One Year to Live: I Traded My Toxic Family for Global Fame novel · Chapter 3 of 24
Chapter 3: The Garage
Tegan rents a garage and starts her own studio. Luther and Rosalyn arrive to take the spot and cut her allowance, and she films every word. That night Camille announces she is joining the show as a guest.
"Not well," Tegan said. "I'll fix it."
"The public pool in Glassell Park opens at six," Cal said. "I'll be in the shallow lane."
He walked back to his coffee.
The director's wife squeezed her hand once and let go.
By evening Tegan had signed a lease.
It was a detached garage behind a duplex in Glassell Park, with a concrete floor, a roll-up door and one working outlet.
The landlady wanted twelve hundred dollars a month and did not ask about her last name.
Tegan paid the first month from the signing advance, eighteen thousand dollars that sat in an account Stegman Entertainment had never been able to see.
She bought a camp cot, a secondhand ring light and a camera from a pawn shop.
She bolted a gray bedsheet to the back wall, and she sat in front of it with a laptop on a milk crate.
Her plan was plain.
Every industry office in the city had just been told to ignore her.
So she would make something they could not ignore, and she would make it on her own floor.
On the second morning, the roll-up door rattled while she was brushing her teeth at the utility sink.
She had left the camera recording on the milk crate, and she let it run.
Luther Stegman came in first.
He stood in the open doorway in a navy suit, with his tablet under one arm, looking at the cot and the sheet and the milk crate.
"Good God," he said.
Rosalyn came in behind him in her cream cardigan with a Tupperware container held in both hands.
"Tegan, honey, I made you your favorite."
Tegan stood up from the cot.
"I don't have a favorite, Mother. You've never asked."
Rosalyn blinked. She set the container on the milk crate anyway.
"You can't live like this," she said. "Come home. Corbin wasn't himself. We can all forget it."
"I can't," Tegan said.
Luther turned the tablet around.
On the screen was a transfer agreement with her name already typed in the signature box.
"The show moves to Camille, and you take the next project we find you. That's what a sensible person does. If you won't, your allowance stops today."
"What allowance?"
"The family account. The card we gave you."
"I used it twice. Both times I paid you back."
Luther's jaw moved. "That's not the point."
Tegan pulled a thin plastic card out of her back pocket and held it out.
"Then here."
He did not take it.
"You have no idea how hard we've worked to make you part of this family."
"I know exactly what the work looked like," Tegan said. "It was Corbin giving my scripts to Camille."
Rosalyn's eyes filled. "Don't be difficult."
"Tell me the name of my foster mother."
Rosalyn stared at her.
"The woman in Dayton who raised me for twenty-one years," Tegan said. "The one who kept every school photo in a shoebox. You found me a year ago. What is her name?"
Neither of them answered.
Luther's face went flat and angry. He looked at his tablet as if the answer might be written there.
"Dayton was a mistake we fixed," he said at last.
Tegan laid the card on the Tupperware lid.
"Please take the container with you when you go."
Rosalyn did not move.
Luther reached over and picked up the container himself. He put it under the arm that held the tablet.
"You will regret this," he said. "We will not make this easy twice."
"You didn't make it easy once."
He left first. Rosalyn looked at her for a long moment, and then followed him out.
The roll-up door rattled down behind them.
Tegan stood in the garage and listened to the car pull away.
Her hands were shaking.
She flexed them, once, and picked up her laptop.
By evening the clip of the visit had thirty views.
By midnight it had four hundred, and her phone had started buzzing on the cot.
She thought it was the clip.
It was not.
Camille had gone live on her own account, in a pale pink sweater, with a box of tissues out of frame.
"Hi, everyone," Camille said, her voice small and brave. "I have some news about The Long Trail. My sister Tegan needs rest right now, and she is not well enough to carry the show alone."
She smiled at the camera and tilted her head.
"So the network and I have agreed that I'll join her as a guest star."
Under the stream, the hearts were already climbing.
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