See you.”
Before he could put the phone down, Ruby spoke up again, her tone exasperated. “You’re really going to let me hang up without even asking which show it was? You could really do that?”
“Yep.”
“And you call yourself a writer! Where’s your natural-born curiosity and nosiness?”
“It’s not going to work, Ruby,” he said good-naturedly. “I’ve got too much to work on to even consider it.”
“Fine. It’s just I know you like the show, I thought you’d be tickled to work on it,” Ruby said. He could almost see her shrugging her big shoulder pads.
“Ruby…”
“Fine. Don’t work on America’s number-one daytime soap. See if I care.”
He was about to end the call, but he hesitated for a beat, his interest well and truly caught.
“You mean, Ocean Boulevard?”
“The one and same,” Ruby said smugly. “Apparently, their story ed’s written himself off for six months or so in a car accident.”
“Yeah?” Dylan said, his mind ticking over at about a million miles a minute. Sadie Post worked on Ocean Boulevard, had done for the past four years. He’d have to be deaf, dumb and blind not to know that in the small industry they worked in.
He couldn’t even think her name without feeling a burning resentment. A series of images flashed across his mind’s eye—Sadie staring at him with burning intensity as she humiliated him in class by peppering him with questions she knew he couldn’t answer; the impatient disgust on his guidance counselor’s face as he kicked him out of school; his father’s contemptuous acceptance that flipping burgers was all his ignorant son was good for.
“Dylan. You still there? Hello?” Ruby said.
“Keep talking,” he said after a long moment.
Maybe he wasn’t as busy as he’d thought.
TEN DAYS LATER Sadie drove into her assigned parking spot at the Ocean Boulevard production offices in Santa Monica and pressed the button to bring the roof down on her Audi TT convertible. She checked her appearance. Her hair looked windblown, but it matched the tan she’d gained on her honeymoon-for-one in the Caribbean and she figured it was the least of her problems. It was amazing how things like convertible-hair suddenly gained perspective when you had a real crisis to deal with. Nothing like being stood up at the altar to give a girl a reality check.
Grabbing her satchel, she swung her legs out of her low-slung car and pushed herself to her feet. She couldn’t wait to get into work. She imagined her desk, overloaded with scripts and story lines for her to read, and felt pathetically grateful. Ocean Boulevard was her sanctuary, her solace. She knew it would take all her energy and focus, and then some. Its comforting embrace would get her through the next few months. She was banking on it.
Not that she was a basket case. Far from it. She was good, solid.
Okay, she wasn’t about to kick up her heels and dance a jig, but she wasn’t a sniveling wreck, either. After ten days of self-pity in the Caribbean, she’d picked herself up and dusted herself off. Life went on, and so would she. It was that simple.
Recovering was a little easier given that she still hadn’t heard from Greg. She told herself she liked it that way. If she never spoke to him again, she could pretend the whole six months she’d thought she was in love with him had been a hallucination.
Striding toward the building, she switched her focus firmly to work. She hadn’t had a chance to download any of the story lines that had been written while she was away, but she could spend the day catching up before the team pitched her their ideas for the week’s episodes on Tuesday morning.
She mentally reviewed the show’s story strands from a week and a half ago as she breezed past the receptionist and into the open-plan office. Set in Santa Monica, Ocean Boulevard centered around a group of people living in a Spanish mission-style apartment block on the street of the same name. The show ran an hour a day, five days a week, so there was always plenty of work to keep her busy.
A couple of heads came up as they spotted her, but she waved and flashed a bright, confident smile. Nothing to see here, her expression said. No tragedy to pick over. Please, move on.
Her office looked exactly the same as when she’d left it, except for a vase full of fresh tiger lilies on her desk return. Claudia being thoughtful, she guessed.
Slinging her satchel on top of her filing cabinet, she hit the power button on her computer and waited for it to boot up. She was typing in her password when Claudia appeared in her office doorway.
“I knew you’d be in early, you workaholic,” Claudia said. Her tiny frame was encased from head to toe in black, her signature color.
“Holiday’s over,” Sadie said, clicking through to her e-mail program.
“Hmm. I don’t suppose the gutless wonder has made contact yet?” Claudia asked, referring to Greg.
“Nope, thank God,” Sadie said. “I have nothing to say to him.”
Claudia raised a disbelieving eyebrow, but let the subject go.
“We need to have a quick work powwow,” she said, switching to producer mode. Propping a hip against Sadie’s bookcase, she tucked her hands into her trouser pockets. “Don’t freak, but Joss had a car accident while you were away. Broke his pelvis in three places.”
Sadie gasped. “Oh, my God. Is he okay? Was anyone else hurt?”
“No. The idiot was test driving a Porsche on Toyopa Drive in the Palisades. A dog ran across the road and he smacked into a tree.” Claudia shook her head as though she still couldn’t quite believe it. Joss was notoriously accident prone. He could find a way to hurt himself in a rubber room.
“Wow. But he’s going to be okay?” Sadie asked.
“Six months before he’ll be out of rehab, but he’s fully covered by insurance, so apart from the joys of physiotherapy et cetera, all is good. Except, of course, we kind of need him.”
Sadie’s eyes widened. For a moment she’d been so worried about Joss’s health that she’d forgotten about the show.
“God, yes. We have to find a new story editor,” she said, her brain hitting a brick wall at the very thought. Story editors—good ones—were like hen’s teeth, difficult to find. Usually it took months to woo someone away from another show, or to headhunt a promising up-and-comer. The story editor was the focal point of the story team, the person who said yes or no to plot lines and drove a show forward. As script producer, the story editor and his or her team were Sadie’s direct reports. It would be her responsibility to find someone to stoke Ocean Boulevard’s furnace with new and innovative ideas now that Joss had taken himself out of the game. Automatically, she reached for her address book, but Claudia waved a hand.
“Relax. I sorted it out while you were gone. We got lucky,” she said.
“Yeah?”
