think about the one person I knew I was better off forgetting.
I opened my drawer and withdrew the framed photo of me and Chaz. We’d taken the photo when he’d come to Miami to visit me and explore the possibility of signing with the agency I worked for. Believe The Dream, Change Your Life was an agency that represented motivational speakers and life coaches. Chaz was one of the hottest names in the business, and he worked alone. Had I been able to sign him to my agency, I would have had my shot at becoming an agent, which was my ultimate goal.
It had almost happened. But a little white lie I’d told Chaz had come back to haunt me. Chaz had dumped me because of that lie, and as a result, had walked away from the opportunity to work with me.
Chaz had always said that the one thing he couldn’t deal with was dishonesty. I’d learned how serious he was the hard way.
In the picture, Chaz was smiling widely, a spark in his eyes. I was smiling just as happily, a woman who’d finally found the man of her dreams.
How could Chaz and I have gone from this happy moment to utter despair? As long as I lived, I would never forget the look of utter disappointment on Chaz’s face when Byron, my daughter’s father, had shown up in the restaurant that day. Having told Chaz that Rayna’s father was dead, Byron’s appearance—and theatrics over possibly losing his daughter—had been a double shock.
Why hadn’t I told Chaz that Rayna’s father indeed was still alive, but a total deadbeat dad?
My phone rang, startling me out of my thoughts. I jumped in fright, then reached for my phone.
“Vanessa Cain.”
“Hello, Vanessa.” A woman’s voice.
“Yes?”
“My name is Charlie Mann. I’m with Real Life Pictures in Hollywood.”
I sat up straight, wary. “Yes.”
“I heard all about your ordeal with Eli Johnson, and I’d love the opportunity to speak to you about the option of buying your story.”
“Buying my story?”
“I’d like to make it into a movie of the week.”
I frowned into the receiver, wondering if the person on the other end of my line was playing some sort of a joke on me. “Are you…is this a friend of Tassie’s?”
“You mean Tassie Johnson, the wife Eli never told you about?”
The woman sounded almost gleefully excited as she relayed the facts I had wanted to put behind me. Like someone sharing a piece of gossip.
No, she wasn’t a friend of Tassie’s.
“This is for real?” I asked.
“Absolutely. And your story has the right amount of sex, deception, twists and turns that would make a fantastic movie. The secret wife and kids, being murdered in his lover’s bed. The whole ‘celebrity behaving badly’ angle is a huge sell.”
“Right,” I said absently, the woman’s retelling of what had happened in my life making my stomach twist.
“Of course, you’ll be paid,” Charlie went on.
“Oh?” I rolled my chair forward and rested my elbows on the desk. “How much?”
“The exact amount will have to be negotiated, but it would be…significant.”
Possibly thousands of dollars, just for sharing my story with America. A story they already knew, quite frankly, so it wasn’t as if I would be airing my dirty laundry.
Of course, a movie would get into much more detail, like how I’d met Eli, our courtship, his life with Tassie.
My life with Rayna.
“When can we meet, Vanessa? I’d be happy to fly you to L. A.”
“You know what, I’m not interested.”
“I think we should meet face-to-face, and you can hear my ideas.”
“I really am not interested,” I reaffirmed. “I think the story has been exploited enough, and I didn’t exactly come out of it smelling like roses. Then there’s my daughter…”
“I promise you, we’ll handle the story sensitively.”
“Short of when my parents died, what happened with Eli was the worst time of my life. I have no desire to revisit that tragic time.” Not even if the money sounded appealing. “I’m sorry, but that’s my final decision.”
“If you change your mind—”
“I won’t. Thank you for the call, though.”
I replaced the receiver, then exhaled sharply. A producer wanted to make a movie out of my life?
Unbelievable.
When my phone rang again, I assumed it was the producer calling back, and I debated not answering it. But there was one thing I couldn’t do as the agency’s office manager—ignore my phone.
I picked up the receiver and put it to my ear. “Vanessa Cain.”
“Hey, girl.”
“Alaina,” I said, feeling immediate relief. “How are you?”
“Better. I’m feeling a lot better than yesterday.”
“Oh, I’m so glad to hear that.”
“I figure I’ll be back to work in no time.”
“Of course you will. You’re a fighter.” I said the words not only to support Alaina, but also because I believed them. In the face of a horrific assault, she was finding the courage not just to go on, but to not let what her ex-husband had done bring her down emotionally.
“So, any office gossip?” Alaina asked. “I’m going through serious gossip withdrawal.”
“Not really,” I said. “Well, that’s not true. You’ll never believe who just called me.”
“Chaz?” Alaina asked excitedly.
“No. Not Chaz.” Hearing and saying his name, I felt a pain grip my heart.
“Tassie?”
“No, not Tassie.”
“Then who?”
“A Hollywood producer,” I said, enunciating my words. “Would you believe she wants to make a TV movie about my story? My relationship with Eli, how he was killed, the fact that he had a secret wife and kids. All the drama that made my life total hell.”
“Oh, my God! How much are they going to pay you?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I didn’t stay on the phone long enough to ask.”
“What? Tell me you did not just say what I think you said.”
“You heard me.”
“Are you crazy?” Alaina asked. “You turned the producer down?”
“I just said that all that drama made my life total hell. I don’t want to relive that.”
“But you could probably get rich! And then you wouldn’t have to marry Lewis, because you’d have the money to buy Tassie off yourself. It’d be a nice way to profit from something so horrible.”
“And all I have to do is let them exploit me,” I said in a fake-cheery voice. “It’s not like I haven’t had enough stress because of the media covering the story to last me a lifetime.”
