“I guess I should clean this stuff up,” I said, surveying my mess. The baseballs were still in the keep pile, along with a few jackets and a pair of ski boots.
“That’s a lot of baseballs,” Ashley said, eyeing the box. I wasn’t sure she was testing me until she added, “How many have you got there?” And there was my opening, so big you could push a body through it.
I thought back to a college basketball player I treated when I was a resident. He had been in a car accident and was paralyzed from the waist down. When he asked me, “Will I ever play again?” I was honest with him. “Your spinal cord was severed. There’s no way.” But he just shook his head. “Don’t tell me that shit,” he hissed. “That’s not for me.” He didn’t want to hear the facts, see the X-ray of his vertebrae looking like alphabet soup. Because if he didn’t look at it, he reasoned, there was still a chance what I was saying wasn’t true.
There were so many knowable unknowns. Had Ashley known about the bunker? If so, how? And how would she have known Louisa was in there, or where the vent was, or that a baseball was the perfect size to seal it up? Neither Nathan nor I had known why that bag of cement had exploded, yet she had known to look underneath it. Lucky guess? Or something else?
“I have no idea how many baseballs are in there,” I said, sliding the box into the trash pile with my foot. “Doesn’t matter, I’m getting rid of them.” And then I bent over and closed the lid.
I don’t know if I did it for her, or for me. I didn’t want to marry her, not anymore, but she was my best friend, and I wanted to hold on to that. So I tossed out that box, and my unanswered questions along with it. Yes, I’d taken an oath to do no harm, but I also believed people should get what they deserve.
EPILOGUE
* * *
THREE WEEKS LATER
EPILOGUE
* * *
ASHLEY
I woke up on my birthday to see three missed calls from my mother. It’s two hours later in Wisconsin, but the first one was at 6:00 a.m.—her time! Which was 4:00 a.m. for me. It seemed she was really eager to wish me a happy thirtieth birthday, so I called her back before getting out of bed.
“Happy birthday!” she said when she picked up on the first ring.
“Hi, Mom.”
“Billy and Dylan are here, too. I’ll put you on speaker.”
“Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to yoooouuuu!” my mom and brothers sang. It was awful, but also sweet, and I had to laugh.
“Thank you, you guys are the best.”
“What are you doing today?” my brother Billy asked.
“Hopefully closing the deal with the writer on my first movie!” I said with the enthusiasm of a woman who had finally gotten her long-awaited big break.
I had saved all the scripts my insider at CAA had sent me over the years, including the one Louisa had cast me in without my knowing. It was as good as I remembered. The characters were well-drawn, and the themes of loyalty, succession, and revenge were still ultra-relevant. No one had picked it up since it fell out of production all those years ago, and it was available! So I contacted the writer to ask if she would option it to me. She was thrilled to accept a modest fee to do some “development,” and I loved her ideas about how to engineer a plum role for me. We couldn’t do the version that had just been played out in real life, of course—I was a risk-taker but not an idiot! So we went back to her original, reshaped the Scarlett/Winnie role for me （why not make the daughter the surprise vigilante?）， and added a few more twists and turns. As she put it, there were a lot of ways to skin this cat, and she was as excited to discover them as I was to star in my very first movie.
“OK, I need my coffee now,” I told my mom and siblings. “I’ll talk to you guys later.” We said our goodbyes, and I got out of bed. I still had a love-hate relationship with Hollywood, but with $1 million to invest in my career, I wasn’t going to give up just yet. Producing my own movie meant no more sitting around waiting for the phone to ring. I was in charge of my destiny now. I vowed to surround myself with the most talented, hard-working, honorable people, and with their help, make all our dreams come true.
Eager to start my day, I pulled on some jeans and a tank top and opened my bedroom door. Then gasped at what I saw.
“Oh my God!”
My living room ceiling was covered with balloons in every color of the rainbow—fire-engine red, powder blue, forest green, sunshine yellow. There were dozens of them, with swirls of ribbon dangling down like candy-colored vines.