by Tessa Bailey
An LAPD helicopter circling overhead while she led a conga line had definitely reaffirmed her status as the reigning party queen of Los Angeles. Probably. They’d confiscated her phone during the whole mug shot/fingerprint thing, so she didn’t know what was happening on the internet. Her fingers were itching to tap some apps, and that’s exactly what she would do as soon as Hannah arrived to bail her out.
She looked at her reflection, surprised to find the prospect of breaking the internet didn’t set her heart into a thrilling pitter-patter the way it did before. Was she broken?
Piper snorted and pushed away from the sink, using an elbow to pull down the door handle upon leaving. Obviously the night had taken its toll—after all, it was nearly five o’clock in the morning. As soon as she got some sleep, she’d spend the day reveling in congratulatory texts and an inundation of new followers. All would be well.
The guard cuffed Piper again and started to walk her back to the cell, just as another guard called down to them from the opposite end. “Yo, Lina. Bellinger made bail. Bring her down to processing.”
Her arms flew up in victory. “Yes!”
Lina laughed. “Come on, beauty queen.”
Vigor restored, Piper skipped alongside the other woman. “Lina, huh? I owe you big-time.” She clutched her hands beneath her chin and gave her a winning pout. “Thank you for being so nice to me.”
“Don’t read too much into it,” drawled the guard, though her expression was pleased. “I just wasn’t in the mood to clean up piss.”
Piper laughed, allowing Lina to unlock the door at the end of the gray hallway. And there was Hannah in the processing area, wearing pajamas and a ball cap, filling out paperwork with her eyes half closed.
Warmth wiggled into Piper’s chest at the sight of her younger sister. They were nothing alike, had even less in common, but there was no one else Piper would call in a pinch. Of the two sisters, Hannah was the dependable one, even though she had a lazy hippie side.
Where Piper was taller, Hannah had been called a shrimp growing up and never quite hit the middle school growth spurt. At the moment, she kept her petite figure buried under a UCLA sweatshirt, her sandy-blond hair poking out around the blank red hat.
“She clear?” Lina asked a thin-lipped man hunched behind the desk.
He waved a hand without looking up. “Money solves everything.”
Lina unlocked her cuffs once again, and she shot forward. “Hannnnns,” Piper whimpered, throwing her arms around her sister. “I’ll pay you back for this. I’ll do your chores for a week.”
“We don’t have chores, you radish.” Hannah yawned, grinding a fist into her eye. “Why do you smell like incense?”
“Oh.” Piper sniffed her shoulder. “I think the fortune-teller lit some.” Straightening, she squinted her eyes. “Not sure how she found out about the party.”
Hannah gaped, seeming to awaken at least marginally, her hazel eyes a total contrast to Piper’s baby blues. “Did she happen to tell you there’s an angry stepfather in your future?”
Piper winced. “Oof. I had a feeling I couldn’t avoid the wrath of Daniel Q. Bellinger.” She craned her neck to see if there was anyone retrieving her phone. “How did he find out?”
“The news, Pipes. The news.”
“Right.” She sighed, smoothing her hands down the rumpled skirt of her dress. “Nothing the lawyers can’t handle, right? Hopefully he’ll let me get in a shower and some sleep before one of his famous lectures. I’m a walking after photo.”
“Shut up, you look great,” Hannah said, her lips twitching as she completed the paperwork with a flourish of her signature. “You always look great.”
Piper did a little shimmy.
“Bye, Lina!” Piper called on the way out of the station, her beloved phone cradled in her arms like a newborn, fingers vibrating with the need to swipe. She’d been directed to the back exit where Hannah could pull the car around. Protocol, they’d said.
She took one step out the door and was surrounded by photographers. “Piper! Over here!”
Her vanity screeched like a pterodactyl.
Nerves swerved right and left in her belly, but she flashed them a quick smile and put her head down, clicking as fast as she could toward Hannah’s waiting Jeep.
“Piper Bellinger!” one of the paparazzi shouted. “How was your night in jail?”
“Do you regret wasting taxpayer money?”
The toe of her high heel caught in a crack, and she almost sprawled face-first onto the asphalt but caught the edge of the door Hannah had pushed open, throwing herself into the passenger side. Closing the door helped cut off the shouted questions, but the last one she’d heard continued to blare in her mind.
Wasting taxpayer money? She’d just thrown a party, right?
Fine, it had taken a considerable amount of police officers to break it up, but like, this was Los Angeles. Weren’t the police just waiting around for stuff like this to happen?
Okay, that sounded privileged and bratty even to her own ears.
Suddenly she wasn’t so eager to check her social media.
She wiped her sweating palms on her dress. “I wasn’t trying to put anyone out or waste money. I wasn’t thinking that far ahead,” Piper said quietly, twisting to face her sister as much as she could in a seat belt. “Is this bad, Hanns?”
Hannah’s teeth were sunk into her lower lip, her hands on the wheel slowly navigating her way through the people frantically snapping Piper’s picture. “It’s not good,” she answered after a pause. “But hey, you used to pull stunts like this all the time, remember? The lawyers always find a way to spin it, and tomorrow they’ll be onto something else.” She reached out and tapped the touch screen, and a low melody flooded the car. “Check it out. I have the perfect song cued up for this moment.”
The somber notes of “Prison Women” by REO Speedwagon floated out from the speakers.
Piper’s skull thudded against the headrest. “Very funny.” She tapped her phone against her knee for a few seconds, before snapping her spine straight and opening Instagram.
There it was. The picture she’d posted early this morning, at 2:42, accused the time stamp. Kirby, the traitorous wench, had snapped it using Piper’s phone. In the shot, Piper was perched on the shoulders of a man whose name she couldn’t recall—though she had a vague recollection of him claiming to play second string for the Lakers?—stripped down to panties and boob tape, but like, in an artistic way. Her Valentino dress was draped over a lounge chair in the background. Firecrackers went off around her like the Fourth of July, swathing Piper in sparkles and smoke. She looked like a goddess rising from an electric mist—and the picture was nearing a million likes.
Telling herself not to, Piper tapped the highlighted section that would show her exactly who had liked the picture. Adrian wasn’t one of them.
Which was fine. A million other people had, right?
But they hadn’t spent three weeks with her.
To them, she was just a two-dimensional image. If they spent more than three weeks with Piper, would they scroll past, too? Letting her sink into the blur of the thousand other girls just like her?
“Hey,” Hannah said, pausing the song. “It’s going to be all right.”
Piper’s laugh sounded forced, so she cut it short. “I know. It always turns out all right.” She pressed her lips together. “Want to hear about the wet boxers competition?”
Chapter Three
It was not all right, as it turned out.
Nothing was.
Not according to their stepfather, Daniel Bellinger, revered Academy Award–winning movie producer, philanthropist, and competitive yachtsman.
Piper and Hannah had attempted to creep in through the catering entrance of their Bel-Air mansion. They’d moved in when Piper was four and Hannah two, after their mother married Daniel, and neither of them could remember living anywhere else. Every once in a while, when Piper caught a whiff of the ocean, her me
mory sent up a signal through the fog, reminding her of the Pacific Northwest town where she’d been born, but there was nothing substantial to cling to and it always drifted away before she could grasp on.
Now, her stepfather’s wrath? She could fully grasp that.
It was etched into the tanned lines of his famous face, in the disappointed headshakes he gave the sisters as they sat, side by side, on a couch in his home office. Behind him, awards gleamed on shelves, framed movie posters hung on walls, and the phone on his L-shaped desk lit up every two seconds, although he’d silenced it for the upcoming lecture. Their mother was at Pilates, and out of everything? That made Piper the most nervous. Maureen tended to have a calming effect on her husband—and he was anything but calm right now.
“Um, Daniel?” Piper chanced brightly, tucking a piece of wilted hair behind her ear. “None of this is Hannah’s fault. Is it okay if she heads to bed?”
“She stays.” He pinned Hannah with a stern look. “You were forbidden to bail her out and did it anyway.”
Piper turned her astonishment on her sister. “You did what?”
“What was I supposed to do?” Hannah whipped off her hat and wrung it between her knees. “Leave you there, Pipes?”
“Yeah,” Piper said slowly, facing her stepfather with mounting horror. “What did you want her to do? Leave me there?”
Agitated, Daniel shoved his fingers through his hair. “I thought you learned your lesson a long time ago, Piper. Or lessons, plural, rather. You were still flitting around to every goddamn party between here and the Valley, but you weren’t costing me money or making me look like a fucking idiot in the process.”
“Ouch.” Piper sunk back into the couch cushions. “You don’t have to be mean.”
“I don’t have to be—” Daniel made an exasperated sound and pinched the bridge of his nose. “You are twenty-eight years old, Piper, and you have done nothing with your life. Nothing. You’ve been afforded every opportunity, given anything your little heart could ask for, and all you have to show for it is a . . . a digital existence. It means nothing.”
If that’s true, then I mean nothing, too.
Piper snagged a pillow and held it over her roiling stomach, giving Hannah a grateful look when she reached over to rub her knee. “Daniel, I’m sorry. I had a bad breakup last night and I acted out. I won’t do anything like that ever again.”
Daniel seemed to deflate a little, retreating to his desk to lean on the edge. “No one handed me anything in this business. I started as a page on the Paramount lot. Filling sandwich orders, fetching coffee. I was an errand boy while I worked my way through film school.” Piper nodded, doing her best to appear deeply interested, even though Daniel told this story at every dinner party and charity event. “I stayed ready, armed with knowledge and drive, just waiting for my opportunity, so I could seize it”—he snapped his fist closed—“and never look back.”
“That’s when you were asked to run lines with Corbin Kidder,” Piper recited from memory.
“Yes.” Her stepfather inclined his head, momentarily pleased to find out she’d been paying attention. “As the director looked on, I not only delivered the lines with passion and zeal, but I improved the tired text. Added my own flair.”
“And you were brought on as a writer’s assistant.” Hannah sighed, winding her finger for him to wrap up the oft-repeated story. “For Kubrick himself.”
He exhaled through his nose. “That’s right. And it brings me back to my original point.” A finger was wagged. “Piper, you’re too comfortable. At least Hannah earned a degree and is gainfully employed. Even if I called in favors to get her the location scout gig, at least she’s productive.” Hannah hunched her shoulders but said nothing. “Would you even care if opportunity came knocking on your door, Piper? You have no drive to go anywhere. Or do anything. Why would you when this life I’ve provided you is always here, rewarding your lack of ambition with comfort and an excuse to remain blissfully stagnant?”
Piper stared up at the man she thought of as a father, stunned to find out he’d been seeing her in such a negative light. She’d grown up in Bel-Air. Vacationing and throwing pool parties and rubbing elbows with famous actors. This was the only life she knew. None of her friends worked. Only a handful of them had bothered with college. What was the point of a degree? To make money? They already had tons of it.
If Daniel or her mother had ever encouraged her to do something else, she couldn’t remember any such conversation. Was motivation a thing that other people were simply born with? And when the time came to make their way in the world, they simply acted? Should she have been looking for a purpose this whole time?
Weirdly, none of the inspirational quotes she’d posted in the past held the answer.
“I love your mother very much,” Daniel continued, as if reading her mind. “Or I don’t think I would have been this patient for so long. But, Piper . . . you went too far this time.”
Her eyes shot to his, her knees beginning to tremble. Had he ever used that resigned tone with her before? If so, she didn’t recall. “I did?” she whispered.
Beside her, Hannah shifted, a sign she was picking up on the gravity of the moment, too.
Daniel bobbed his head. “The owner of the Mondrian is financing my next film.” That news landed like a grenade in the center of the office. “He’s not happy about last night, to put it quite mildly. You made his hotel seem like it lacks security. You made it a laughingstock. And worse, you could have burned the goddamn place down.” He stared at her with hard eyes, letting it all sink in. “He’s threatened to pull the budget, Piper. It’s a very considerable amount. The movie will not get made without his contribution. At least not until I find another backer—and it could take me years in this economy.”
“I’m sorry,” Piper breathed, the magnitude of what she’d done sinking her even farther into the couch cushions. Had she really blown a business deal for Daniel in the name of posting a revenge snap that would make her triumphant in a breakup? Was she that frivolous and stupid?
Had Adrian been right?
“I didn’t know. I . . . I had no idea who owned the hotel.”
“No, of course not. Who cares who your actions affect, right, Piper?”
“All right.” Hannah sat forward with a frown. “You don’t have to be so hard on her. She obviously realizes she made a mistake.”
Daniel remained unfazed. “Well, it’s a mistake she’s going to answer for.”
Piper and Hannah traded a glance. “What do you mean by”—Piper wiggled her fingers in the shape of air quotes—“‘answer for’?”
Their stepfather took his time rounding his desk and opening the bottom filing drawer, hesitating only a moment before removing a manila folder. He tapped it steadily on his desk calendar, considering the nervous sisters through narrowed eyes. “We don’t talk a lot about your past. The time before I married your mother. I’ll admit that’s mostly because I’m selfish and I didn’t want reminders that she loved someone before me.”
“Awww,” Piper said automatically.
He ignored her. “As you know, your father was a fisherman. He lived in Westport, Washington, the same town where your mother was born. Quaint little place.”
Piper started at the mention of her birth father. A king crab fisherman named Henry who’d died a young man, sucked down into the icy depths of the Bering Sea. Her eyes drifted to the window, to the world beyond, trying to remember what came before this swanky life to which she’d grown so accustomed. The landscape and color of the first four years of her life were elusive, but she could remember the outline of her father’s head. Could remember his cracking laugh, the smell of salt water on his skin.
Could remember her mother’s laughter echoing in kind, warm and sweet.
There was no way to wrap her head around that other time and place—how different it was from her current situation—and she’d tried many times. If Maureen hadn’t moved to Los Angeles as a grieving
widow, armed with nothing more than good looks and being a dab hand at sewing, she never would have landed a job working in wardrobe on Daniel’s first film. He wouldn’t have fallen in love with her, and this lavish lifestyle of theirs would be nothing more than a dream, while Maureen existed in some other, unimaginable timeline.
“Westport,” Hannah repeated, as if testing the word on her tongue. “Mom never told us the name.”
“Yes, well. I can imagine everything that happened was painful for her.” He sniffed, tapping the edge of the folder again. “Obviously she’s fine now. Better than fine.” A beat passed. “The men in Westport . . . they head to the Bering Sea during king crab season, in search of their annual payday. But it’s not always reliable. Sometimes they catch very little and have to split a minor sum among a large crew. Because of this, your father also owned a small bar.”
Piper’s lips edged up into a smile. This was the most anyone had ever spoken to her about their birth father, and the details . . . they were like coins dropping into an empty jar inside of her, slowly filling it up. She wanted more. She wanted to know everything about this man whom she could only remember for his boisterous laugh.
Hannah cleared her throat, her thigh pressing against Piper’s. “Why are you telling us all of this now?” She chewed her lip. “What’s in the folder?”
“The deed to the bar. He left the building to you girls in his will.” He set the folder down on his desk and flipped it open. “A long time ago, I put a custodian in place, to make sure it didn’t fall into disrepair, but truthfully, I’d forgotten all about it until now.”
“Oh my God . . .” Hannah said under her breath, obviously predicting some outcome to this conversation that Piper was not yet grasping. “A-are you . . . ?”