There was a rustle in the crowd as we turned around the final corner, looking down the short stretch toward the gathering at the base of the hill.
But the crowd looked different now that it was in focus. It wasn’t just the excitement of the end of the race that filled the air. There was a large pocket of the group, all bunched close to the finish line that was clearly filled with photographers. Their cameras weren’t the kind that amateurs might purchase for taking pictures of sunsets and vacations. They were the big kind you might see in a press box at a football game, or in the paparazzi line at a movie premiere. Behind the jostling mass of lenses were several news vans, with cameramen and reporters speaking into microphones while kids made bunny ears behind them. There was a hum in the crowd that wasn’t just about the end of the race. They were waiting for something. Something big.
All at once, the lenses turned our way, and while I couldn’t see exactly who was moving whom, the sudden shift in the crowd toward us was noticeable. I frowned, but continued down the hill, realizing only a few steps later that I was alone.
I turned around to find Will frozen under a large pine tree. As the last few runners ran by, I walked back to him. When he pulled off his sunglasses, now he was the one who looked like he was about to pass out.
“Will? What’s wrong?”
But for once, he couldn’t look at me, his eyes instead trained directly ahead—at the odd mob of cameramen and reporters elbowing their way through the runners who had finished. Some of them were starting to jog toward us up the hill, huffing as they carried their heavy equipment. A few even pointed in our direction.
“Who—who are they?” I asked, unable to keep the warble out of my voice. My chest was pounding with something approximating dread—that same feeling you have when you know something terrible is about to happen. You just don’t know what.
Maybe even then, I knew deep down just who Will Baker really was. There had always been something about him that seemed a little otherworldly and larger than life. He tried the best he could to mask it with overgrown hair, grungy clothes, and a beat-up car. But Will Baker couldn’t hide his shine.
In that moment, all I felt was the pure, unadulterated panic coursing through the veins of the man I loved as he took a step backward, then another, up the hill.
“Will.” I reached out, trying and failing to take his hand as he continued to back away.
Every muscle in his beautiful body was tensed, like an animal ready to bolt. His glance pinballed between the oncoming cameramen and me, flickering between us at breakneck speed.
“I…God…Maggie, I’m so sorry,” he said with a voice cracked in fear.
“For what?”
Even from several feet away at this point, I could see the way his body vibrated from head to toe.
“So fucking sorry,” he repeated, in a voice that was barely audible above the crowd closing in. And then, with one last sorrowful look, he turned and took off through the trees.
“What the hell…” I murmured as I turned back to the crowd. I couldn’t have told you why, but everything in me screamed to turn around, go back the way I had come.
But my muscles ached. I wanted to lie down. I needed to finish the run, and then I could get a ride, or walk, if need be, back to my house to shower, change, and then check up on Will.
The cameras were closer now, but past them, I could see the table of water bottles they were handing out to participants. So instead of following my instincts and Will into the forest, I continued running toward the inn.
“Hey, that’s her!” shouted one of the cameramen as I approached. “That’s Maggie Sharp!”
“Maggie!”
“Margaret!”
My name was volleyed through the crowd, and suddenly I found myself swarmed with photographers and reporters.
“Hey!” I shouted, pushing them away when several reached out to touch my arms or grab my hands. “What the hell?!”
But there were no apologies, and definitely no space.
“Are you dating Fitz Baker?”
“Are you sleeping together?”
“When did you find him?”
“Have you known he was here the whole time?”
“When did you know he was alive?”
“Did you help him fake his death?”
“Where’s Fitz, Maggie?”
“What are you talking about?!” I shrieked, shoving another photographer away. I looked around frantically for some kind of shelter. Where was Will? What was going on? Who the hell was Fitz?
But instead of the person I so desperately needed in that moment, Lucas’s solid form barreled through the crowd, cutting a path for his mother behind him.
“Move!” he barked at the photographers and pushed them aside as Linda wrapped an arm around my shoulders.
“Are you okay?” she asked as she ushered me into the inn and locked the door behind her.
I followed her past some of the guests milling in the living room; several looked up and pointed when I passed.
We went into the empty kitchen, where Linda locked the door, and Lucas rummaged for a bottle of water from the fridge.
“We’re going to have to send everyone home,” Linda said bitterly. “Maybe even cancel the banquet tonight! They are absolutely vicious, and it’s not good for the guests. Oh, honey. Did you know this was going to happen?”
“Wha-what are you talking about?” I stuttered after I guzzled half the bottle of water. My entire body was shaking, full of terror I still didn’t understand. “What in the hell is going on?”
“See, Mom?” Lucas said as he set his hat on the counter. “I told you she didn’t know. He fooled her just like he fooled everyone else, the lying sack of shi—”
“Lucas, there’s no need for that kind of talk,” Linda admonished him.
She took a seat next to me at the counter and picked up the remote to the small TV mounted on one wall. The screen blared onto some sort of morning talk show. A picture of me and Will—the one taken at the barbecue just the other night—flashed across the screen.
“Here, honey,” Linda said as she turned up the volume. “You should probably watch this.”
I plopped onto one of the stools and fell forward onto the counter, transfixed as I listened to the overdone faces on the television talking to one another. About me. About Will. Except…it wasn’t Will at all. Was it?
“It’s the biggest news of the decade,” the lady was saying. “This news is everywhere—absolutely everywhere. Fitz Baker, who was believed to have died off the coast of Maine only four years ago, has been discovered alive and well in a tiny town in Eastern Washington.”
“If you’re just tuning in, we’ve got four little words for you, ladies,” the male host continued. “Fitz Baker is alive.”
Another series of pictures flashed across the screen, and if I hadn’t already been sitting down, I would have fallen over. They were of Will, but an incredibly different, un-Will-like Will that I wouldn’t have recognized if they hadn’t already said who he was.
He was still tall, of course, with the same tanned skin, penetrating green eyes, and broad shoulders I now knew intimately. But in one photo, that broad body was covered by an elegant tuxedo while he accepted some sort of award. In another, he wore a beautifully tailored suit while posing on what looked like a red carpet. The tangled blond hair that I had yanked so hard only last night was shorn and combed to the side. His face was clean, completely shaved, without even stubble, revealing an impossibly sharp jawline that was clenched hard enough to reveal a thin vein in the side of his neck and dimples so deep they looked like they’d been pressed in by two fingers. But though the man in the pictures was smiling in a way I had never seen Will smile—bright, incandescent—the rest of him was incredibly tense, and his eyes reflected clear misery.
“Apparently, he’s been living out there, under the radar, for the past four years. No one even knew it was him!” said the blonde woman.
“How is that
even possible?” asked the man with skin that was slightly orange. “How could someone as famous as Fitz Baker just fly under the radar for four years without being spotted? I don’t believe it. I just don’t believe it.”
“You’ll believe it when you take a look at this, Pat,” said the woman. “He looks positively feral.”
A picture flashed across the screen, and I sat up immediately when I caught a look at it.
It was Will. And me. Just last night, when we were snuggled together by the fire.
“Shit,” Lucas muttered as he caught sight of the photo. We both knew who had taken it.
To me, Will didn’t look feral at all. Compared to when I first met him, he looked positively dapper. His long hair was pulled back, and his beard, which he usually kept grown out to an inch or two below his chin, had been shorn also, close to his face. I recognized it now for the compromise it was—he knew I wanted to see him clean-shaven, while he preferred a full beard.
Now I knew why.
“Who do you think the girl is?” wondered Pat as he leered at a copy of the photo. “She’s a looker, isn’t she?”
“She’s certainly…different,” sniffed the woman. “I mean, poor Amelia, am I right?”
“Oh, Stacy, you’re so bad,” admonished Pat. “Clearly he’s moved on from her by now.”
“Well, wouldn’t you want to know if your fiancé had disappeared into the woods?” Stacy asked. “The poor girl was absolutely devastated. I heard she paid for private search parties to sail up and down the coastlines for weeks and weeks after they called it off.”
“Yes, but we all know that relationship was on its way out, of course. They weren’t engaged anymore at that point,” Pat said. “If it were me, after what she did to him, I’d have said good riddance too.”
Yet another picture flashed across the screen. One I stared at in horror as I realized it was a very young Will—or Fitz, or whatever his name was—walking down the street with a very, very beautiful woman whom I recognized as Amelia Craig, a well-known actress who, at least in this picture, had a very big diamond on her left ring finger. This picture had clearly been taken on the street, by photographers like the ones outside. The two of them were tense, unsmiling, and even under their sunglasses, you could see the anger and fear simmering just below his seemingly calm demeanor.
Still, miserable or not, he looked like a movie star. Which, I was slowly realizing, was exactly what he was.
Almost all the blood flowed out of my head at once. I slumped across the counter while Linda rubbed my back. Oh, God. What the hell was happening?
“So now the question is,” Stacy was asking the simpering Pat. “What really happened? He clearly didn’t die in that boating accident. So, what happened?
“What really happened to Fitz Baker?”
29
Splat.
My footsteps fell heavy on the ground, sending water in all directions as I jogged down the seventy-three steps that led down the hill to my mother’s house. I felt like I was falling, lost in an avalanche, tumbling down the hill with no control.
The sudden summer storm had arrived moments before, opening with thunder and gushing torrents everywhere. It fit, really—in the space of a few minutes, my own life had felt like it was gushing open, full of talk, of people, of stares, of questions. Two seconds after the newscasters had uttered their questions, I had one of my own:
Who in the fuck was “Fitz Baker”?
Before leaving, I had sat in the Forsters’ kitchen, slowly numbing, turning the question over in my mind again and again, until Lucas forced me to drink some orange juice before I passed out. Then he stayed with me, not saying a word, just keeping me company while I continued to process. Continued to figure out…what next?
There was a bang at the entrance. A nasty knock, followed by a dozen more, and incomprehensible shouting. The guests in the lobby were silent, their glances ricocheting between me and the knocking. But before anyone could answer them, the big double doors of the inn flew open, and at least twenty different people carrying cameras, microphones, and notepads toppled inside, filling the tiny lobby with chaos.
They found me almost immediately. One tripped and had to roll to the side to avoid being trampled by the others.
“Maggie!” they shouted. “Maggie, did you know? Maggie, where’s Fitz? Come on, Maggie, give us a smile!”
“Will.” I turned to the Forsters. I couldn’t feel my knees. I couldn’t feel anything. “Where’s Will?”
But Lucas just shook his head, his eyes wide, stunned in the litter of flashes, and Don, who had come in for a coffee refill, had basically the same expression as his son.
“Lucas! Don!” Linda’s sharp voice jerked the men out of their daze. “Get the poor girl out of here!”
With remarkable presence of mind, Linda sprang to the front door and locked it, while Don barred the entrance to the kitchen as Lucas shepherded me out the back and into his truck.
“I’m guessing you’ve got a five-minute head start,” he said as he started it up. “Maybe ten if we can get out early enough that no one follows. You’re lucky—Ellie’s place is kind of hard to find.”
And so, for the second time in just over a month, I was on the run. It was the last thing I ever thought I’d be running from, but here I was, scrambling down the side of the hill while Lucas waited in the truck up top. I’d pack up whatever I could as quickly as I could, and he’d take me away from the madness until his parents gave word that the cameras and reporters—whoever they were—had left. Then I could retrieve my car and go…somewhere.
It wasn’t much of a plan, but it was the only one we had to get away from the chaos. For now.
For eight years, I’d chased this kind of attention, the kind that had swarmed me at the Forsters’ house. I’d moved to New York with dreams of making it big. Hopes that one day, I’d catch my break and be allowed to play my music in front of the world, and they’d all sing along with me.
What a fool I was.
Flower. The word echoed through my mind, reminding me in my misery of my tormenter, the man who had ruined my chances at that future. The man whom I thought had ruined me.
And then I’d met Will.
Intense.
Evasive.
Just as damaged as me.
His combination of strength and vulnerability had captivated me from the start, even when I was furious at him (which happened a lot). Little by little—or maybe it was all at once—we had fallen for each other, until just a month after I arrived back in this place, I found something resembling hope that my future might belong to me after all.
Now my brain was fogged over with the deception. The knowledge that for four weeks, I hadn’t been falling in love with a hermit, a self-banished recluse who simply preferred to be away from others because of some strange phobia of crowds. It all made sense now. Every time he ran away. Every time he shouted “pine cone.” Unbeknownst to me, I’d been falling in love with one of the most famous faces in the world, hidden from me and everyone else behind a thick beard and a wild riot of blond hair.
Not just a writer.
Not just a neighbor.
A secret freaking movie star who had faked his death to escape the trappings of fame.
And idiot that I was, I hadn’t sensed a thing.
I still couldn’t see straight. The flashes from the wall of cameras that had been waiting for me when I finished the triathlon still made me see stars, even in this horrific weather. I practically had to feel my way down the last steep flight, terrified that with one misstep, I might go toppling down the deck and break my arm.
“Maggie!” my mother’s voice croaked from another night of alcohol-fueled dreams through the open screen door as I dashed by. “Maggie Mae, are you all right?”
I ignored her, beelining for the outdoor shower on the other side of the house. I didn’t want to see her. I didn’t want to see anyone right now. I had just had my heart split open in front of a hoard of cameras, h
ad my heartbreak and gullibility broadcast across the entire world.
I could still see them—Lucas, Jenna, Katie, and their parents, Linda and Don, circled around me in the kitchen of their inn while guests peeked through the swinging doors. Everyone watching me while I watched the vapid, surgically enhanced faces on the television screen gossip about the fact that the man I had been seeing, the man I had fallen desperately in love with within the span of only a few weeks…wasn’t that man at all.
There was no Will. There was only Fitz Baker. Playboy. Actor. Drug Addict. Fiancé.
Once in the shower, I unzipped the front of my triathlon suit and yanked the straps over my arms, eager to shed the evidence of the morning. Five minutes. Maybe ten. But I had to get clean before I went anyway. The exhaustion I should have felt after running six miles, biking twenty-four, and swimming one that morning hadn’t hit me yet—I was still reeling on adrenaline. Though my stomach was growling like a beast, demanding replenishment after hours without, I knew that if I tried to eat a thing, it would all come up. Nerves will kill you.
Hurry, Maggie. Go. The photographers, the tabloids, the news people—it was only starting to dawn on me what Lucas had already figured out when we left. That they all knew my name, so it would only be a matter of time before they figured out where I lived. Found out my story too. That I was a failed musician. The daughter of an alcoholic hairdresser. A bastard child without a known father. Frankly, I was surprised they weren’t already here, knocking at the sliding glass door of the main house, or on the flimsy particleboard entrance of the outer shack I’d claimed as my own. I scrubbed frantically at my skin. If I didn’t finish up, there would be naked pictures of me in every supermarket across the country within an hour.
“Maggie?”
Mama’s voice was creaky, like she’d been shouting all night long, though I recognized it for what it was: battling the remnants of a hangover while she had come out in the rain to make sure I was all right.
I closed my eyes and scrubbed a little too hard at my hair. “What, Mama?”
Vote Then Read: Volume I Page 201