you go to one of those meetings.”
“A.A.” Pagan shifted uneasily on the bed. “Yeah.”
“Yeah?” Mercedes raised her eyebrows. “You promise me you’ll go?”
Pagan waved one hand airily. “I’m fine, really.”
Mercedes’s brown eyes took on an implacable look. “Promise me you’ll go to a meeting.”
Pagan looked at her best friend, her only friend, and said reluctantly, “If there’s time, and if they have meetings in Berlin, I’ll go.”
“If, if!” Mercedes made a tsking sound with her tongue. “Just go.”
“Okay, okay!” Pagan threw up her hands. “Can I hang out here with you for a bit longer before I leave, at least?”
Mercedes relaxed. “Who’s going to tell me crazy stories about the guests on Ed Sullivan after you’re gone?”
“You won’t need Ed Sullivan,” Pagan said. “I’m going to send you every single brand-new tabloid magazine I can lay my hands on.”
“Coolsville,” Mercedes said, looking sly. “I can read what they’re saying about you.”
* * *
The tiny windowless room they’d shared felt so empty without Mercedes. Miss Edwards had brought Pagan the suit she’d worn the day she walked into Lighthouse, but it was now too big in the chest and the hips. Prison was apparently an excellent dieting tool.
Now the suit looked like something another girl would wear. Pagan wasn’t sure who that girl was—a spoiled drunk movie star or a sad orphan going off to juvenile detention—but she wasn’t either of those people anymore, and the outfit was all wrong. After they allowed her to shower, she folded up the suit and her old white gloves and left them behind for Mercedes to trade, donning her saggy garters, stockings, and scuffed flat shoes under the scratchy gray Lighthouse uniform for the last time.
She didn’t take anything else with her. As Miss Edwards clomped angrily in front of her toward the front door, Pagan paused to listen to the voices of the girls in the distant classroom, now reciting geometry proofs. Their chant faded behind her as she walked out the double doors and the sunshine hit her face.
All the snappy last words she had prepared to say to Miss Edwards fled her brain the moment she gazed up at the azure sky. Hot, dry August air swept through her hair. After nine long months, she was free.
At the bottom of the steps lurked a long black limousine with fins like a shark. Leaning against it with the passenger door open beside him was Devin Black.
He pulled the door open wider. “Ready to go home?”
Home. Without a family waiting for her, she didn’t know what that meant anymore.
In a blink everything seemed oppressive—the heat; the hard yellow light; the empty, waiting house that still held Ava’s stuffed animals and Daddy’s golf clubs.
And the car. It wasn’t remotely red or a convertible, but the thought of getting in it made her queasy. Nine months since the accident, and the memories were waiting there, circling like vultures.
“What are you waiting for? You can’t stay here.” Miss Edwards’s voice sliced through the dread. “Even if you’re not ready to go.”
Pagan glanced over her shoulder. Something about Miss Edwards’s condescending smirk made the big scary world out there a lot more appealing. “Thanks ever so much for all your kindness.” She bestowed a wide, fake smile on the woman. “I’ll be sure to mention you in my first magazine interview.”
Miss Edwards’s face froze. Knowing that she probably looked more like a war refugee than a movie star in her stained uniform and ponytail, Pagan nonetheless did her best model sashay down the steps. The dark depths of the car swallowed her. She didn’t look back as Devin got in after her and slammed the door.
Inside it was air-conditioned. She sank back into the smooth, deeply cushioned black leather seats as the driver stepped on the accelerator and they glided away. The limo’s velvety bounce was nothing like the low-down rumble of her Corvette, and she began to relax. Low storefronts and empty, fenced yards flashed past as they headed west. She was free.
Or was she? The unreadable expression on Devin Black’s face wasn’t reassuring.
“Does the car bring back bad memories?” he asked, his voice mild.
“The car?” Dang, he was perceptive. She’d have to be careful around him. “It’s no big deal. I’m cool.”
He leaned forward and opened a small cabinet set into the partition between them and the driver. “Something to drink?”
She stared at the tiny refrigerator. The luxury of it being here, inside a car, reminded her of her old life. Limousines, movie premieres, and fridges full of alcohol. She’d never appreciated it, or feared it, the way she did now. “Got a Coke?”
“Sure.” He grabbed a bottle and used an opener to remove the cap. She took it and sipped, her first taste of Coke in months. It was delicious and icy cold.
Devin reached into the breast pocket of his coat and pulled out a red-and-white pack of cigarettes. “Smoke?”
Winston. Her brand. This guy had done his homework. But why? She took the unopened pack, and the plastic wrap crackled in her hand. She could almost taste the smoothly acrid smoke and feel the filter of the cigarette between her index and middle fingers. All she needed was a martini in the other hand. Cigarettes and alcohol went together like drive-in movies and making out. One without the other just didn’t make sense.
“Thanks,” she said. “I’ll save these for later.”
He nodded and removed his sunglasses. In the cool dark of the limousine interior, his eyes were shadowed. “The plan was to take you directly home. We got permission from Judge Tennison to air out your house. The studio has sent over a designer with some clothes for you to choose from, with a hairdresser and manicurist on standby. Is there anywhere you’d like to go first?”
“You mean, like a record store?” She tucked the cigarettes away in her skirt pocket. Maybe one day she could face them without a drink. “I wouldn’t mind seeing what’s new from Ray Charles.”
“We could do that if you like. Or is there some sort of organizational meeting you should attend?” When she looked at him blankly, he added, “The Friends of Bill W?”
Pagan nearly did a spit take with her Coke. “A.A?”
He regarded her, his face neutral, and said nothing.
Of course, he meant well, and she had promised Mercedes. So she’d go. She really would. But certainly not with Devin Black tagging along. She’d attended exactly two meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous between getting out on bail after her arrest and being sentenced to Lighthouse. Everyone there had been her parents’ age or older. They’d tried so hard not to stare at her that she’d felt both conspicuous and invisible, like a ghost no one wants to admit is haunting their house.
“I’m fine,” she said to Devin Black. It
