A pause in her step as she glances over her shoulder. “You did this so Nico’d send me?”

  He smiles. “I kept watering a palm tree with Old Staggs so I could keep going and Nico’d get the call. A waste of bourbon, but it did the trick.”

  “Well, you almost got the troops, not me. If it weren’t for Olivier—”

  “Olivier hitting on a married woman at the Canteen, just down the street from here? Who do you think was at the Canteen, telling him all night just how much that woman was making eyes at him?”

  She smiles as she searches for the best, least noticeable way out. “All that to get me out of Sunday dinner?”

  “Nico took enough from me today; I at least wanted you for the evening.”

  They can’t talk about this now. Not yet. “I heard your accent back there.”

  “I said I wasn’t drunk. I didn’t say I was sober. Take the side entrance, through that hall.”

  She veers off, taking the hallway. They’ve almost made it to the side exit and are passing a man who’s leaned heavily against a pay phone, when suddenly that man sees Frankie and steps forward and pinches her butt. Without thinking, she wheels around and slugs him. Not a slap. Not a sweet scolding, but a full-on punch. All her anger at the situation landing on the man’s jaw.

  There is a moment when no one does anything. Each thrown by the sudden course of events. The man holds his face, confused and staring at Jack as if sure he is the one who threw the punch. Then Frankie snaps to and is pulling on Jack’s arm, and the two are running through the hall when the man starts to yell. In seconds they’ve burst into the night.

  Outside, Jack stops, doubled over. Unafraid and laughing.

  “Don’t stop! Move!” She spots her car and grabs his elbow, and they’ve just made it to the next row of cars when she hears the door to the club sigh as it opens. Quickly, she yanks on him to duck. They crouch by someone’s tire.

  Jack’s eyes flash. “Nico teach you to punch like that?”

  Just barely, she raises her head enough to see the man turning back inside. “I’m from New York. We don’t slap.”

  “I’ll say you don’t.” A pause. “I liked it.”

  She ignores him, focused on the side entrance. For a bit longer, they stay crouched, then hurry to the car.

  “The guy’s not following,” Jack says, getting in the passenger seat. “You’re fine.”

  But her heart won’t stop racing—even as she drives, she checks the mirrors.

  “Cop-spotter,” he says, motioning to the side mirror. “That’s what they used to call them. And why they put them in cars, so you could see if you were being trailed. Are you?”

  “No.”

  “See? We’re fine.” He gives a short laugh and puts his arm on the door, relaxed wherever he goes. “Maybe your dad was a boxer.”

  “Not my mom?” She grins, but calling anyone but Fiona her mom feels wrong, and she quickly loses the smile. She’s always been curious about the people who raised her for five years before deciding she wasn’t worth the effort, and even the curiosity feels like a betrayal. When she thinks of them, she sees a large Italian family, but that could just be a result of people assuming that, with her first name and dark hair and olive skin, she’s Italian.

  When she nears Westlake Park, the night air is cold, and feels like a reprieve, a separation from what just happened. Palm trees splay like fireworks against the stars. The implications of tonight’s events are hitting her. Jack Sawyer, in a private hall with a woman who’s not his fiancée, a woman who’s throwing punches. Nico sent her to keep him out of trouble, yet she caused it. On the night he promoted her. “Did that man see it was you?”

  Jack shrugs. “He didn’t yell out my name, so here’s hoping.”

  Frankie debates over where to go. Where they are now seems to be in the middle of everything. Though they’re somewhat close to the studio, which isn’t too far from Frankie’s apartment, Jack’s houses are either in Venice—west from here and on the coast—or Pasadena, which is east from here and farther inland. Even without traffic at this time, the drive, with so much unsaid, seems torturous. Then she thinks of the bungalows, two little houses that the studio owns, one behind the other on a long and secluded lot. They’re near her own building and not far from where they currently are. “I could take you to the bungalows.”

  “We having an engagement party?”

  He laughs, and she shoots him a look. Stars go to the bungalows for privacy or parties, a place for either seclusion or secretive intemperance. Rumor has it bootlegging tunnels exist beneath the lush grounds, and Frankie knows of one that’s closed off, a sign on the door with a drawing of a gorilla with an X through it, as if everything else is allowed. Just a bunch of spiders, Nico told her about what’s in the tunnel, but you go through it, and you end up on the street behind the property, so take note if the cops ever arrive. They shouldn’t bother us, but now and then you get a Boy Scout who’s new on the job and doesn’t know better.

  “I’m kidding,” Jack says. “June’s at the bungalows. Maybe she’s there with the father of my child.” He adds a laugh at the end, but it falls flat.

  “June likes the first bungalow. We could put you in number two.”

  “Frankie, you make things really hard sometimes, you know that? I need you at my house because I have something for you there. A surprise.”

  She tightens her hands on the steering wheel. “You just got engaged.”

  “But I’m not going to do it.”

  Quickly, she glances at him. “They’ll call your bluff. Jack, I’ve seen what they can do. Remember what the sound guys did to that actor in Let It Lay? Raising his voice? People laughed the entire movie, and it wasn’t a comedy. Really, you don’t want to mess with them. You’ve got years left on your contract, that’s years till you—”

  “It’s not a bluff. I’m not getting married. I’ll work it out, but it’s not happening. Where there’s a will, there’s a way. But tonight, tonight we don’t talk about it.”

  Her job, of course, is to force this. To convince him. To make him take his medicine, as Nico said. But that objective is directly opposed to what she wants. And what she wants is for there to be a way. Finding time together would be harder than before, but could be possible.

  Then she thinks of what the studio knows, of why the strong arm of their protection could easily turn against him. Jack never had the life they painted for him in his bio. There was no ranch in Montana, no doting parents who have since passed. Instead, there was a more-than-rocky existence in Louisiana, and a wife he left high and dry. Donna. She’s the person the studio has dealt with, the reason for the subterfuge and stories. Jack claimed she never loved him and only married him because it got her out of her family’s house, and that when he went to war—a war that battered him with incessant, nerve-racking noise and blasts of fear—he realized that if he survived, he needed to be more than just a paycheck to someone and to lead a life that was more than just a ticket out. But he did it the wrong way. He took the coward’s exit and simply never returned to Louisiana, abandoning Donna to do what, he wasn’t sure. Deplorable. Shameful. A regretful move he most likely wouldn’t have made had he been of sound mind, but at the time he only knew that acting made him happy, the one production he’d done in school, and so he moved to New York, where the theatre saved him. By the time he found his sense of right and wrong, it was too late to contact her. There was no going back. And when the studio discovered him and lured him to Los Angeles, Donna saw him on the big screen and did what any scorned person with no love in their heart would do: She promised to destroy him. So the studio stepped in with a divorce attorney and Nico, who took care of the rest.

  People abandon people all the time. But not Hollywood’s leading man. Not like that.

  “So,” Jack continues. “My house. O’Shea isn’t there. I gave him three nights off.”

  “I thought that was so you could . . .” She pauses, looking for the word.

  “Break down?”

  She smiles. “Maybe.”

  “Just goes to show you, Frankie, sometimes people can surprise you.”

  The foothills rise in the distance. Houses in his neighborhood are mansions, many shrouded and tucked deep into greenery, set apart from each other with massive trees and expensive landscaping, tropical jungles and English gardens. A pause at the gatehouse—a small building the same Spanish Mediterranean style as the main house, but with only one room—and Louis, Jack’s groundskeeper, hears the sound of the car and appears in the window, a slow blink as he clears his vision. Recognizing Frankie, he starts to let her in, but then spots Jack in the passenger seat and hurries. The imposing metal frames creak open, and the car’s headlights bring patches of the yard to life as they wind up the hill.

  The mansion is pure opulence. Sprawling and three stories, it’s white stucco with dark-brown trim, Moorish-style light fixtures, and tiled stairs. Terraces jut from several locations, each with stunning views of the tennis court and the Arroyo and the Colorado Street Bridge. On either side of the house, bright-fuchsia bougainvillea grows against the white walls in a brilliant grip. There are seven bedrooms, eight bathrooms, marble doorframes, and painted wood ceilings. Off the kitchen, there is yet another little tiled patio surrounded by a wood fence with a gate that leads to an alley. The alley was Frankie’s escape route on the occasions when she accidentally fell asleep with O’Shea still in the house. Once, she even startled a trophy hunter, a little man who was rifling through Jack’s trash looking for mementos or scripts or anything he could sell. I get reporters out there too, Jack admitted when she relayed what happened. After that, they deemed it safest to stay together in Venice.

  His Venice cottage. Already, it’s become a symbol of what they shared, a common loved ground, their haven where nothing else mattered. Yet even there she snuck in the back gate and waited till the coast was clear. At first the effort was fun, but eventually she began to wonder if part of her appeal was her willingness to play the game and not question the rules. How much of why he likes her is because she accepts his situation?

  Though O’Shea is gone, he readied the house before he left. Windows glow, amber tinted and warm. “Follow me,” Jack says at the front door before leading her straight through the house and out to the back patio. Beyond is a path that snakes through twists of oak trees to a small pond, around which are boulders and a few Adirondack chairs. Past that is the western lip of the Arroyo, with views of the Rose Bowl and mountains and streams and gullies and even the massive and opulent Vista del Arroyo Hotel, which sits directly across the way. At six stories tall, the resort often hosts guests who stay for months at a time, and has so far survived the Depression, known even now as the seat of high-society events and a top spot for fine dining. Beyond the hotel is Colorado Boulevard, chock-full of people and businesses: a bowling alley and clothing stores and restaurants and Dad & Ernie’s Gas Station, where O’Shea fills up, and Vroman’s Bookstore, where Jack spends as much time as he can reading and browsing and relishing in the fact that the people around him are too consumed in their stories to notice the star in their midst.

  When they reach the pond, Frankie spots two fishing poles leaned against the chairs. She turns to him, questioning, and he smiles.

  “I made a call after you said you never fished. Catfish. They’re nocturnal. Now’s our chance.”

  There are two pails nearby: one on the ground packed with dirt and another on a small wooden table filled with mostly melted ice and bottles of NuGrape soda. “So we catch them?”

  “Only if we want to eat ’em. I do spicy and spicier blackened catfish.”

  Frankie reaches for a bottle of soda. “If you can handle it, I can handle it.”

  “That’s what I figured.”

  The water is all dark moonlit reflection. With Jack, her world continually cracks open, and so much is a stark contrast to her past that she feels guilty, as if somehow she is betraying who she used to be. Trying not to think about it, she uses the bottle opener O’Shea left to pry off the soda’s cap. The shape of the NuGrape bottle reminds her of a top-heavy woman, bulbous but with a cinched waist, and as she hands the soda to Jack, she’s thinking of the bottles she collected with her mother. For vases, for water, for decoration, or to sell. They would’ve cherished this one, and even that thought undoes her, just a little.

  When Jack lights a lantern, a circle of brightness surrounds him. “You look like you’re on a stage,” she says.

  “I wish I was on a stage.”

  An owl calls into the night, and the sound is so real that for a second she assumes it must have been a sound effect. She searches the treetops, studying the shadows.

  “The first time I did a play,” he says, “everything made sense. All the escaping and pretending I’d done. Everything felt right. Like trying on clothes that fit for the first time.”

  Though they’ve been together for a while, she still conceals how much Nico’s told her about Jack’s life. Jack had a mother who died in childbirth and a father who let a whiskey-strong grief pour through his fists, fighting on the job and on the streets and against walls and barstools and his own son. To account for the injuries, Jack had to get creative. That’s the acting class he owes everything to, the part of the acceptance speech no one will ever hear. He made me into the actor that I am.

  What she also knows is that it’s in his contract that he can only do RCO productions, which means no plays. Frankie understands she should direct them away from what can be a sensitive topic. “I don’t deserve this,” she says.

  He sets his soda bottle between two rocks. “Everyone should fish.”

  “But not on a whim, because someone made a call and had their pond stocked with fish.”

  “Probably no one should do that.” Now he edges closer to the water, then leans down to touch its surface. Ripples of light spread from his fingers. “Today I brushed my teeth with champagne because it was there, and I spit my soul into the sink.”

  “What’s that from?”

  “June said it to me. A couple months ago. The champagne was by the bathroom sink, and she just did it because she could, because it was there, and then she curled up on the bed and didn’t talk to anyone for two days.”

  Frankie thinks back, remembering a weekend when June disappeared.

  Jack continues, standing and looking up at the moon. “Sometimes I think we hate each other because we’re stuck together in this. But it’s also why we understand each other.”

  “Oh good, I’m glad you two can talk about all the hardships of wealth and fortune.”

  “That’s exactly it. Everyone sees it the way you do. Everyone but her. Our lives are amazing, but they’re not ours. Not the way we’d want to lead them.”

  Frankie glances back at the mansion. “When your suffering looks like that—”

  “Which is why I don’t feel right questioning it. Which is why I do what I’m told, because I’m lucky, and I know it. I don’t expect sympathy, and I’m not asking for it. I’m saying she’s the one I can talk to because she feels the same; it’s why she called after the morning with the champagne. We get what a horrible wonder this all is. Everything good we have—it’s like the ugly beauty. A woman who’s so beautiful that her beauty loses all meaning.”

  “When you talk, it gets worse.”

  Again, he smiles. Charming, even now. “But it could be a man too.”

  “That’s good to know.”

  “Anyone that’s just too perfect,” he says. “Or has it too good, maybe that’s it. Because if all you get are perfect apples, you don’t think twice. You forget to appreciate them. And pretty soon you forget there was something to appreciate to begin with.”

  “Maybe the perfect apple’s just not as interesting as one with curly, frizzy hair, let’s say.”

  He watches her, steady. “To me, the curly, frizzy-haired apple is perfect.”

  The way he looks at her, sometimes it takes her breath away. But now an idea is forming, a new tactic. “You and June have that in common.”

  He takes a swig of his soda. “We spend most of our time hating each other. But we know what it’s like to belong to the world, and not belong to ourselves. We’ll always have that.”

  Ignoring the chairs, she takes a seat on a large boulder at the water’s edge as Jack picks up the old aluminum pail by the fishing poles. Tentatively, Frankie says, “So maybe you’d consider helping her? Since you understand her—”

  “No,” he says firmly. “I want my life. But I know June, and I know she’ll understand why. And I know she’d make the same choice. But that was a nice try, Frankie Donnelly.” He gives a grin before sifting through dirt in the pail. “Night crawlers. Look away if you don’t want to see this.” Which, of course, makes her look. Jack notices, and smiles as he hooks a worm. “Fishing is how you eat. It’s not a luxury—at least not the fishing I’ve done.”

  She studies him—the flop of his hair against his forehead, the trees behind him, lit up and haunting—and wishes she hadn’t stopped him from talking about doing plays. “So you’d really prefer theatre and all that struggling?”

  “It’s not a struggle if you love it. Theatre is acting. Real acting. At least for me it is.”

  “I never did a play, but I got good with being somewhere else. We didn’t have money for books or movies. But the movie posters—those you can look at for free. And my mother practically hunted them down. Every time there was a new one, she’d take me to it to show me, and later she’d have an entire story ready to go with it.”

  “She could’ve been a writer.”

  “In a way, she was, just nobody knew it. Nobody but me. And she got me doing it too, with the posters. That’s what kept me going while I worked.”

  He watches her. “My fellow dreamer.”

  The owl calls again, its question emerging from deep within an oak tree. Jack turns toward the sound. “With my dad, the second I saw the whisky come out, I had my stories ready to go. They were always about someone I pretended was in the other room, someone I was protecting. Maybe it gave me a purpose, I don’t know. My black eye would always be one some imaginary person didn’t get.” He takes another swig. “So. Who should we be so there’s no house, no studio, nothing but a pond and fishing poles and us?”