Chapter 4: The Birthday Brunch

My mother turned fifty-eight on a terrace in Beverly Hills, under white umbrellas.

Thirty people were there, and all of them knew what I had done.

I knew they knew because the talking dipped when I walked in.

I had borrowed a blue dress from my roommate and carried a wrapped book.

It was my grandmother's cookbook, the one with the tomato stains.

My mother had asked for it three times when I was twenty, and I had never given it up.

"Addie."

Coralie reached me first, arms open, hair in a soft wave, eyes already wet.

She hugged me hard, and I let her.

"I knew you'd come," she said into my shoulder. "I told Dad you would."

"Where's Mom?"

"At the head table. She's been so brave."

My mother stood when she saw me, small and straight in a green silk dress.

She took my hands, and hers were cold.

"Please don't," she said, so quietly that nobody else could hear.

"Happy birthday, Mom."

I put the cookbook in her hands.

She looked at it and her mouth shook, and she said nothing at all.

I sat at the end of the long table next to a producer's wife.

She had known me since I was nine, and she now found her mimosa fascinating.

Roman waved from the middle of the table, big and warm.

Landon was beside Coralie's empty chair, and he did not look at me.

Griffin, across from him, looked at me constantly, which was worse.

My father stood up with his glass, and the whole terrace turned to him.

"I want to say a few words about my wife," he said.

He said them well.

He had always said them well.

He told the story of how she had cast unknown actors in his first film.

It had made him a hundred million dollars.

Her father had founded Haverill Pictures, and my father had run it for her ever since.

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