Total pages in book: 107
Estimated words: 106001 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 530(@200wpm)___ 424(@250wpm)___ 353(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 106001 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 530(@200wpm)___ 424(@250wpm)___ 353(@300wpm)
When the door snicks shut, my dad emerges from his office and joins me on the couch.
He wipes his hand across his brow theatrically and says, “Tell me that was all a dream last night.”
He offers a cheeky grin.
I don’t smile. Instead, I find the courage to say the hard thing. “I love you, and I think you need to get help for love and sex addiction.” I’m grateful to have finally breathed those words out loud.
To his credit, he doesn’t flinch. He doesn’t feign surprise. And he doesn’t brush me off or call me young. He simply nods. “Thank you for your advice.”
For a few weighty seconds, a tantalizing hope winds through me—the hope that he could change, that he could turn his life around.
So I push once more.
“I mean it,” I say desperately, imploring him. “I want you to get help for your addiction.”
“I know you do.” But then he shrugs, his expression unbearably sad, and completely revealing for one of the first times ever. Like he knows who he is. Like he knows why he does what he does. “I just don’t want to.”
I remember my mother’s words about help. We can rarely help people. Either we don’t have what they need, or they don’t want what we can give.
“I hope you change your mind someday,” I say.
He takes my hand, squeezes it. “Thank you.” Then, like it costs him the world, he whispers, “I just want you to be happy. So did your mother.”
My throat swells with emotion. Tears prick my eyes. “I am.”
On that note, I go. I walk down the block where I grew up, stop at the corner, cross the street. I head straight into Central Park. A place I went with my mother, my brother, and a place I like to go by myself.
I wander around, stopping when I spot a tattered paperback on a green bench. A bookmark pokes out from the pages. Someone must have left it behind. I snap a picture and post it with the caption: Time for a new story.
49
OPENING NUMBER
Bridger
It’s Friday morning in mid July, and I leave my new office in Chelsea with Jules by my side, rattling off our plans for the rest of the day. “We’ll have lunch with Ellie, and then after that we can meet with—”
But her words are cut off by a jackhammer ripping through asphalt. That’s New York for you. Construction is everywhere all the time.
When we pass the workers, I turn to Jules. “It’s okay. You don’t need to brief me on my schedule. Christian does that. You’re a junior producer now. You’re coming to the meeting in that capacity.”
My no-nonsense co-worker seems to fight off a smile, then dives right into business for our walk and talk, discussing the details of the courting we’re doing of Ellie Snow. After she won her Critics award for Best New Show, I called her agent, and asked for a meeting.
Then I pitched her on a concept.
She was keen on it, and now we’re going to refine it.
We reach the lunch spot Ellie picked out and head inside. After quick hellos, the upbeat showrunner turns to me. “So, love letters. That’s a brilliant concept,” she says.
“Thank you. Harlow and I thought so too, and we want you to helm it.”
“And I want to helm it,” she says, then she shares where she’d like to take a show where the hero’s backstory is told through love letters. “And we frame his current arc around a letter he’s writing. But we don’t know who it’s to. But we’ll find out over the course of the season.”
I never shared the concept with Ian. He wasn’t interested. So it wasn’t his or Lucky 21’s to claim. It was mine, and it was Harlow’s.
Now, my hope is that it’ll belong to Opening Number, my new production company that I launched immediately after the awards ceremony.
We’re lean, but we’re fierce. I hired Jules the first day. Though insisted she join me is more like it. “You need to work with me. You’re sharp and talented, and I want you to learn the business from me,” I’d told her over the phone.
“Yes. The answer is yes,” she’d said, and then she jumped ship.
Lucky 21 now belongs to Ian. Or it will soon. It takes time to unwind a partnership, but our lawyers are handling the details, and soon we’ll be…professionally divorced.
Our soap-opera scene from the gala was indeed all over the trades and the gossip rags. Lots of agents and writers and actors don’t want to work with me. But lots don’t want to work with Ian either.
And honestly, enough do want to work with me. Besides, I only need a few. And I still have my best asset.
Taste.
I have excellent taste and a strong gut instinct.
This love-letter story can be a hit with Ellie leading it. “We’re going to need a star though. Someone to lure the fans,” she says. “Anyone in mind?”