They Saved My Sister and Let Me Drown, So I Took Hollywood novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Credit and Lunch

Beck Mallory returns the notebook Griffin's assistant was copying, tells her about the bribe he refused, and offers to shoot twelve minutes for credit and lunch, while Coralie texts an invitation to a brunch.

He held the notebook out at arm's length, and I took it without touching his fingers.

"Beck Mallory," he said. "I shot Griffin's last film. I was at the dinner."

"I saw you stand up."

"I didn't know what else to do."

My roommate came down the steps behind me, holding the baseball bat in a way she thought was casual.

"Is this the part where I hit him?" she asked.

"Not yet."

"I'll stay close."

Beck looked at the bat and then at me, and one corner of his mouth moved.

"Fair," he said.

I sat on the second step, and he stayed on his feet a few paces off, giving me room.

"Why do you have my notebook?" I asked.

"Because Griffin's assistant was in the pool house at one in the morning with her phone. She was photographing every page. She'd done the first two thirds when I came in for my jacket."

My stomach tightened.

"What did you do?"

"I said I'd lock up. Then I took it," he said.

"You stole it."

"I returned it." He nodded at the cover. "I read some, in the car. I'm sorry. I didn't plan to."

I turned the notebook over in my hands.

Everything I had written in the last two years was in it, including the last third of Salt Year, which existed nowhere else.

"What did you think of it?" I said, because I had to know.

He took a moment.

"I've shot forty-one things," he said. "Eleven were good. I haven't read anything like that in my life."

I did not cry on a stranger's steps.

I put the notebook inside my folder and shut it, and my roommate looked at the sky politely.

"What do you want, Mr. Mallory?"

"Beck."

"What do you want?" I said.

"I want to shoot it."

"All of it?"

"Twelve minutes first. Any twelve you pick, with whatever cast you can find. I'll bring the camera and the lights. You'd show it to someone who can say yes," he said.

"I can't pay you."

"Credit and lunch."

"Lunch?" I asked.

"I eat a lot."

My roommate made a small sound that might have been a laugh.

I looked at him for a long time, because there was something I hadn't said.

His face was real in the morning light, with a day's stubble, tired eyes and a scar that went white when he frowned.

Last night I had seen it in the water, and it had been looking at me.

He had no idea.

He had never been in that water, because it hadn't happened yet.

It would not happen at all if I could help it.

So I said nothing about that.

"Have we met?" I asked instead.

"Not until last night."

That was true, and I could tell he had picked the words with care, which I thought was only manners.

"There's something you should know before you say yes," Beck said. "Your father called me at midnight."

My roommate stopped pretending to be interested in the sky.

"He offered Griffin's next three films," Beck said. "Lead camera. The kind of work you build a career on. All I had to do was stop returning your calls."

"And?"

"I said I'd think about it, and I hung up. Then I took your notebook and went home," he said.

"Why didn't you say yes?"

He seemed to turn the question over, and I watched him decide not to lie.

"Because I'd rather shoot one thing I believe in than three I don't," he said. "And because he didn't ask how you were. Not once."

That was what did it.

Nobody in my family had ever asked Beck Mallory how I was, and he'd noticed.

"Okay," I said. "Rules."

"Go ahead."

"My pages stay mine. Nobody rewrites the ending. If anyone ever says 'we love it but' about the last page, we walk."

"Agreed," he said.

"I direct."

"I assumed."

"No beach," I said.

His face went still.

"That was going to be my line," he said.

"You don't shoot on the ocean?"

"Not for money. Not for you." He rubbed the back of his neck. "I'm not explaining that. If the story needs water, I'll find a reservoir with a fence around it. I'll do it in a tank. But I won't do the ocean."

"Why?"

"Lenox."

I had not told him my grandmother's name, and I looked up fast.

"It's on the notebook," he said. "In the corner. You write it on everything you care about."

He was right.

I'd forgotten.

I had written Lenox in the corner of every page I'd ever believed in.

I had done it since I was fourteen, when my grandmother taught me that your name belongs on your work.

"Okay," I said. "Lenox, then. What do I call you?"

"Anything but late for lunch."

My roommate's phone buzzed against the bat handle.

She looked at the screen, and her face went flat.

"Your sister," she said. "She got my number from your mother's address book."

She read it aloud in her own voice, which made it worse.

"Mom's birthday brunch Saturday. She's been crying all night. Please come, Addie. I miss you."

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