Starstruck

A Hollywood Romance

PART 1

The woman in the Lululemon dupes had one last thought as she arced through the air: This hurts more than I thought it would.

To be fair, she was struck by a $250,000 Mercedes G-Wagon, a car built to forge rivers, impress wealthy neighbors, and, apparently, hit joggers in crosswalks late at night.

When she opened her eyes a minute later, she was face up on Sunset Boulevard. A silhouette hovered over her, backlit by a pair of headlights.

“Oh God,” the man whispered. “Say something.” His hand rested on her knee.

“Did I land in heaven or hell?” she quivered.

“Hollywood,” he said. “So a little of both.”

She could hear the concern in his English accent. As her eyes adjusted, she could see it in the shadow of his green eyes. Even his bangs stretched toward her with an unmistakable empathy.

The woman in the crosswalk managed a half smile, then started to fade off again. Just my luck, she thought. Killed by the last perfect man in L.A.

“Stay with me,” he begged.

She wanted to.

“What’s your name, love?”

She rallied just long enough to let out a soft “I don’t know.”

The man swore under his breath, then crossed off. In his absence, a billboard filled her vision. A summer blockbuster starring the world’s biggest actor. She closed her eyes before she could realize… the man who hit her was the same man on the poster.

---

When Collin Wright left home earlier that night, the only thing he’d intended to hit was an empty bar. He thought he had found one, too. Tucked away from the tourists a half-block down Sweetzer, it had one boarded up window and a pair of naked hooks where a sign once hung. The dive was so unloved that even the hipsters stayed away. And so, to the actor’s delight, he had planned to sit there for hours with a bourbon and his thoughts and never be bothered.

“You doing good?” the bartender asked.

So much for that.

Collin stole a glance at the voice through the dim light. The bartender was young. Maybe twenty-three. Curly hair. Kentucky accent. Some stubborn acne around the nose. He’s using the wrong face wash, Collin thought. No. Best not to engage.

“All good,” Collin responded with a smile, then stared back down at his glass like he was waiting to receive an important transmission from somewhere under the ice.

There was a time when Collin longed to be noticed. Early in his career, five thousand miles from home, he fed off it. But with success he learned that attention is shallow. Having just turned thirty with an ex-wife, no kids, and more money than he could ever spend, all he wanted was depth. He could buy once-in-a-lifetime experiences and he had. But they only provided a temporary relief from the gnawing fear that nothing he did had any lasting value.

“My name’s Jonas. I’m an actor too,” the bartender piped in.

Collin sighed. “Hi Jonas.” There was no stopping this now. The kid had seen the yellow light and blew right through it. Which meant a question was coming. A dumb question. “So what’s the secret of making it here?” Jonas asked.

And there it was. Collin especially hated this one. It attempted to reduce fifteen years of self-sacrifice into one magical “secret” that would explain how he succeeded while so many others had failed.

Collin looked up but said nothing. He let the tension build, leveraging the look that had made him the highest-grossing star worldwide for the last five years. And when it was clear Jonas finally felt uncomfortable, Collin finally spoke:

“Discernment.”

Downing the rest of his drink in one gulp, Collin pivoted off his barstool and headed for the back door. “Are you gonna be here every Wednesday?” he asked.

“And Thursdays,” the kid answered with a smile, mistaking the question for a compliment.

Collin slid into his denim jacket. “Good to know,” he said. Then he pushed open the door and was gone.

---

Back on Sunset, Collin grabbed his phone from the G-Wagon and made the rare phone call. Sheryl Dolan was an A-list manager and a Hollywood savage who wouldn’t even wear a dress to the Golden Globes. Pushing sixty, there was no crisis she hadn’t already navigated twice.

“Is she alive?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Is she underage?”

“No.”

“Are you drunk?”

“No!” He paused, reconsidering. “But I did just come from a pub.”

“Collin—”

“She came out of nowhere! Truly. I was driving home and turning left and then—”

“Has she seen your face?”

“What?”

“It’s a simple question.”

“I’m not leaving her in the street, Sheryl!”

This was the problem with celebrities these days, Sheryl thought. They start off cutthroat, willing to hurt anyone to make it big. Then once they get there they turn soft. And introspective. It was a liability. “Do not call 9-1-1. Do you understand? It will be a big scene and the paparazzi will show up…”

A block down Sunset, a light flipped green and fifty cars rolled their way.

“I don’t have much time!”

“…plus you already have the DUI from last year—”

Collin hung up and ran to the nameless woman. He scooped her into his arms and carried her to his passenger seat. By the time the wave of cars reached the intersection, his G-Wagon had vanished into the Hollywood Hills.

---

Collin Wright’s home at the top of Marmont Avenue was considered “architecturally significant.” He just thought it looked cool. It had mostly glass both inside and out with views of downtown and the westside and everything in between. The drawback was a lack of privacy and the never ending struggle to keep windows clean. There was Windex hidden in a dozen different cabinets. A 5,000-square-foot home that should have brought serenity was usually filled with the sound of someone, somewhere… squegee-ing. As a sick reward for all the effort, the house claimed the lives of a good thirty birds a year.

“You shouldn’t have brought her here.” That was the non-medical assessment from Collin’s personal doctor on the current situation.

“But she’s okay?” Collin replied.

Best the doctor could tell without doing a CT scan, she was fine. No nausea. No blurred vision. Good balance. No broken bones. Just some memory loss which should come back over the next few hours. “She needs to rest. And you need to pray she doesn’t sue.”

Collin showed his doctor out and made the long walk back to the den. The woman was sitting with her feet up on his leather couch. Awake.

She was pretty. About Collin’s age. If she was wearing makeup, he couldn’t see it in the low light. She reminded him of the kind of girl he would have fallen for in an earlier lifetime.

“Well, this is the fanciest hospital I’ve ever seen,” she said.

Collin nodded and sat on the couch near her feet. He gathered his thoughts. “I am genuinely sorry,” he began. “This is a unique situation. Obviously, everything I do is under a microscope. Bringing you here saves us both a lot of unwanted attention. The good news is you’re not broken, just… rattled.”

“Am I supposed to know who you are?” she asked.

Now it was Collin who was rattled. “You don’t?”

The woman didn’t. Truly. She still didn’t know who she was. All she had was her phone, locked behind a code she also couldn’t remember.

“I’m an actor,” he explained. “Collin Wright.” He waited, sure that hearing his name would spark something. It didn’t.

“Are you any good?” she said.

Collin laughed. It was absurd. Of course he was good. He didn’t have any Oscars but he had everything else. A star on the Walk of Fame. A wax figure in Madame Tussauds. This ridiculous house. Plus three or four others.

“I’m not bad,” he answered.

She wasn’t convinced. “Show me something. Whatever you think is your best work.”

“You’re serious?”

She shrugged. “I mean, it’s kinda the least you could do after trying to run me over.”

He couldn’t believe he was having to prove himself. And yet in a world where he hadn’t had to work for the interest of a woman in ten years, he found the challenge refreshing.

“All right. Fine,” he said.

He grabbed a remote and pushed a button. A cabinet slid open to reveal a 100-inch flat screen. “Couldn’t find a bigger one?” she quipped. Collin shook his head and began scrolling Netflix. A slew of action films filled the screen. “Okay, so not a serious actor,” she noted.

“I see you also lost your sense of humor,” he shot back without looking at her.

He stopped at his most critically-acclaimed film. “Here we go. This one’s called Dark Feud. A cat and mouse thriller. Opposite Brie Larson. This was right before Captain Marvel.” The woman stared back blankly. “Well, this was an awards contender,” he noted, then pushed play and settled in.

For as much as she enjoyed keeping his ego in check, his talent was undeniable. His performance was commanding but still likeable. It felt like an authentic reflection of the man Collin Wright seemed to be in real life. It would have been natural for her to assume the worst about the rich celebrity who hit her with his Mercedes then abducted her to his house. But the more time she spent with him, the more she found herself giving him the benefit of the doubt.

“Not bad, I guess,” she said as the credits rolled.

“Not bad?”

She smirked and picked up her phone. She tried another password. Nope.

Collin shook his head. “People don’t realize how hard acting is until they try it. First there’s the technical side. Knowing where the camera is, knowing where the lights are, hitting your mark… And if you mess that up a hundred different people are mad at you. But then there’s the artistic side. To do it well you have to develop the ability to become a different person on command. Sometimes it feels almost like a possession. And as much as you try to leave that person behind, a little part of every character stays with you. It messes with you.”

“So stop doing it,” she said.

He chuckled. “Obviously I can’t do that,” he said.

“Why not?”

The safe answer was to smile and say “Because I love it.” But he wasn’t talking to an entertainment reporter or 6,000 fans in Hall H at Comic-Con. Collin Wright was sitting in the dark on his couch, talking to a woman who didn’t even know who he was. He could be completely honest.

“Because too many other people need me to keep going,” he said. The list was too long to list them all. The short version included agents, lawyers, Sheryl Dolan, theater owners, studio chiefs, car detailers, landscapers, a masseuse, a private chef, two personal trainers, a hairstylist, not to mention his ex-wife, his own parents, and his deadbeat pot-smoking brother back in London. “I used to be an actor with a dream,” he said. “Now I’m a machine that’s never allowed to stop.”

He was worried she would laugh off his vulnerability as the most privileged of problems. Instead, he caught the lights of Los Angeles reflecting off a tear in her eyes. She stretched out her hand to his. He took it. Then, feeling a connection that had been missing from his life for years, he pulled her close and kissed her.

---

She woke up with the sunrise. Her head felt clearer. Collin was still next to her, sharing a one-person blanket.

They hadn’t gone beyond the kiss. Which meant she woke up with all the hope of what could be and none of the regret. Riding that wave of optimism, she grabbed her phone and closed her eyes. She entered some numbers. No. Still locked.

She slipped away from the den and went in search of a bathroom. She found seven of them, each more grand than the previous. At last she made it to Collin’s room. Floor to ceiling glass with an original Vivan Maier photograph above the bed.

She wandered into the bathroom. The shower was carved from a single block of granite, with a tinted pane of glass that looked out on the Hollywood sign. The shower head was not a head at all, but a hundred small spouts drilled into the rock that dropped purified water from above like a downpour in the Amazon rain forest.

She couldn’t resist. As the water heated up, she happily slid out of her tank top and leggings and, for the first time since the previous night’s accident, inspected herself in the mirror. She had some scrapes on her forearm. Some road rash on her left shoulder. Below it, she caught sight of something else. A tattoo. She leaned in closer.

It was two words. Backwards in the foggy mirror. She wiped it clear with her hand, then screamed.

The two words were “Collin Wright.”

---

PART 2

His name was written in a romantic, scripted font, set against the backdrop of a snow-capped mountain. The woman who remained nameless stared at it in the mirror, deducing its meaning.

For the last ten hours, she had assumed that theirs was a chance encounter. But the name on her shoulder meant that there was nothing accidental about it at all. She was not some stranger in a crosswalk. She was a target in his sights.

But just like the fake punches Collin Wright threw on camera, he pulled up short. And she survived. And as she was quickly realizing, it was only a matter of time before the man who tried and failed to kill her once would find an opportunity to finish what he--

KNOCK KNOCK.

Collin’s shadow stretched across the other side of the frosted glass door. “Still alive?”

Darn right she was. And she had every intention of staying that way. “Uh huh,” she said, then quietly locked the door from the inside.

“Take your time,” he answered. “I’ll make us breakfast.”

She scanned the bathroom for a blunt instrument and found an asteroid on the counter, a gift from the studio when Space Hunter 2 crossed a billion dollars in global box office revenue. She gripped it in her sweaty palm. “Sounds good,” she replied.

As Collin’s shadow slipped away, she climbed into the shower and looked out the curved panoramic windows. She thought about smashing them with the space rock and making a run for it. But the house sat perched on stilts, leaving a thirty-foot drop into brush and rattlesnakes of Franklin Canyon. If she had any hope of escaping, it would only be through Collin Wright’s front door.

---

The woman pulled her wet hair back in a ponytail, stuffed her locked phone in the waistband of her leggings, and walked softly into the living room. Collin was battling with a skillet in the kitchen, leaving her a runway to the front door. She arrived at the massive steel handle and pulled, but it didn’t move.

She looked for a clasp or a dead bolt or a latch. Nothing. She pulled harder, trying in vain when—

“Traditionally I’m the one who tries to slip out when no one’s looking,” Collin said from behind. He was holding a butchered omelet. Burned red peppers peeking out through runny eggs.

“Thanks for last night. But I’m gonna—” she said.

“No you’re not.”

“I’m not?”

“You know I can’t let you go. Not in your condition. Besides…” He was inches from her now. “I like you.”

“You don’t even know me,” she said, still pretending.

“Of course I do,” he admitted.

Her back pressed against the steel door. This is where I die, she thought.

“I know German engineering can’t kill you,” he began. “Which tells me you’re strong as hell. And I know you’re not afraid to speak the truth even when it’s not what someone wants to hear. And I know you aren’t impressed by fame. And I know you have an adorably crooked smile. And I know you talk in your sleep. I’m sure there’s more to you than that, but that’s a pretty good start,” he said.

Lord, he is charming, she thought. Maybe he isn’t out to kill me. Maybe there is a perfectly reasonable explanation for my tattoo. “Collin Wright” is not that uncommon a name all things considered. It could just be a massive coincidence… He moved in closer when a fresh thought cut through the tension—

“What did I say?” she asked.

“When?”

“In my sleep. What did I say?”

Collin pulled back. “You mumbled. A number.”

She stood up straight, realizing the potential significance. “What number?”

BUZZZ!

Someone was at the front gate. Collin pushed a hidden button on the wall, opened the heavy door, and walked barefoot down his front walkway with skillet in hand. “Twenty-eight!” he answered as the door swung closed behind him.

“Twenty-eight,” she repeated.

She took out her phone. Then, with the utmost care, entered the six-digit passcode:

2 8 2 8 2 8.

Click. Her phone unlocked.

---

She went to her settings and there, along with a happy profile photo, was her name:

Mandy Lake.

Hearing those two words pierced the darkness of her memory. Of course it was. Other puzzle pieces fell into place. She saw her apartment. It was somewhere hot. Reseda. She could picture the walls. And a photo. She was hiking. With a dog. A mutt. Roscoe? No. Rascal. She could see his eyes. One was brown and one was green.

Mandy flipped to her texts. Unread messages with blue dots from “Mom”... “Bro”... “Keira”.... “And a random (323) number.”

She scrolled backwards in time through the one-sided text thread.

You’re welcome?

Mandy read it a few times, trying to discern its meaning until confusion gave way to reality. An explanation for all of this that she hadn’t considered.

Collin Wright wasn’t stalking her. She was stalking him.

---

Out in the driveway, Sheryl Dolan was giving her biggest client an earful.

“Do you realize how exposed you are?? The leverage this girl has?? She could end you. And you know who becomes collateral damage? ME. And then where do I go, Collin? Back to Michigan? Have you ever been there in February? I might as well DIE!”

“First off, she’s not a girl. She’s a woman.”

“Wow. What a gentleman. You slept with a woman you hit with your car who doesn’t even know her own name. You’re dead! YOUR CAREER IS OVER!”

“I didn’t sleep with her!”

“What?” Sheryl was shocked.

“I slept next to her,” he added. “On the couch.”

Sheryl looked up to the heavens and put her hands together. “Oh thank God.” It was her first prayer in a decade.

Collin explained his thinking. “I could have. I suppose. But I didn’t want to mess things up. I’m actually kinda… intrigued.” He explained what made her so great. Her sense of humor. Her honesty. The fact she didn’t come with any preconceptions. By being free of all the baggage that comes with thirty years of real world trauma, he was getting the purest version of her. And he was all in.

Sheryl nodded, thoughts of Michigan winters in the rear view and her frontal lobe starting to function again. “I can sell this,” she said.

“What? No. Please don’t,” Collin said.

Sheryl was excited. “The world’s biggest star hits an everyday beauty out for a jog. Cinderella in Hokas. NO. Not hit. A romantic run-in. She was… lovestruck. Yes. NO. STARSTRUCK. There it is. I need her to sign an NDA.”

Mandy watched Sheryl and Collin through the windows. She couldn’t hear but she could see Collin’s face. He was scared. She knows, Mandy concluded.

When Sheryl burst into the house with Collin hot on her heels. “Now where is our favorite pedestr—” Before she could finish, Mandy sprung from behind the sofa and hit her in the head with Collin’s MTV Movie Award. As Sheryl slumped to the carpet, Mandy leapt over her, escaped out the front door, and disappeared down Marmont Avenue.

---

Mandy ran toward the flats of Hollywood, pulled by gravity and guilt but unable to outrun the one person in the world she was truly scared of: herself. The twisted thinking that marked her life had been kept at bay for the last twelve hours but was now gaining on her. She could feel it seeping slowly into the corners of her psyche, polluting her mind like a toxic tide.

Behind her came a familiar rumble. Collin’s Mercedes. With Sunset Boulevard in view a block below, he pulled even with her. She kept running, not even stopping to look his way.

“Stay away from me,” she warned.

“I can’t. You have my MTV Award for Best Fight. That has great sentimental attachment.”

Mandy looked down to see that, yes, she was running with a gilded box of popcorn in her hand. She threw it through his open window and kept going. Collin kept pace.

“You know you really shouldn’t run downhill. It’s bad for the knees,” he warned.

“Can’t you see I’m dangerous?” she yelled.

“Not really,” he said. “To be fair, I’m the one who hit you, so—”

She stopped running and faced him head on. “No. I hit YOU.”

Collin pulled to a stop next to her. “What?”

The truth brought relief, not pain, so she kept talking. “I unlocked my phone. I checked my texts. My name’s Mandy Lake. I’m not an innocent crosswalker. I’m your stalker.” She pulled her sweatshirt to the side and showed him the tattoo. “I knew you were driving home last night. Someone tipped me off. I jumped in front of you. I don’t know why. It was all me.”

Collin paused to process the revelation. “Well that’s… that’s pretty jacked up, Mandy Lake.”

“I KNOW!”

“Honestly, most of my stalkers are men…”

“So?”

“It’s just unusual, that’s all.”

“Happy to be the outlier. Now just let me go!”

“I want to see the tattoo again,” Collin said.

Mandy pulled down the sweatshirt a little further this time.

“Interesting. Wonder why you chose the Paramount logo?”

“The what?”

Collin pointed to the snow-capped mountain below his name. “That’s the Paramount Studios logo.”

“Okay,” Mandy said, taking his word for it.

“Aren’t you curious why?” he asked

“I’m only curious why you haven’t driven away yet,” she said.

It was a good question. One that deserved a thoughtful answer. Collin leaned over and pushed open the passenger door from the inside. It swung open before her.

“Because I’m hoping you’re not the monster you think you are,” he said.

---

One of the perks of being an A-list actor is access. Anywhere you go, the world assumes you are supposed to be there. Nowhere is that more true than when pulling up to a studio lot. There is no asking for I.D., just a wave from the guard at the gate and a friendly, “Ya know where you’re headed?”

“Sure do,” Collin said.

That was a lie. This was an exploratory mission. “Any of this look familiar?” Collin asked Mandy as they drove past Paramount’s executive bungalows. She nodded her head. They passed the mill where a wave of sawdust drifted through the sunroof. They stopped in front of the Blue Wall and Mandy gazed up at the cloud-covered backdrop, 200 foot-wide and 175-foot tall. “They use this for ocean scenes, don’t they?” she said, a random memory breaking through. “Sure do,” Collin affirmed. He pointed to a blue-bottomed parking lot filled with black BMWs. “I made a Coast Guard film here,” he said. “The best one ever made.”

“Are there a lot of Coast Guard movies?” she asked.

“Almost none,” he said.

Collin continued across the lot when an LAPD squad car in the distance turned toward them. Mandy shot Collin a nervous look. “Probably a picture car,” he said, continuing toward it. Behind the first, three more squad cars turned and fell in line. “Or maybe not,” he added. Collin calmly turned right past the studio water tower then watched his rear view mirror.

The line of cops made the turn and followed. “Well, Mandy Lake, we seem to have attracted unwanted attention. Thankfully, this is one part of Los Angeles I know better than the LAPD.” Then Collin flipped the G-Wagon into sport mode and tore out across the studio backlot.

They flew down little New York, where brick facades framed open doors leading to nowhere. Collin weaved around 18K lamps on wheels and fake maple trees on wooden stands. “I once spent six hours running from an invisible CGI alien on this street,” he said.

“That doesn’t sound very awards worthy,” Mandy quipped.

“It wasn’t,” he said before zipping around a corner.

Collin pressed the accelerator as massive mid-century soundstages passed outside Mandy’s tinted window. With the cops falling further behind, she drew her attention to the large black numbers emblazoned on the side of each stage.

25… 26… 27…

“TWENTY-EIGHT!” she yelled.

Mandy reached over and grabbed the steering wheel. Collin hit the brakes and they spun sideways off the alley and through the open elephant doors where they slipped into the shadows of Stage 28 and skidded to a stop.

They sat in silence, grateful to still be vertical. “That was a pro move,” Collin whispered in the dark. “Not a lot of actors could pull that off.”

“Pretty sure I did the move and you were just holding on for dear life,” Mandy answered.

“I was working the brakes,” Collin insisted.

“True. In between your whimpers.”

Outside, the four squad cars flew past them and down the alley toward the front of the lot.

In the clear, Mandy opened her door and stepped onto the swept concrete. She looked up at the maze of catwalks, a hundred high. She ran her hands along the bare, soundproofed walls covered in wire mesh. It was a blank Hollywood canvas and yet…

“I’ve been here,” she said. “Don’t remember when. Or why...”

Collin nodded and crossed to a plaque near the stage door that listed every TV series or movie filmed on Stage 28. “Godfather Part 2?”

Mandy shook her head.

“Hunt for Red October... Forrest Gump... Uh oh… Dr. Phil?”

She glared back. He moved on.

“Oh wow. I made a movie here. Barely remember it. 2016. Twist of Fate…”

Mandy shot him a look. “That was it.”

“Really?” Collin stared at her, puzzled. “Hang on… are you… an actress?”

She nodded. The fog was lifting. She closed her eyes, summoning all she could before it rolled in again. “My first big role. I would have been twenty… I played your love interest.”

Now it was Collin who felt like the crazy one. “In Twist of Fate? No. That was Florence Pugh. Wasn’t it?”

“It was. After I got recast. This was my chance. And I came here. And it was my first day on set. And I…”

“What?”

“...I blew it. I knew my lines but I… I don’t know what happened. I was so excited and my parents came to town and we were… about to go out to dinner when my agent called and said… they wanted to go in a different direction. And that was that. And it messed me up. Because I thought I knew who I was and what I was good at and then suddenly… I didn’t know anything.”

“We never got to do our scenes together,” Collin realized.

“And I’ve been chasing you ever since.”

“HANDS UP!”

A SWAT team with guns drawn stood at the open elephant door. Mandy did as she was told. Arms in the air, then knees on the ground, her back to Collin as the LAPD moved in and put her in shackles.

“I don’t want to press charges,” Collin explained.

“Yeah, well that lady does,” a sergeant said, pointing toward Sheryl Dolan, silhouetted against the midway sun, a large bump visible on her forehead.

---

Three months later, after pleading guilty to assault and serving time at Lynwood Women’s Prison south of Los Angeles, Mandy was once again free. Or as free as a woman could be having been at the center of the Hollywood news cycle for the better part of a month.

Moving home was an easy decision. Her parents Stu and Denise had already packed up her apartment and taken her things back to Georgia. Stu owned a plumbing business there and he thought he could find a job for her as his bookkeeper.

When the prison gate opened, Stu was waiting for her in the visitor lot. He flashed the lights of his rental car and Mandy waved. She was halfway across the street, a clear plastic bag of photographs in her hand, when a black G-Wagon came to a screeching stop just inches away from her.

“Well that was far too close,” Collin chirped as he hopped out. “These brakes are squishier than I remember. I meant to have them looked at but then I got called over to Singapore to do some reshoots and—”

“Why are you here?” she asked.

“Right. That’s understandable.”

Stu watched with suspicion from the visitor lot.

“Here’s the thing,” Collin continued. “You didn’t get fired from Twist of Fate because you were bad. You were good, actually.”

“You never even saw me.”

“I called the editor and asked if she could dig up the dailies. It took some time but she found them. And I watched them. And you were great.”

“I was not great.”

“You were. And I asked her why you were fired and she couldn’t remember and I asked the director and he couldn’t remember. And so I asked the producers and they did remember. You were fired because I asked them to fire you.”

“You? But we hadn’t even met.”

“That’s correct. Not even once. But I had met Florence Pugh. And I was convinced that if I were to get her cast in that role that all my twenty-something fantasies would come true.”

Mandy shook her head in disgust. “And how’d that work out for you?”

“Quite well, actually. Florence is fun. For a spell. But it came at a price. That price was you.” Collin looked at her with a sincerity that transcended even his best acting abilities. “And so I’m here to say something long overdue. I’m sorry.”

Mandy started to cry. Tears of anger and sadness and a decade of confusion being untangled.

“I didn’t just take away a job that you were worthy of. I took away your confidence. And I don’t know how to give that back.”

Mandy didn’t know the easy answer to that either. But she knew where to start. “Can I punch you?”

“Punch me?”

“Yes.”

“In the stomach?”

“In the face.”

“In the face? A real punch or a—”

“A real punch. In the face. Right now.”

Collin nodded. “Okay. That’s fair. I accept.” He steadied himself. Closed his eyes. Exhaled a cleansing breath then opened his eyes again. “I don’t want you to break a bone in your hand. I have very little body fat.”

Mandy was already widening her stance and making a fist. “I’m willing to take the risk,” she said.

“Super. Just wanted to check.” Collin closed his eyes again. “As long as this isn’t a violation of your parole—”

Mandy responded with a fierce right hook to Collin Wright’s chiseled jaw. Out in the parking lot, her dad Stu leapt a little in his seat and honked his horn in accidental delight.

Collin screamed, loud enough to draw the amused attention of a prison guard standing watch. “OW! Son of a… OW!”

“Sorry not sorry,” Mandy said.

Collin gripped his face and wiggled his chin. “You lifting weights in there or something?”

“Every day,” she answered. “They say it’s good for self-confidence.”

“Why didn’t you tell me that ahead of time? I would have skipped that whole part of my speech!”

Mandy smiled and looked him over. “Calm down. I barely even broke the skin.”

“What about my teeth?”

“Your teeth are fine.”

“And my nose? I think your knuckles got the edge of my nose.”

Mandy took the actor’s face in her two hands and held it steady. She looked him straight in the eyes with a clarity and stability that came natural to her. A rebirth of an old instinct. “You’re gonna be okay,” she promised.

He believed her.

“I’m moving to Georgia,” she said.

“No, you’re not,” he answered.

“I know,” she replied.

Ignoring the pain in his jaw and a fat bottom lip, Collin leaned down and kissed her. He had no idea how Sheryl Dolan would spin this. And for the first time in a long time, he didn’t care.

---

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