One long weekend, p.29
One Long Weekend,
p.29
The imaginary lie detector just started beeping like a reversing bin truck. Hollywood wouldn’t know her number if someone spray-painted it on the Walk Of Fame. And if she was going to go travelling, she’d need to use her Government-issued, over 60s, free bus pass because she was broke. Skint. Cleaned out. Her last husband, Mitchum Royce, had been a former Edinburgh banker (with a ‘w’), who had schmoozed her until she’d married him on holiday in Vegas in 2015. The reality of who he was couldn’t have been clearer if it had been plastered on a flashing billboard on The Strip, playing ‘Viva Las Vegas’ on a repetitive loop, but she’d been too blinded by love or lust or loneliness to see it.
Gambling addict. Compulsive liar. Not a faithful bone in his body. She found out later that just days before their wedding he’d agreed to quietly resign from the bank after they found out he’d been misappropriating client funds (a move kept confidential to save the bank’s image). Their marriage had lasted two years, before he’d taken off with a cocktail waitress half his age that he’d met on yet another trip with his cronies to Sin City. Only afterwards did Odette discover that before he’d left, he’d systematically drained her bank accounts of over two hundred grand, every penny she’d saved since her previous divorce, while racking up tens of thousands of pounds of debt in her name. She’d been paying it off ever since, keeping it secret from the world, because she hadn’t wanted to look like the sad fool she’d become.
Now all she had was her re-mortgaged home, her shoes and her name, because, thankfully, she’d been smart enough to keep it through four marriages, realising that when it came right down to it, it was all she had. And it wasn’t even real. She’d become Odette Devine when she’d landed her big break, saying goodbye to Olive Docherty, her moniker for the first twenty-nine years of her life. Another secret. And yet another one that she wasn’t giving away to anyone, including the documentary director who was like a wasp buzzing beside her ear. One she wanted to swat.
Elliot was still standing to the side of the camera and nodding thoughtfully now. ‘And I have to ask… do you have any regrets?’
On any other day, she might have been able to brush seamlessly over that sucker punch to the gut, but as she opened her mouth to speak, her vocal cords seemed to have gone in to some kind of state of paralysis. Did she have regrets? In the words of Frank Sinatra, probably too few to mention.
In fact, only one.
One forty-year-old regret.
Back when she was just plain Olive Docherty, working as a school dinner lady, barely covering her rent with her paltry wages, there had been a split-second, sliding-doors moment. She’d manipulated a situation, told a lie, stolen something from a friend. That one act of duplicity had transformed her life, delivered her dreams, and given her the career and the stardom that she had craved. But at what cost?
Her life was now a wreck. Other than Calvin, she had no one in it that she cared about. She was deeply lonely. Damaged. Destroyed. Washed up. Devoid of joy. Staring down a barrel of nothingness until she keeled over, and then she’d have a funeral attended by no more than a handful of Devine Believers and a few hawkers who would probably come for a nosy and some free sausage rolls at the wake.
Karma had caught up with her. This empty life was her punishment for taking what should never have been hers in the first place. Justice. Fair play.
Sometimes she wondered if there was any way to go back and fix it, but it was impossible to give back what she’d taken. She had snatched a friend’s opportunity right from her hands, been too damn selfish to do the right thing. Instead, she’d just kept on moving, left her old life, and her friend behind, and she’d never looked in her rear-view mirror. Until now. And that was only because the road in front of her was cutting right through a barren wasteland and there wasn’t much tarmac left before she would fall off a cliff.
Elliot was still gazing at her expectantly, waiting for an answer.
‘Regrets?’ she mused. For a split second, she was tempted to lay it all out. To get real and honest and truthful. To let the world see what a horrible bitch she really was and to make some attempt to fix what she’d broken.
But the moment passed, and before she could come up with some fluffy, bullshit answer about doing nothing differently and loving her life, there was a knock at the door and another production assistant who looked about twelve popped her head in.
‘Ms Devine. They’re calling you to the set. Are you ready?’
‘I’m ready.’
No time to answer the question. Odette pushed herself up from her make-up chair. For the last time. Checked her expertly applied visage. For the last time. Pulled back her shoulders and slipped into character. For the last time. And then, followed by Calvin, Elliot and his cameraman, who was catching everything on film, she made her way out of her dressing room and onto The Clydeside set. For the last time.
Tomorrow she would go back to being plain old Olive Docherty.
Today was the last day that she would be Odette Devine. And she was going to put on a show to remember.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shari Low is the #1 bestselling author of over 20 novels, including One Day With You, and a collection of parenthood memories called Because Mummy Said So. She lives near Glasgow.
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ALSO BY SHARI LOW
My One Month Marriage
One Day In Summer
One Summer Sunrise
The Story of Our Secrets
One Last Day of Summer
One Day With You
One Moment in Time
One Christmas Eve
One Year After You
One Long Weekend
The Carly Cooper Series
What If?
What Now?
What Next?
The Hollywood Trilogy (with Ross King)
The Rise
The Catch
The Fall
First published in Great Britain in 2024 by Boldwood Books Ltd.
Copyright © Shari Low, 2024
Cover Design by Alice Moore Design
Cover Photography: Shutterstock and iStock
The moral right of Shari Low to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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Shari Low, One Long Weekend
