Neglected and Ignored by My Movie Star Husband novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Declined

Willa's cards are cut off, so she calls Roz. Roz pulls the first draft out of her freezer while the news reports Willa's breakdown.

I slept in the guest room with the door locked.

At seven I heard the housekeeper in the hall and opened the door in yesterday's gown.

"Did you move my notebooks out of the study?" I asked her.

She looked at the carpet.

"Miss Camille's driver took some boxes on Friday, Mrs. Holloway. She said they were for the awards archive."

"Did she say which boxes?"

"The ones from your shelf. I didn't think it was wrong. She said you knew."

"I didn't."

"I'm so sorry."

"It's not your fault."

She went down the hall faster than she needed to, and I stood there in my bare feet.

Camille had been in my house on Friday.

She had asked me on Thursday how my writing was going, and I had told her it was going well.

I dressed in jeans and a gray sweater from the back of the closet and went down the stairs.

Lance was in the kitchen, in a robe, eating eggs and reading something on his phone.

He didn't look up.

"There's coffee."

"Where is she?"

"Camille's at her hotel, Wills. She's not sleeping in our house." He smiled at his phone. "I took the award to bed with me last night, did you know that?"

"Lance, I need my notebooks back."

"Why do you keep saying that? We'll find them."

"Camille took them Friday."

He finally raised his eyes.

For half a second, something crossed his face and went away again.

"She probably took them to make copies," he said. "For safekeeping. She's careful."

"She didn't ask me."

"Because you'd say no, and then they'd get lost. Come on."

"Lance."

"Willa." He put the fork down. "I've got a press call at nine and four interviews after. Can we do this tonight?"

I walked out of the kitchen without answering him.

I had my purse and my phone and the green pen.

I went to the coffee shop at the end of our road because I needed to be somewhere with a door that wasn't his.

The girl at the register knew me.

"The usual, Mrs. Holloway?"

"Please."

I tapped my card.

The machine beeped twice.

"Declined," the girl said, and gave me a small, apologetic smile.

"Try it again."

She did.

"Declined."

I tried the second card.

Declined.

The third card.

Behind me a man in a suit sighed.

I paid with the only thing I had left, a ten-dollar bill from the bottom of my purse, and went outside and stood on the sidewalk with a cup of coffee I could barely afford.

My phone showed three missed calls from Lance's number.

Then a text.

I had to move some things around, Wills. It's just until you calm down. Love you.

He had cut off every card in my name before nine in the morning.

I stood on a street in the sun in the city where I'd lived for ten years and realized I did not have one dollar of my own.

I had one phone number I knew by heart.

I dialed it.

"Roz Tully," said a dry voice. "If this is about my car warranty, I've already died."

"Roz, it's Willa."

A pause.

"Where are you?"

Twenty-five minutes later, an orange hatchback with a cracked bumper screeched up to the curb.

Roz Tully leaned across the seat and pushed the door open.

She was sixty-one, five foot two, in an old cardigan with her reading glasses on a cord.

"Get in," she said. "I saw your face on the news and I've been sitting by the phone for six hours."

"They put my face on the news?"

"Get in."

Her bungalow in Echo Park smelled like toast and old paper.

She sat me at the kitchen table, put a mug in my hands and said nothing until I'd drunk half of it.

Then I told her everything.

She didn't interrupt once, which for Roz was a miracle.

When I finished, she took off her glasses and set them on the table.

"I told you to put your name on that script in writing, the day you lent it to her."

"I know."

"I'm not going to say I told you so," Roz said.

"You just did."

"I said I wouldn't say it. I said it was a fact." She stood up and went to the freezer.

She pulled out a bag of peas, then a bag of corn, then a foil brick.

From behind the foil brick, she took out a gallon freezer bag with something flat inside it.

"What is that?"

"Insurance."

She set it on the table and unzipped it.

A stack of printed pages, soft at the edges, with a title on the cover and a name under it.

Low Tide. By Willa Mercer.

I'd printed it for her at the library three years ago, when I still believed I was only sharing it with a friend.

In the margins, in green ink, were my own notes in my own hand.

"I kept it," Roz said. "You never asked me to give it back."

I turned the cover page with a finger that wouldn't stay steady.

On the counter by the toaster, Roz's little television was still on, with the sound turned low.

She picked up the remote and raised the volume.

A woman in a red dress stood outside the Marlowe Theatre.

"Sources say Willa Holloway, wife of newly crowned Best Actor Lance Holloway, left the ceremony early after what insiders call a breakdown."

The screen cut to a photograph of me in the lobby with my eyes wet and my mouth open.

I had never cried in that lobby.

The caption read: Hollywood wife, unwell.

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