I started down the hall without thinking, but I stopped just outside the door to my bedroom. I could hear Ava and Layla in there, talking. I heard Ava make a noise that was suspiciously like a sob. That’s when I turned and walked away.
I wasn’t proud of it, but that’s what I did. I walked away.
I went around the house to the breaker room, intending to properly fix the wiring issue I’d only patched before. I needed to get my hands in the guts of something electronic. I needed to focus on a problem that was fixable. Al had taught me that. When things got to be too much, too overwhelming, focus on something fixable.
I tried. I tried to focus on the wiring, on replacing one that had frayed, on reconnecting a couple that had come loose. I tried to focus on binding them all in neat bundles, out of the way, organized.
It didn’t seem to matter how much I tried to focus. I just kept seeing that bitch’s botoxed face in my head. As badly as I felt about what I’d done to Ava, it was a private affair. Aside from those of us at the ranch, no one knew about it, and it had only lasted a few days. It was a shame I might carry the rest of my days, and Ava might continue to hate me forever, but it didn’t really affect her life. Not like naked pictures on the Internet. Not like a tell-all book filled with god-only-knows what sort of hurtful lies… I couldn’t imagine a scenario where there would be anything truthful that Ava had ever done that could fill a tell-all book. The girl was only 19, for fuck sakes, and as innocent as they come. How much could she have done?
I had no doubt the book would be filled with bullshit designed simply to sell copies and line the pocket of the bitch telling the stories.
What kind of a woman would do that? What kind of a woman could play Ava’s mom one second and then turn around and stab her in the back the next? What kind of woman…?
My mind stuttered in the middle of a thought. What kind of woman? That was what I needed to find out. That was the fixable problem.
Because I wanted to fix things for Ava, even if I couldn’t fix things with Ava. I owed her that much.
I owed her a hell of a lot more, but this much I could do.
Leaving the breaker room, I circled the house again, keeping away from the side my room was on. Just as I made it to my office, I heard the sound of an engine starting and knew that River must be taking the girls to the airport. I couldn’t blame Ava for that. I didn’t even want to be around myself right now. I just hoped she didn’t do anything she’d regret later. I hoped if she was headed back to L.A., it was to her parents’ house, where she could get some rest and comfort, where she could feel safe and not worry that someone was going to betray her as soon as she let her guard down.
I was an ass.
Focus on something fixable.
When I sat at the computer, I paused, letting the idea roll around in my head a while. It had been a long time since I’d had a problem I wanted to fix this badly, since I’d felt those wheels start creaking to life.
I’d done a little investigating into Ava’s life in the past week. Enough to know basic things. This was different, though. Now it was time for a deep search.
I started looking everywhere. Google to start, which mostly just brought up the latest gossip, but I soon spread further, dug in deeper. I found clips of commercials she’d done as a kid, movies where she’d played an extra with no lines, even a picture of her from her junior high yearbook, skinny and awkward with blond braids and braces.
There were a lot of pictures of her with her castmates, too. Not just screen caps or publicity shoots, but of them hanging around on the backlot, or having lunch, or huddled under umbrellas. They looked like a real family. Every picture of Ava with Fiona had her smiling up at that bitch like the sun shone out of her ass.
Suddenly, I felt the need to know everything I could about this woman. I knew exactly what I wanted to do for Ava, even if she never knew it was me. I wanted to take Fiona down and maybe that scumbag manager, too.
Fiona was easy enough to find information on. There were articles about her in every gossip rag and sleazy website I could find, going back years. She’d been a relatively famous actress in the late-90s/early-2000s, but her career had fallen off sharply. Since then, she’d had a spate of roles as mothers, or mothers-in-law, or spinster aunts. In every instance that I saw, Fiona played second fiddle until one day, suddenly, there was a scandal involving her (always younger, always rising) co-star, and their careers imploded. Fiona just seemed to brush the dirt off and keep going.
Ken was harder, but I found just what I was looking for. He’d worked with Fiona on a show in 2005, when he was young and new to the business. His client had been Fiona’s co-star, just 18 and cute as a button. A few years into her role on the show, she was caught snorting coke at a nightclub she wasn’t old enough to be in. Her manager could not be reached for comment.
That was enough. I could start with that. Now to get to work.
Even though my anger at both Ken and Fiona made me want to start with revenge, I knew there was a much more pressing issue at hand. I hadn’t tried any serious hacking in years now, but I figured I could dust off those skills pretty easily. Manipulating news sites so that any stories involving the leaked nudes would be given the lowest priority in any algorithm wasn’t so much difficult as it was tedious.
But what did I care? It wasn’t like I was doing anything else with my time. And even if I had obligations, nothing mattered any more beyond making Ava’s life what it should be. What she deserved it to be.
Chapter 21
Ava
“Sure you don’t want me to come in with you?”
I couldn’t blame Layla for asking. We’d been sitting in her car outside my parents’ house for the last fifteen minutes, and I couldn’t bring myself to open the door.
“I’m totally willing,” she continued. “I will take that bullet for you. I’m that good of a friend.”
I smiled a little. Ever since I’d fired her, she’d been taking every opportunity possible to mention that we were friends, no matter how often I reassured her that I believed it. “No,” I said, taking a deep breath. “No, I should do this on my own.”
My mom had been very sweet on the phone. No recriminations, no disappointment. It was almost too much. When I’d started getting bigger roles, Mom had been very careful to warn me about the sort of people I’d meet in Hollywood. The sort of manipulation and betrayal I’d face. There was an ”I told you so” waiting in there. I knew it. And who could blame her, after everything I’d done to her and my dad?
“Want me to keep the engine running for a quick getaway?” Layla asked as I reached for the door handle for the sixth time. She’d offered to let me stay with her, but her place was just a room in an apartment she shared with two other women. I was not going to fit there.
“Just... tell me again I can do this?”
“You can do this, boo.”
“Thanks, Layla,” I said, turning to pull her into a hug. “For everything. Really. I don’t know what I’d have done without you.”
“Dude,” she said, squeezing me tight. “You sound like you think I’m never going to see you again. We’re buds now. We’re gonna hang out all the time. Especially since we’re both out of work.”
I laughed as I pulled back. “Well, there’s an upside to all this then, at least.” I looked out the window again, toward my parents’ house, the house I’d grown up in, the house I’d left in a fit almost two years ago. With a firm nod, I opened the door and stepped out.
“You got this, Ava,” Layla said, and I managed a sort of half-smile as I strode toward the house.
The door opened when I was about halfway up the walk, and my mom came running out to pull me into a hug. “Oh, baby,” she said, and I could hear the tears she was holding back. “Oh, Ava-bean, I’m so glad you’re home.”
It was hearing my childhood nickname that made me break down into tears of my own. I hugged her back tightly and buried my face in her shoulder.
My mom always
smelled like rose water and soil. It smelled like home, and all at once I felt myself falling back into childhood. I supposed I’d never really grown up, never really lived on my own like a regular person.
My dad came out next, a big grin on his face. I knew that a lot of people thought my dad was a little dim, the way he always looked at life like nothing was ever wrong, but I knew better. It was his way of supporting people—showing them that life went on.
“There’s my sweet Ava-bean!” he said, giving me a quick hug. “Welcome home, bug.”
I laughed, and it was only slightly choked off by tears. “Thanks, Dad.”
“Come on in,” Mom said. “You must be exhausted. We have lunch ready whenever you want it.” She reached for my hand to tug me inside, and her fingers touched the ring I was still wearing. I’d wanted to toss it away, but for some reason I couldn’t make myself do it, so instead I just switched it to another finger. Besides, I might turn out to need the money it was worth after all. “That’s pretty,” she said, and I could see some unspoken questions behind her eyes, but she was doing her best to hold back. There was plenty we needed to talk about, lots about my life in the last couple of years I had to fill her in on, but not this. Not yet, anyway.
I pulled my hand back, glancing down at it briefly. “It’s... yeah, it is pretty, but I’m not sure if I’m going to keep it. Anyway… you mentioned something about lunch?”
“All laid out in the kitchen,” she said, and I was grateful she didn’t push. I slipped the ring off my finger, playing with it in my palm a bit. I should send it back to Bennett, really, but it wasn’t like he needed it. Either way, I could decide what to do with it another time, after I had a chance to just crash away from all the drama of my life and my career.
As I passed the ring from finger to finger, toying with it in my hand, I let it slip back onto my hand.
I’ll deal with it tomorrow.
My mom let me take my lunch to my room, and I plugged my phone in almost immediately. It had been dead since the day I got to the ranch, but I couldn’t afford to block out the world any longer. As I munched on my sandwich, I flicked through dozens of texts from friends, co-stars, directors, agents, even my hairdresser.
There were two conspicuous absences: Ken and Fiona.
And Bennett.
So three.
Not that I’d expected any of them to call or text. My fingers unconsciously moved to turn the ring on my left hand, slipping it off and sliding it back onto my wedding finger. When I realized what I had done, I switched it back and then sat on the hand to keep from doing it again.
In a way, I was glad that none of them had tried to contact me. I didn’t know what I’d say if they had. I didn’t have anything to say to any of them.
For a while, I just stared at my list of unanswered messages with a feeling like there was a lump of lead in my stomach.
I was back in the real world now. Nothing to do but start living it.
By the time I’d finished answering the ones I really needed to get back to (I left the one from the studio exec saying he was “so sorry things had turned out this way” and “wished me the best on my future endeavors” for later), my mom was calling up that dinner was ready.
It was such a wonderfully normal thing, such a callback to before things had gotten ugly and complicated, that I had to laugh. Maybe things would be okay. Maybe I could just stay here until I figured everything out.
My dad was waiting at the bottom of the stairs with a glass of orange juice. “Don’t tell your mom,” he whispered. “I gave it a little kick.”
I took it from him and sipped curiously, surprised to find it tasted of what I now knew was vodka. I smiled and hooked my arm through his. “Thanks, Dad.”
My ring clinked against the glass, but for tonight, I was not going to think about it. Tonight I was nobody’s sweetheart. Tonight, I was just Ava-bean.
Chapter 22
Bennett
Despite my best efforts, when I did a search for Ava the next morning, her pictures and her feud with Fiona came in at the top of every page. Every gossip site had it either as the front page story or at the top of the sidebar. This was bigger than me, clearly, and out of my skill set.
Luckily, in my time on the convention circuit, I’d met a lot of people working in the IT world. One of them, Luke Braden, worked at Google, specializing in Search Engine Optimization. I figured if he didn’t know how to help me out, he’d at least know someone who would. I refused to believe this was out of our hands.
Well, my hands, anyway. Ava’s hands were somewhere else entirely.
I caught Luke just before his lunch break, and it was clear that he was impatient to get going.
“You wanna know what Google does when someone’s reputation is being ruined by information on the Internet?”
“Yeah,” I said, trying for casual. “I was just curious. How might somebody go about burying that kind of news.”
“You don’t,” Luke said. “Google doesn’t have a policy on it or a method for it. If it’s on the Internet... tough luck. What happened? You finally take a prank too far?”
Am I that obvious? “Something like that,” I admitted. I wasn’t sure how to impress on him how serious this was without telling him the whole story.
I heard him sigh, and then he said, “Look, if you really want to get something like that out of the top of searches... the only way is to put out something even more interesting. You can’t fool the computers, but you can fool the people using them.”
Bingo. If there was anything that was in my skill set, it was fooling people, and as soon as Luke said that, the gears started turning in my head. “All right,” I said. “Thanks, man. I’ll let you go now.”
“Anytime. Hey, did you ever tell Maxie it was you who filled her fountain with dish soap?”
“I am taking that to my grave, man,” I said with a laugh. “Thanks again.”
“Welcome. Hit me up next time you’re in town?”
“Will do.”
I hung up with Luke, the barest seeds of a plan beginning to grow in my mind. We needed to get Ava into the news again, with something positive. Something so big nobody would be talking about her pictures or Fiona’s bitchy tell-all. I had an idea of something that would work, but it wasn’t something I was going to do without Ava’s willing participation, and convincing her wasn’t going to be easy.
I couldn’t call her. She’d never pick up for me. I had to go see her in person. Not that she’d want to see me then either, but maybe if I surprised her I’d have a shot. Not that I really had any clue where she was. Finding her would be my first problem.
Throwing clean clothes, toiletries, and my laptop into my bag, I rushed through packing. I had a house in L.A., so I didn’t need to bring much, but I didn’t want to get there and have left anything important behind. I’d have to let River know I was leaving, but that was just a technicality.
I grabbed the keys to the Jeep and headed for his cabin, the closest one to the house. I rapped lightly on his door. He was probably awake, but who really knew with him.
There was a shuffling noise inside, and then he opened the door, just a little, squinting out into the sunlight. His hair was a mess, and he was only wearing boxers. Clearly, he’d just woken up.
“Hey,” I said. “Don’t want to bother you, but I’m heading out for a while. I’ll let you know when I’m planning on coming back.
“Sure thing, boss,” he said, nodding, carefully keeping the door open only a crack. “Want me to drive you into the airport?”
“Nah, I’m just taking the Jeep,” I said, and then I spotted something through the window. Something distinctly feminine in appearance. River didn’t usually bring women home (not that I minded. It was his home, after all), and given how close he and Layla had gotten, it wasn’t hard to guess who it was.
“Layla?” I asked, pushing the door open a little. River wasn’t holding it tightly, likely not expecting me to barge in, so it was easy e
nough to push. Sure enough, there was Layla, standing in the entryway, wrapped in a sheet.
“Um, hey,” she said. “I’m still hella angry at you, but I had a little time off, so….”
I didn’t let her finish, just pushed past River to wrap my arms around her, picking her up off the floor in my exuberance. “I am so glad to see you!”
“Whoa,” she said. “Hold on there, dude. I am here for River. Not for you. That is a whole mess of nonsense I want no part of, and as far as I can tell, it’s completely your fault.”
“Layla,” I said, so happy to see her that I lost all semblance of dignity and completely ignored her anger and accusations. “Beautiful Layla. Amazing, talented, sweet Layla….”
“Enough with the flattery,” she said, crossing her arms over the sheet and somehow managing to still look like she was the one in charge of this whole situation. “What do you want?”
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