As Jacinta kissed her on the cheek, Kara’s hand automatically went to her wild red curls in a futile bid to tame them. Jacinta wasn’t one of those mums who gave sympathy and comfort in times of distress. An actress to her very core, she viewed every drama, disaster or upset as a plot twist, necessary to get to the bit where the heroine triumphed, and all was happy ever after. Once upon a time, she’d worked fairly consistently in small but interesting roles in Scottish television and theatre, supplementing her income by teaching drama one or two days a week for local authorities. Nowadays, she told everyone she was semi-retired, which was her way of dealing with the reality that she hadn’t been offered a single role since she’d turned sixty the year before.
‘It’s only a flying visit – I’m getting my hair done across the road in five minutes. Drea, darling, are you organised for the trip?’ She immediately answered her own question. ‘Of course you are. Sometimes I don’t know where I got you from. Neither me nor your father had a logical bone in our bodies.’
Kara watched as Drea rolled her eyes, refusing to bite. Kara was usually viewed as chronically uninteresting by her mother, but apparently her current situation was worthy of Jacinta’s rapt attention, as she focused back on her.
‘Right then, darling, what have I missed?’ she asked. ‘Do you need me to help to hide evidence or bury a body?’
Much as Jacinta’s breezy delivery irked her, Kara appreciated the sentiment. Sometimes she wondered if their mother’s over the top, flighty, dramatic flair was the reason that she and Drea had developed very different personalities. Drea’s core traits were that she was driven, logical, practical and cynical, while Kara preferred to be low key, non-confrontational and to go with the flow.
‘Not today, Mum. But I do need to dash.’
‘Just tell me you’re not going to take that man back. Urgh, I never liked him. You deserve so much better.’
Even if that were a possibility, she wouldn’t admit it because it would set her mum off on a rant that would cause her to miss her shampoo and blow dry. Jacinta had never approved of Josh, because she’d always said he wanted everything to be on his terms. In hindsight, she wasn’t wrong.
‘I won’t take him back, Mum. I’m rushing because I’ve got a meeting at the studio. They want to speak to me about what happened.’
Jacinta gasped. ‘What? Don’t dare back down with that buffoon, Corbin Jacobs. All smarm and no talent, that man. If the universe hadn’t blessed him with that face, he’d be doing adverts for stairlifts.’
Again, Kara didn’t disagree, but she wasn’t going to get into that right now, because she had to be at The Clydeside in half an hour and the clock was ticking.
‘I won’t back down, Mum. But right now, I’ll let Drea give you a run-down on everything…’
Over behind their mother, Drea’s eyes widened in outrage as she mimicked stabbing Kara.
‘…because I need to run. And you’re going to be proud of me. I might not be Julia Roberts, but today I’m going to speak to the bosses at the studio and maybe Josh too, and I’m going to stand my ground with them all.’
She was pretty sure none of them, including her, was completely confident about that statement. But there was only one way to find out.
2
OLLIE CHILES
Ollie stepped out of the shower to grab the phone that was ringing on the stone top of his vanity area. Calacatta Gold Marble. Just one of the ludicrously expensive stone accents in his townhouse in the beautiful Park Circus area of Glasgow. If the kid that had grown up just a few miles away from here on the South Side, in a tiny, terraced council house with one bathroom between four of them, could see him now, he’d punch the fricking air and then nip down to the corner shop and blow his entire pound pocket money on a can of Irn-Bru and a packet of football cards.
And yet… Weirdly, he still felt more at home back then in that terrace than he did here, in his seven-figure, majestic Georgian townhouse. Although, that was probably because he’d spent a grand total of about twelve nights here in the year since he’d bought it and had it decorated by one of the hot new interior designers in the city. The concept of getting other people to carry out his wishes was still so new to him. Little more than six years ago, he’d been a jobbing actor, mostly in theatre, and he was staying in a cupboard-size studio in New York, because the London play he’d worked on for six months had moved statesideand taken most of the cast with it. When the run came to an end, he still had a few months on his work visa, so he’d landed the part of a chorus member and understudy to the leading man in a short-lived but weighty Broadway play, starring Sienna Montgomery, former Disney teen star turned serious theatre actor. He’d respectfully punched the air when the show’s leading man went down with appendicitis and Ollie had stepped into the role, garnering praise and attention from both the critics and Sienna. They’d married three months later, after a whirlwind romance, with his best mate, Kara, by his side, four weeks before his visa was about to expire.
That had been just the start of his meteoric life transformation. A few weeks later, he’d got a call to replace an A-lister who’d pulled out of a new TV show, the first series ofThe Clansman. It was a TV spin off-of a major Hollywood movie franchise about sixteenth-century Scottish warriors, written and directed by Hollywood royalty, Mirren McLean. To his eternal gratitude, Mirren had remembered him because years before, when he was just starting out, he’d had a small part in the eighth movie inThe Clansmanfilm series, and she’d decided he’d be the perfect person to replace the big-shot dropout on the new show. Before he could catch a breath, he was on a plane, meeting Mirren again, and signing contracts. He’d shot the eight episodes in just over three months in various locations including LA, Vancouver and Croatia, where, by the miracles of television, some of the exterior scenes mimicking sixteenth-century Scotland were filmed. It was the kind of big-budget global TV show that every actor dreamed of working on. It became an international sensation, catapulting him to a level of fame that would see him mobbed in ALDI. That year, he did what felt like a million online interviews, racked up a gazillion fans and was soon on a plane back to LA to shoot the next series.First class. And he tried not to be starstruck that Harry Styles was in the seat behind him.
Five seasons later, he got recognised in every country he travelled to, was being offered serious movie roles, was rumoured to be the next Bond, earned millions per series, and had been voted Hottest Hollywood Male three years in a row. He was also overworked, exhausted and lived between so many time zones, he rarely remembered what day of the week it was. Just in the last fortnight, he’d done about twenty-five thousand airmiles and he’d only managed to spend Christmas with Sienna because he’d flown from LA to New York to meet her there. He’d spent a couple of nights in the apartment she was renting while she was working on a mediocre off-Broadway show that met its unexpected demise on Christmas Eve. He’d consoled his wife as much as he could, before he’d had to hop on a flight to Croatia, to shoot some extra scenes. One week there, including New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day, and then yesterday, he’d flown into Glasgow for a whistlestop overnight stay that would allow him to pick up fresh clothes and re-pack his case, before heading to Hawaii later today for Kara’s wedding. The one that was apparently now cancelled. And he already knew that the person whose name was currently flashing on his phone probably wasn’t mustering up much sympathy for his friend’s heartbreak.
Sienna.
‘Hey, babe, I was just thinking about you,’ he opened the FaceTime call. ‘I miss you.’ He tried to pull out his best smile and sound as sexy as possible, in the ever-present hope that it would remind her why she fell in love with him. Tomorrow would be their sixth wedding anniversary, and that all-consuming joy and the bliss of their first couple of years was a dim and distant memory for them both. Not that he blamed her after the latest knock to her career. When they met, she’d been the more successful one, the star who was rumoured to be underconsideration for a Tony nomination. But that was then. There had been a slump in the parts she’d been offered after that, and the last two or three years had been tough for her, culminating in the premature closure of her latest show. Now that the run had jack-knifed, she was benching her love of the theatre and heading back to LA for the TV pilot season auditions that came around at the beginning of every year, and was clearly not thrilled about it.
‘Back at you,’ she said, with an unmistakable edge of weariness that made it depressingly clear that she didn’t.
He heard the bing-bong of an announcement in the background noise. ‘You still at the airport? I thought you’d have been halfway to LA by now.’ He did a quick calculation of the time – 3a.m. in New York. Her red-eye flight should have left a few minutes before midnight.
‘Me too, but the flight was delayed because of the snow. I’ve been in the airline lounge for the last four hours, but they’re just about to start boarding now.’
Ah, that made sense – there was a slight slur to her words that definitely said four or five vodka martinis.
‘Nightmare. I’m sorry, babe.’
She shrugged. ‘The joys of flying commercial. What about you? Did you speak to Kara?’ His wife was a wonderful actress, but she couldn’t mask her disdain when she said his friend’s name. It was nothing new, so he rolled right over it.
‘I haven’t been able to get hold of her yet, so we haven’t spoken since the text.’
