Neglected and Ignored by My Movie Star Husband novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Wrong Name
Lance wins Best Actor and thanks Camille for writing every word. Willa walks out past the cameras and a director stops her at the curb.
My husband won the award for best actor, and the whole theater stood up for him.
I stood too, in a plum silk gown, with both hands pressed over my heart.
Camille sat two seats down from me, crying and clapping.
She leaned across the empty seat and squeezed my wrist.
"He did it, Willa," she whispered. "After all this time, he did it."
In the limousine she had fixed my zipper when it stuck.
She had also said, "Tonight everyone finds out whose words they've been crying at."
I had held onto that sentence all evening.
I had held onto Lance's promise too.
Three nights ago in our kitchen, he had kissed my forehead and said, "Tonight I make it right, Wills. Trust me."
His film was my screenplay.
I wrote it in four months at that kitchen table, and Camille's name is on the cover page, because her father's company only read scripts that came from family.
Lance had sworn the credit would be fixed after the awards, so it wouldn't hurt the campaign.
The awards were tonight.
Lance Holloway climbed the steps to the podium with the gold statue in his hand and waited for the applause to die.
He thanked the studio, and the producers, and Mason Kerr, who sat three rows ahead of me and nodded once.
Then Lance took the folded card out of his pocket, looked at it, and put it away.
"There's one person I have to name tonight," he said. "Without her, none of this exists."
My pulse went hard and fast.
This was it.
He searched the audience, slowly, and I lifted my chin so he could find me.
His eyes crossed my face and moved on.
They stopped two seats down.
"Camille Draper," Lance said, and his voice went soft. "You wrote every line I got to say in that film. This award is as much yours as it is mine."
The theater clapped.
Camille put a hand on her chest and bowed her head.
I noticed then that her face was already wet before he said her name.
I did not think about why.
I was looking at my husband, waiting for him to correct himself.
"And thank you to my wife, Willa," he said, finding me at last. "For keeping the house running while I worked."
Warm, easy laughter rolled through the room.
A camera swung toward me, and my face appeared on the giant screen behind him.
I was smiling, because I had been smiling for the last full minute and my mouth had not caught up.
I had quit my writing job for this man and spent my savings on his headshots.
And he had just told two thousand people that I kept the house.
The woman beside me, an actress I had once helped with a speech, touched my sleeve.
"Honey," she murmured.
Camille turned to me with her hand over her mouth and mouthed, I'm so sorry.
She looked so sorry that for one second I wanted to comfort her.
Then she looked back at Lance, and she did not look surprised at all.
Lance held up the statue and the room rose again.
I watched the big screen show me sitting still while everybody else stood.
I heard my own voice in my head, plain and quiet.
If I stay in this seat, I stay in it for the rest of my life.
So I stepped out.
I picked up my clutch, said "Excuse me" to the actress, and edged past her knees into the aisle.
The camera followed me.
I knew it did, because the sound of the applause changed as people turned to look.
I walked up the center aisle in a plum gown with my back straight, past rows of people who had been waiting all night to be photographed.
Behind me, Lance said, "Willa?" into the microphone, and the whole theater heard it.
I did not turn around.
In the lobby my phone buzzed once in my clutch.
It was an alert from the Meridian Awards account.
Best Original Screenplay nominee: Low Tide, written by Camille Draper.
I looked at the name until the letters stopped meaning anything.
Then I took off my wedding ring, held it a moment, and put it in my bag next to my green pen.
I pushed through the glass doors into the night.
Flash bulbs went off down the length of the red carpet.
A publicist in a headset hurried toward me with her hand up, saying "Mrs. Holloway, we have a car," and I walked straight past her to the valet stand.
A man stood alone under the heat lamp with his tie pulled loose and a ticket in his fingers.
Mason Kerr had left his seat before the speech was over.
He looked at my bare hand, and then at my face.
"Mrs. Holloway," he said quietly. "Before you decide what to do next, I have something to tell you."
"I don't want to hear a thing from anyone in that building."
"I know," he said. "But the first draft I was sent had notes in the margins, in green ink."
He looked at the pen sticking out of my clutch.
"I know whose handwriting is in my script."
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