“I’m aware of this.”
Cybil sits back up, her face grows serious. “I know you’re hurting, but he said he was shooting all day, maybe he turned his phone off and didn’t turn it back on so he could focus. I’m not sure that actors don’t have weird rituals, and maybe it’s his.”
“Or maybe he heard it but decided I was an asshole and needed to sit in my own self-hate.”
“Sugar, you don’t know shit about what he’s thinking. Neither of us do.”
I sigh. “How did I mess this up so bad?”
“Because Luke, for all his great qualities, didn’t place you and the kids above his job. Even when he had the choice, and you asked him to get out of the navy, he didn’t. You asked him not to volunteer for the deployment, and he did. You begged him to take leave when you were sick and he wouldn’t. Yes, all those times there was something imperative to his career, but that’s just it. Being a pilot was all he wanted and he didn’t really care what he had to give up to keep that. Reggie and I would talk about it a lot because it never made sense—and because I threatened to leave his ass if he tried the same shit. But you complained about it all the time and it wasn’t enough for him to change.”
She has always been very aware of how I felt about his career. Nothing was more important than flying. It didn’t matter that he married me, in reality, he was committed to his job.
I always felt that.
There was always this part of me that wondered what would have happened if Melanie had never surprised us.
“So, you think that’s what I was doing to Jacob?”
Cybil smiles softly. “I think that you did what any irrational and emotional woman would do. In fact, I’m sort of proud of you in many ways.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“It means you weren’t perfect, Bren. You didn’t go deep in your head and explain why your feelings were either right or wrong before you reacted. Jacob makes you lose yourself. He made you forget that people don’t always respond the right way and it’s the errors that teach us the lessons.”
“Another Daddy tip?” I ask with mock sarcasm.
“That one came from you.”
“Me?”
She laughs. “Yes, you idiot. You said it once, and it stuck. I tend to like phrases like that.”
“Cyb,” I say, feeling sad again. “I love him.”
“I know, sugar. He loves you too. He’ll come around. You’ll see.”
I sure hope so because I don’t want to experience losing him.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Jacob
I’m fucking over it all. We’ve reshot this scene four times, and it still isn’t right. I’m tired, angry, and can’t stop thinking about Brenna and how we left things.
Her message replays in my head, but I’m still not ready to talk to her. For all I know, she called to tell me she really feels the way she said and we’re done. I needed my head in the game in order to get through today, which it’s clearly not.
“Cut!” Noah yells and then walks toward me. “Jacob, I know you have somewhere else you’d rather be, but I need you to focus so we can get through this scene. Can you give me one good, full scene? We have enough to splice some, but I’d like the sequence to feel like we got through it once.”
“Yeah. Of course. I just need two minutes.”
Noah nods and waves his finger in the air twice. “Let’s start it over from the top. I have a good feeling, people, let’s all be on our A-game so we’re done before nine.”
I open my phone, hovering over Brenna’s number, and decide not to do it. If I can make it through this scene one more time, then I’ll call.
“You all right?” Eli Walsh asks as he claps me on the back.
“I’m fine.”
Eli is my nemesis in this scene. He’ll be in only this one movie because, inevitably, I’ll kill him toward the end. “You seem out of it.”
I shrug. “I have a lot on my mind.” That doesn’t seem to give him the clue that I don’t want to talk about it because he just keeps looking at me. “There’s a school play I was directing. It was a big deal because the kid’s father died.”
He nods. “I see, and you had to let him down to be here.”
“Yup.”
“Then stop dicking around and shoot the scene. Use your anger and frustration and channel it the right way. There are so many times when I’m not in the right headspace for filming, but in the end, it’s our job to fake it. You know all that.”
I do, but hearing it from him seems to be what I needed. “I guess I forgot.”
He chuckles. “Being out of Hollywood for a while will do that. It’s why I really never wanted to do movies, but Noah and I go way back, so . . . here I am.”
I didn’t realize that Noah knew him outside this movie. “How so?”
Eli glances over at him. “We’re married to best friends, and we both starred on A Thin Blue Line.”
Jesus. I totally forgot that. “Did he handpick his entire cast?”
“Basically. He wanted to work with quality actors,” he says as he raises one brow.
And I’m definitely not living up to that.
Noah’s voice comes over the megaphone. “Ready?”
“The sooner we nail this, the sooner we’re all heading home. Remember that.” Eli walks away, and I send a quick text to Brenna.
Me: Filming. We’ll talk when I get back.
I shut my phone off and go to work so I can get back to Sugarloaf before the play.
My legs are bouncing as anxious energy courses through me. Making it back to Pennsylvania before the show is going to be close—so insanely close that I might just be tempting fate. We shot the scene in one fluid take. Noah replayed it, but I was already grabbing my shit to go. I knew the second he yelled cut that it was perfect. Every one of us was on point.
He gave me one solid head nod, and I was running to the car that was waiting. I didn’t tell anyone back home that I was on my way because traffic in L.A. is always an issue, and with my luck, I wouldn’t make it to the airport in time to catch my flight back to the East Coast. Thanks to Catherine’s planning, the plane was ready to go the second I got on board. Within minutes, we were airborne.
“The pilot is making great time, the winds are on our side, Mr. Arrowood,” the flight attendant says as she hands me a drink.
I’m sitting on the couch across from the captain chair on the small private plane, and I can’t even enjoy myself. “Great. Thanks.” I accept the glass and then place it on the table beside me. I don’t care much about eating or drinking, I just want to get there.
She smiles. “Do you need anything else?”
“Nope, just . . . watching the clock.”
“I understand, he’s doing his best. I’ll be back in a few minutes, just ring for me if you need anything before then.” She heads to the front of the plane into the little area where the supplies are.
The only thing I need is for this plane to go faster, but that’s not really possible. It’s been fewer than forty minutes, but it feels like forty years. I should’ve at least sent Brenna a text, but I was laser focused on getting in the air.