Now a Major Motion Picture

by Stacey Wiedower

  Realizing that all of it, everything, was about him.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Comfort Zone

  Amelia leaned into the long bar and surveyed the crowd packed in around her in the Beale Street club. The air was thick with smoke and the hum of a hundred different conversations. Even more deafening was the music blaring from a stage in the corner, where a cover band blasted out a raucous version of Violent Femmes’ “Blister in the Sun.”

  She felt oddly detached from the scene—still in shock from Andrew’s news, though the cocktail in front of her, her third, made it all seem fuzzy around the edges.

  She eyed a group of college-age girls dancing close to the stage, trying to get noticed by the guys in the band. As she watched, a leggy blonde in a skirt so short it practically showed cheek hoisted herself up and sashayed over to the lead singer. He looked more flattered than annoyed until she moved in front of him and tried to wrestle away his microphone. Seconds later she was hauled off by a black-shirted bouncer who’d suddenly materialized onstage.

  Amelia chortled, shaking her head. The rush of movement made the room spin, and she put a hand down on the bar to steady herself. Even with her buzz, she’d need a lot more vodka to reach that point of inhibition. Who am I kidding? I’d never reach that point. She’d pass out well before she got there.

  “Those were the days, right?” Reese yelled into her ear.

  Amelia grinned at her. “Did you have days like that? Because I don’t think I did. Maybe I should have—”

  Reese grinned back. “I don’t think you have it in you. That’s okay though. You’re classy. That chick’s not. It’s not a bad thing.”

  She groaned. “You make it sound like I’m about ninety-five and boring.”

  “Nope,” Reese said, her eyes sweeping down Amelia’s halter top and skinny jeans ensemble, not stopping till they reached the floor. “No boring person would ever own shoes that hot.”

  She looked down at the pewter peep toe heels she’d bought a few hours earlier, her periwinkle blue pedicure popping against the shimmery patent leather. She let out a self-conscious giggle, thinking if only she had Reese’s perspective on life. She lifted one stilettoed foot for Reese’s benefit and twirled it around.

  “They are hot, aren’t they?”

  “He thinks so,” Reese said.

  Amelia followed her gaze to a man she didn’t know. He was standing next to David—probably one of his “guys from the office.” When he caught her looking at him, he tipped his glass and winked. Amelia felt the flush rise into her cheeks as Reese grabbed her hand and tugged her toward the dance floor. They’d taken just two steps when Reese stopped in her tracks and reached back to grab Amelia’s half-full glass from the bar.

  “Get drunker,” she said, thrusting it into Amelia’s hand. “And come on, let’s dance.”

  Before she knew it, she was dancing not with Reese, but with the winker, who picked a slow song—a tinny version of Foreigner’s “Waiting for a Girl Like You”—to make his move. His name was Jake and he was, in fact, a lawyer at David’s firm. He had straight, caramel-colored hair that was a little too long, and he was very tall, at least six-three. He told Amelia he’d moved to Memphis from D.C. six weeks earlier, and it wasn’t until the song ended and Reese dragged her to the ladies’ room—the card Jake had pressed into her hand with his cell number on the back now warming in her jeans pocket—that she learned he was also married with a pregnant wife at home. David had warned Reese while Amelia was on the dance floor.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.” Her jaw dropped as she looked at Reese in the mirror. “What a prick. Surely he knew I’d find out?”

  Reese grimaced. “Maybe he didn’t think you’d care.”

  She shook her head. No wonder I don’t get out much. Men couldn’t be trusted. Frowning at her reflection, she glanced over and caught a glimmer of that worried look Reese had given her earlier in the day.

  “I don’t care,” she said. “This is how much I don’t care.” She yanked the card out of her pocket and ripped it into four pieces before tossing it in the trash.

  She forced out a laugh and opened the door to the loud, pulsing rhythm of the nightclub.

  “C’mon.” She tugged on Reese’s hand. “Let’s get back out there.”

  As they threaded their way through the bar, Amelia spotted her old work friends. They’d staked out a table near the door, which stood wide open, encouraging the partiers outside to commit to a location. Katie Anderson, Amelia’s old boss, waved her over and patted the chair beside her. She slid onto it as Reese rushed off to find David.

  “Congrats, Mel,” Katie said for at least the fifth time that night. “I still can’t get over this movie thing. This is so huge.”

  She leaned over in her chair and gave Amelia a sideways hug, pressing their cheeks together and in the process snagging a thick strand of her unruly red hair in Amelia’s earring. Extracting it proved difficult after three hours’ worth of liquor. It involved several minutes and a lot of giggling.

  “Have I told you how awesome it is to see you?” Katie said once she’d separated her wavy, auburn locks from Amelia’s stick-straight, chestnut-brown ones. She wiped her eyes. “We’ve missed you at the office.”

  Amelia ignored her pointed look. “I’ve missed you guys, too. A lot.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure you think about us nonstop while you’re lounging around in your PJs, knocking out bestsellers,” said Becca Strazinsky in a dry voice.

  Amelia plastered on her best Southern transplant smile. Becca had been vying for her spot at Katie’s boutique PR firm ever since Amelia had taken an extended leave to write. So far Katie hadn’t promoted her, and Amelia knew she didn’t want to. Her creative director position remained unfilled, her old office empty.

  “I’ll bet she does think about us,” said Carrie Stockton, an account manager who deserved the promotion more than Becca, in her soft Memphis drawl. Amelia’s smile reached her eyes as she turned from Becca to Carrie. “I bet she misses all the drama.”

  “Yeah, seriously. What’s going on? I’ve been seeing the news on Maxwell. You guys have had your hands full,” Amelia said, eager to shift the subject away from herself before Katie, or especially Becca, could ask her how the book was going. She didn’t want to lie.

  Katie’s eyes sparked, and she launched into a five-minute description of the old, familiar client crises. Amelia was completely drawn in, forgetting how removed she’d been from the office in the past few months as she slid into her old role of problem solver.

  “I really miss this,” she said, her voice wistful and her chin in her hands.

  Katie shot her an expectant look, and she cringed.

  “Weeeell, you can come back any time, you know. I’d love it if you came back. And if you’re thinking about it…that must mean you’ve finished the book, then?”

  She blanched. Luckily Reese and David chose that moment to appear beside her, Reese drooping against her fiancé’s side in a dramatic display of exhaustion. Amelia pushed her chair back in relief and hugged her friends good-bye before following Reese toward the door.

  * * *

  Out on the street, she glanced at her phone—it was just after midnight. She ambled down the cobblestone blocks of Beale with one arm linked in Reese’s. David followed behind, cheerfully indulgent as their voluntary DD.

  The air was warm, but the breeze coming off the river had a slight chill in it—the faint hint of a fall that hadn’t yet appeared. Amelia shivered and quickened her step, lost in thought and oblivious to the cars and lights and people surrounding them. The clang of a trolley’s bell jolted her out of her daze, and she almost crashed into Reese, who stopped short at the curb to wait for it to pass. The long red-and-green car clattered by on its track, the driver dinging her bell every thirty seconds as a warning to preoccupied, and drunk, pedestrians like her.

  As they walked, Reese kept up a constant stream of chatter, but Amelia didn’t hear a word of it. Her m
ind skimmed over the conversation she’d just had with Katie, then the call from Andrew, and she realized suddenly the impact one would have on the other. She had no idea what kind of pressure would be added to her schedule now that a movie contract was in her future, but the prospect of returning to her old job seemed unlikely.

  She stared ahead at the trail of moonlight glistening over the broad, rippling expanse of the Mississippi and thought about her old job, her old life, comfortable as a broken-in shoe. She glanced down at the pewter heels that a few hours earlier had held such promise. Suddenly they were offensive—a symbol of everything she was giving up.

  As if in answer to her thoughts, her right heel snagged a jagged edge in the sidewalk. She lurched forward, avoiding a face-first plunge onto the concrete only because Reese squeezed her arm tighter, hauling her up yet again.

  “Whoa, Mel. You okay?”

  “Yeah,” Amelia said, feeling the full weight of the lie.

  * * *

  Fifteen minutes later, David inched his Land Rover over the jagged lip of Amelia’s driveway, and she cursed herself internally for not flipping on the outside light before she’d rushed out several hours earlier. She fumbled for her keys as she made her way up the dark steps. The house was a classic 1920s bungalow, deceptively small from the outside with a façade spanned by a deep porch with battered stone columns—a characteristic of its Craftsman roots. The original, arched front door was deliciously dinged and gnarled. She’d spent an entire weekend stripping layers of old paint and then staining it a deep walnut that matched the rest of the trim.

  Just before she put her key into the lock, she heard the faint whoosh of a window being rolled down. She turned to see Reese’s head leaning out of it, her hair a blue-white glow in the light of a nearby street lamp.

  “You all right?” Reese called out.

  “Yeah, I’m fine,” Amelia said with a surprised laugh, pausing as she slid the key into the deadbolt. She opened the door and turned to face them before crossing the threshold into her dim foyer. “Thanks for the ride.”

  “Oh…kay,” Reese said, watching her in a way that made Amelia feel discomfited. “I’ll call you in the morning.” She didn’t roll the window up until David had shifted the hulking vehicle into reverse and eased it back down the narrow drive.

  Amelia kept the smile pasted on her lips and repeated the words in her head.

  I’m fine.

  She tossed her keys with a loud clatter into a pottery bowl on one end of the long wood bench in her entry and kicked out of her shoes, wishing she hadn’t picked a night like this to break them in. She raised one foot and tugged up the leg of her dark skinny jeans, wincing as she surveyed the glaring, red blister on her heel. She remembered Reese’s comment in the bar. Oh well, at least they looked damn good. She took in a long, slow breath and rubbed her eyes. The same could be said for her life right now. It looked damn good on the surface, the sources of friction visible only to her.

  She walked into her living room, its cream walls, slipcovered furniture, and quirky collection of local, homespun art giving the room a cottage kind of charm. Her favorite chair, light blue and well-worn, looked like she’d just slipped out of it—a book lay folded open on its arm. Beside it glowed a small mercury glass lamp, the only source of light in the silent house. She kept the lamp on a timer to make it look like someone was home when she was out, a habit she’d picked up from her mom.

  She felt the usual prickle of pride as she glanced around the cozy room. Her house was one of the things she loved best about living in Memphis. So many of her friends in other cities—especially her old friends in New York, where what had seemed like an enormous salary turned out to barely cover cab fares—were paying double in rent for cramped, dingy apartments what she paid for a mortgage on a three-bedroom, two and a half-bath house with modern upgrades and period charm.

  Seriously, your life’s not so bad, Mel. A tiny smile tugged at her lips as she crossed the black-and-white tile floor of her kitchen, thinking only she would feel the need to talk herself off the ledge the day she’d sold the movie rights to her first book. Her friends, if they knew, would think she was unhinged. She reached for a glass, half-filled it with water from the tap, and popped two ibuprofen to stave off the next morning’s headache. The microwave screen read 12:32. Hmm, not too late to work.

  She smiled again, thinking her friends would question her sanity at that thought, too. But she couldn’t afford to lose the whole day. Besides, she felt good, wired, the haze of her lingering buzz minimizing the enormity of her task.

  She’d written her first book in the late-night hours. It was the only time she’d had, as busy as she’d been with work. At the time she’d had no inkling anybody else might want to read what she was writing. She probably wouldn’t even have shown the manuscript to Reese if she hadn’t demanded to know why Amelia was suddenly so busy all the time. And without a doubt, she wouldn’t have attempted to get it published if Reese hadn’t pushed her into it.

  She shook her head as she mulled over the many ways her life had changed in the past two years.

  Placing her glass in the sink, she flipped off the light and headed down the back hall toward her room. She replaced her party clothes with a T-shirt and her most lived-in flannel pants, pink plaid ones with a tiny hole at the left knee. Her pulse throbbed in her temples, beating past the layers of alcohol and Advil, as she made her way barefoot down the hardwood floor of the hallway to her home office.

  She flipped on the light as she stepped into the room. Two months earlier, she’d painted the blue walls yellow—she’d read it was the best color for stimulating creativity. The small, square space was stuffed with an inspirational assortment of her favorite things: the scrapbooks and journals she’d kept since childhood, her favorite books, framed photos of all shapes and sizes. When she flipped on the desk lamp, her eyes lit on a cluster of frames on her desktop. In one was her older brother, Henry, and his family. In another were her, Henry, and their grandmother, smiling in front of a roller coaster on a trip to Six Flags in St. Louis. And in a third was her father—the only picture she had of him—with Brooke in a park or in the woods, some outdoor setting unknown to her. Her father was a poet, which sounded romantic, but became less so when you learned he’d left her mom for another woman when Amelia was five months old, a nurse in Brooke’s obstetrician’s office. He’d told Brooke the woman was his muse, that she’d inspired the best work of his life. Amelia thought it was as good an excuse as any to get the hell out of Dodge.

  He’d died when she was nine, in a motorcycle accident in Colorado.

  She sighed and plopped into her modern, lime-green desk chair, which contrasted starkly with the quirky antique table she used as a desk. Flipping open her laptop, she pulled up the blank document she’d closed twelve hours earlier, willing herself to be objective. This isn’t personal. I have a job to do. She paused with her fingers over the keyboard.

  And stared at the screen.

  Who was she kidding? She might have been able to detach herself the first two times around, but those first two books were different. She’d been drawing from the good stuff then, and the good stuff had been easy to write.

  She stared at the desktop, one finger absently tracing the patterns in the wood. Her series, Shattered, was billed as a dystopian action-adventure, but at its core it was a love story—one critic had described it as The Maze Runner-meets-When Harry Met Sally, and secretly she’d always thought that was an apt description. The story was set a century into the future, twenty-five years after a cataclysmic collision with a meteor had shifted the Earth’s orbit, changing weather patterns and exterminating entire species—and two-thirds of the globe’s population—within weeks. Survivors had huddled into commune-like communities, and governments had morphed and joined forces or dissolved altogether.

  At the series’ start, an international team of scientists who’d been studying the disaster predicted another collision within the year. In the midst o
f government cat fighting, the group was preparing to send up a team of experts charged with diverting the enormous mass of debris and gases that was moving in the Earth’s direction. This team included prodigies from a prestigious college program who had been hand-picked and taken from their families as kids to rebuild North America’s fledgling space program. Among them were Nick Brockman and Liana Riley, the series’ main characters.

  The idea for the first book had come to Amelia in a dream—literally, she’d dreamed the entire story as if she were watching it on a movie screen, and astonishingly remembered it in vivid detail when she’d woken up. She’d written down as much as she could fit into her journal and eventually moved to the computer screen.

  She’d published the books under a pseudonym—Mel Henry—and a lot of people knew that, but no one knew why. She’d always been a little shy, a little reserved. Her agent, her friends, her mom, they all thought she wanted to protect her privacy, and Amelia let them think it. No one, not even Reese, knew that the reason she’d kept her identity hidden was because she’d based Nick and Liana on herself and Noah, and because parts of the books—lines of dialogue, certain scenes—were pulled directly from her past.

  But Noah would know it. She was sure of it.

  Amelia thought that over, her chin in her hands. It had been eight years since she’d last seen Noah. Like her, he had moved on, moved far away from the small Midwestern town where their story had started. She wasn’t sure where he was, and after the way they’d left things, she figured he didn’t care where she was.

  That thought made her feel faintly pathetic as she pulled up Google and typed in the familiar combination of letters.

  Noah Bradley. Click.

  And there he was. Well, there they were—Noah Bradley was a fairly common name. She was 99.8 percent sure he was the Noah Bradley in Texas, though his Facebook profile was private and his profile photo was of a brown Labrador retriever. She’d pored over the website of the architectural firm she was pretty sure he worked for, but it didn’t include staff photos. By putting his name and his firm’s name in the same search field, she’d found him quoted in a few news stories, but never about anything personal, just projects he’d been involved in. Nothing that quelled the ache inside her.