Blame
“Well, I don’t know all of the details, I really don’t,” Drew stammered. “But Mom says it’s just as much your family’s fault as Daddy’s. Maybe she’s wrong.”
“She’s not wrong, not entirely.” Rome certainly placed some blame about what had allegedly happened to Ella on his family. “But the fact that your father blames himself means he finally understands the magnitude of what he drove Ella to do.” He hoped that was the case.
Drew didn’t seem to want to talk about her stepsister anymore, and Rome was glad for it because he didn’t want to either, not in this capacity, anyway, and that was the only way he could talk about Ella with Drew. “I hope that you and I will be able to get along well while we’re on the set,” Drew said. “When Henry offered me the part, I was so excited to finally have a role in a movie, I didn’t ask who I’d be starring with until later. You’re not… mad are you?”
“Mad?” Rome asked. If she’d meant it in the old-fashioned way--crazy--he might’ve said yes just to mess with her. Henry was driving him there. “No, I’m not mad. Just surprised.”
She nodded in understanding and pulled her blonde hair over one shoulder. It was remarkable how absolutely opposite Ella she looked. Not that step-siblings normally looked alike, but Rome couldn’t imagine a woman looking less like his wife. They were opposites on the inside, too. It was no wonder they never felt like family. Her mother had seen to that, though. Even if Drew and Anna had wanted to be nice to Ella, she doubted they’d been given their mother’s blessing to do so. He didn’t think they’d tried to get to know her, though. Ella had been a pin cushion, and any opportunity to stab her had been taken by everyone else living in that house, except for one of the maids, Mary, who had helped her escape and now lived on a beach with the driver they’d picked up in Italy, Gus.
“Anyway,” Drew said, “Henry offering me this part was the best thing to happen to us in a really long time. Anna was jealous at first, but he promised he’d find her something else.”
His natural instinct was to be happy for her, for their family, but when he spent a few moments thinking about who they were and what they had done, it was difficult to force a fake smile onto his face. He mustered one, though, calling upon all of the skills he’d honed over the years, the same ones that had gotten him nominated for the biggest award in the industry. “Good.”
The thought that he might have to star in that movie, the one Anna made with Henry, made his stomach twist again. He was about to have to force his mind elsewhere, whether Drew continued to talk or not.
She continued. “We were upset about Tim, too. I know you didn’t kill him. It was so crazy to think that some people were saying that you had when it was so obvious that he’d drowned. I mean, what did they think you did? Held his mouth open and shoved water down into his lungs?”
Rome didn’t bother to explain to her that people were assuming he’d held Tim under the water. Others thought he should be arrested for merely falling over the side of the boat with Tim. Clarifying seemed to be a waste of time as she was just as smart as he’d always thought she was--about as smart as the faux bricks the construction workers were currently applying to the outside of a building on the sound stage. Henry had certainly found a new way to torture him this time, a way Rome would’ve never dreamt possible until now.
Thankfully, about halfway through Drew’s recounting of how awful Tim’s funeral was, Guy decided to come over and speak to them. Rome thought perhaps this Frenchman wasn’t nearly as bad as the other one he’d had the displeasure of speaking with recently.
As soon as Guy opened his mouth, he took the thought back. “Drew. Rome. You have your new scripts?”
“Yes, sir, Mr. de Chante, and let me just say--”
Whatever Drew wanted to say would remain unsaid as the director interrupted her. “Good. Flora will be here in forty minutes. We will read through the script then.” He looked around, likely searching for a conference room, but this sound stage didn’t have any rooms in it at all, not that Rome could see. “I suppose we will have to do it here.” He rolled his eyes and then ran a hand through the unruly mop of dark curls on his head. “Gen! A chair!” He walked away, looking for the assistant, shouting something in French that sounded quite angry.
Rome could see that the director had a chair set up over by where the cameras were being assembled for the first shoot, but he wasn’t about to call the man back over to point that out. He’d leave that to Gen. Shaking his head, he glanced at the shooting schedule attached to the new script. Twelve weeks? It wasn’t a long shoot by any means, but he had no idea how he’d make it through three months of this hell.
“He seems… horrible,” Drew muttered.
Something about her tone, or perhaps it was the truth of what she said, made him laugh. Once he started, he couldn’t stop. He sat there, in a chair labeled with his name, next to his “dead” wife’s stepsister who had been awful to him, holding the worst script ever written in the history of movies, laughing like an idiot. Drew joined in, clearly not exactly sure what was so funny, until they were both laughing so loudly, the guys building the stage stopped and turned to look at them.
Once he could breathe again, Rome muttered, “This sucks. This movie is a shitty, shitty movie, Drew.”
“I know,” she said, her face going straight. “But it’s a movie, Rome. And we get to make it. There are a lot of people out there in the world who’d do anything to trade places with us.”
Her words were sobering. She was right. As much as he was complaining about the content of the script, it was a script. He wasn’t stuck in a cubicle somewhere or flipping burgers. He was making movies, and that was something to be thankful for. She might not be that smart, but she made a good point. Rome decided to stop hating what he was doing and embrace it, at least until Juliet could figure out a way to get him out of it. That wouldn’t be so hard would it? As he glanced down the script and read some of his lines, he knew it would be hard--nearly impossible.
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