Water.
Not many people had an outlet for their crazy, but Cat had her brushes. And it was time she put herself out there—
really
out there—because painting alone had reached its threshold of usefulness. If she didn’t find a new path to travel soon, if she didn’t figure out what this strange connection to water meant, she feared what might become of her.
“What do you think of the space?” Michael swept out an arm.
Here it came, the bartender smile. “As if I’ve ever had anything to compare it to? It’s…incredible. So much bigger than I expected.”
“We bought the old building behind us,” Helen added, “and knocked out the joining walls. Perfect for big shows like this.”
Big show. For her. The floor undulated like waves and she grabbed Michael’s arm for support. When he looked down at her hand with an odd, uncomfortable expression, she removed it.
Helen slid warm fingers over Cat’s shoulder. An intimate gesture from someone she barely knew. Strangely, it felt welcome and right.
“You okay, honey?” Helen asked. “Your eyes look a little red.”
She glanced at Michael, whose expression reminded her of the “talk” he’d given her a few months ago in preparation for these next two weeks.
Be professional, Cat. Always be professional
. What he was really saying?
Don’t embarrass me
.
Cat waved Helen off. “Yeah. I mean,
yes
, I’m fine. Not used to the cold. Made my eyes water.”
Helen humored her. “We’re excited to have you. All the canvases arrived safely and I’ve been paging through them every day. Your work is fresh. Explosive, yet serene at the same time. The perfect thing to show in the dead of winter. I expect to sell the hell out of them during the festival and all through ski season.”
Her paintings in strangers’ houses. At least some part of her would find a home.
Helen crossed her arms. She looked like a kindly grandmother and a shrewd businesswoman at the same time. Heaven
help anyone who told her no. “Let me tell you, I had my pick of up-and-coming artists, all wanting to get in front of the Hollywood crowd. Nothing truly jumped out at me. Then Michael Ray called. He may be an arrogant son of a bitch, but he has an amazing eye and a sharp business sense. I’m not doing him or you a favor by showing you. I have a reputation to uphold.”
Cat swallowed and glanced at Michael, but he just nodded.
“Then I saw your work.” Helen rolled her eyes. “Wow.”
Michael beamed. Cat realized they were waiting for a response. “I can’t tell you how overwhelmed I am to have this opportunity.”
Helen tilted her head as if Cat were the painting. “Let’s see how long that humility lasts when the who’s who of L.A. and New York walk in here and start clawing for your stuff.”
Michael nodded. “She’s the real deal, isn’t she? And just look at her. Made for the media. Made to be big.”
Cat stiffened but Michael didn’t notice. He probably wasn’t even aware he’d said it out loud or that he wore a disconcerting, hungry sort of look. He’d certainly never said anything like that to her face before. As a film producer, she supposed, he was used to treating people like products because to him, they were.
With a quick, perceptive glance at her, Helen deftly turned the conversation. “It’s stunning, Cat, how you capture the personalities of various bodies of water and still manage to twist them. Oceans are intimate. Ponds are expansive. And the rivers—ah!” She pressed a hand to her chest. “I know Michael loves the
Pond
series, but the
Rivers
are my personal favorite. You give them all such mystery. Such melancholy. Like you love it and hate it at the same time. So tell me: why water?”
Cat toed a folded drop cloth. That was the big question, wasn’t it? If she could answer that, she wouldn’t have started painting in the first place.
A phone buzzed. Michael reached into his pocket, mumbling, “Sorry, sorry.”
He’d never apologized before for taking a phone call, but Cat didn’t mind because it saved her from answering Helen. Michael listened for a second or two, his mouth drawing a grim line, then clicked off the phone. “I gotta run. First screening starts in fifteen then meetings all afternoon through dinner.”
He turned to Cat. “Meet up tomorrow? There’s an actor I want you to meet. Big art collector.”
She just stared. It always took a few seconds to track the speed of his brain.
“What?” Michael tapped at his phone’s calendar. “Did we make plans?”
“Well, no. But I have a reservation at Shed tonight.”
She wasn’t really keen on having dinner with Michael—given that she’d made the reservation in order to stare at Xavier some more and try to figure out how she knew him—but she realized, as she said it, that she didn’t want to be alone her first night away from the ocean. Already the dryness and isolation of this place scraped at her skin and mind.
He hissed through his teeth. “Sorry, can’t. Wait. Did you say Shed? How’d you get in there?”
“Um. I asked?”
Suddenly she feared he’d cancel his plans to go with her, because if Michael was about one thing, it was status.
“Why don’t you go with Helen?” he offered. “You two could talk more about the show. Get to know each other.”
Helen grinned, sliding on her glasses, the beaded chain catching the overhead lights. “Sounds good to me. As long as I can pick up the check. We can giggle and talk about Michael Ray behind his back.”
Michael snorted. “You already know everything. I’m an open fucking book.”
As he gave Cat’s arm an impersonal pinch, she wasn’t entirely convinced that that was the case.
Michael kissed Helen on the cheek, gave Cat a squeeze on the
arm that felt more awkward than it looked, and left the gallery. No one could rattle him like the gorgeous, modest, as-yet-unknown artist from Florida…despite the fact she was still a nobody. With his help, that would soon change. And
then
she’d be worthy.
Out on Waterleaf, he flipped up the collar of his cashmere coat and tugged on his stiff, leather gloves. His gaze skated over the papered windows and the chalkboard sign with Cat’s name scrawled on it. He shivered, but it had nothing to do with the cold.
Cat’s opening was going to fucking
kill
.
Suggesting to Helen to schedule the gallery event in the middle of the festival, at the peak of the Hollywood presence and the greatest saturation of money and power, was brilliant on his part. Aside from the fact that he’d contracted with Helen to take a finder’s fee from sales, really what he was selling was Cat.
The L.A. elite spent their lives grasping for whatever was “the latest.” They worshipped new faces. They obsessed over beauty. They loved whatever someone else told them to love, whatever someone better than them deemed important or rare or special. Michael was a prime example of this, and he knew it.
Thank you, Raymond Ebrecht, for passing on the torch
.
Michael was merely doing his duty by telling the rest of the elite to love Cat’s art. He was nothing, if not a trendsetter.
He was nothing, if not a man obsessed with the one woman
who didn’t give a shit about his money or his job. The one woman who wasn’t
quite
good enough for him.
His phone rang. With a grunt he pulled off a glove with his teeth. No wonder the industry was based in L.A. If everyone had to jump through these goddamn hoops all the time to get to their phones, the number of tantrums would increase exponentially.
“Yeah.”
“Tell me you’re on your way.” Grant, his office assistant.
“I’m on my way.”
Grant’s voice lowered. “I have Tom Bridger in my eyesight and he’s talking to some random. Get over here and you’ll catch him before the main title.”
Bridger seeing Michael at the theater
before
the screening went a hell of a lot further than Michael approaching the director right after. That meant Michael was about to actually sit through the film and hadn’t just popped in during the denouement. Bridger needed to know Michael’s pursuit of him was deadly serious.
The project for which Michael wanted the young, up-and-coming director was going to be a game changer. But Michael had to slow play him. Bridger was one of those annoying types who were into film for the “art” and publicly decried anything to do with Big Hollywood. So far, Bridger had barely acknowledged the calls from Michael’s production company. Michael’s number-one business goal while in White Clover Creek? Change Bridger’s mind. And he was exactly the kind of guy who’d love Cat, with her aw-shucks likability and raw talent. He’d introduce them as soon as possible and let Cat’s good vibes rub off on Bridger. Everything was coming together so nicely. With Bridger in the director’s chair, the thing would sweep the Oscars.
The world assumed that winning more Oscars than the record-setting Raymond Ebrecht was every Hollywood producer’s dream. Not for Michael. His goal was much more personal.
“You there?” Grant’s tinny voice came through the phone.
“Be there in five.”
At the bottom of the Waterleaf hill, a respectable crowd gathered outside the Gold Rush for Bridger’s opus on
eighteenth-century French prostitutes, shot with one camera and a max on Bridger’s credit cards. A light snow started to fall and Michael had to slow his steps so his loafers wouldn’t send his ass rolling down the sidewalk to the red carpet below.
His phone buzzed. A text this time.
“Jesus, Grant,” he mumbled, “I’m almost there.”
But it wasn’t from Grant. It was Sean, his
other
assistant.
Need you up at the house. Now.
Problem? Michael texted back.
A surprise from Lea. Get up here.
Oh, God. She’d brought him another one.
Michael snapped his phone shut, adrenaline hurtling through his body. Growing up he’d never had the joyful Christmases like you saw in his films, but in the past two years Lea had become his own goddamn Santa: unpredictable, generous, and
magical
.
He stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, right in front of a boutique that had rolled out racks of sale sweaters and jeans under its awning. A woman walking behind him skittered on the slanted concrete trying to get around him. He didn’t apologize.
Ten minutes to curtain on Bridger’s film. His rental house up in the mountains a fifteen-minute drive away. He needed to be two places at once.
No problem.
He stalked down to the end of the block and hung a tight right. Shit, the narrow, one-way street was full of people posing for pictures against the backdrop of the main square and its horrid statue. He kept going and came out on Groundcherry Street, which bordered the backs of all the buildings along Waterleaf. An overflowing parking lot sat across the street. No celebrities, no gapers.
He ducked behind the boutique, into a little alcove where new snow was trying to make the old sludge look pretty again. A tower of empty Christmas decoration boxes tilted against the old brick wall and he wedged himself behind it, shielding himself from view, should anyone come along. Good thing he’d inhaled a giant breakfast. He needed the energy.
Pressing his back against the brick, he drew a deep breath and held it. He closed his eyes and dove into the black of his
mind. There, straight down the center of his subconscious, ran a thick, pulsing seam of glowing red. He pushed his awareness into that seam, filling it until the crack widened and widened. He slipped ghostly fingers into the seam, taking hold of each side, and ripped his own mind apart.
He
split
.
The second it happened, Michael went weightless. His body felt like it shot upward from the ground, bobbing like a balloon. The next second, someone yanked on that balloon’s string and he was jerked back downward. His stomach sloshed and lead lined his veins. He inhaled. Exhaled. The world evened out. Then he opened his eyes.
Michael Ebrecht stood in front of him. The same coat, the same posture, the same face.
It was not a twin, with a similar face and separate thoughts. It was not a mirror image or doppelgänger. It was him, Michael. Divided.
The double raised a gloved hand and smoothed down his silvering hair. Always, at the first look after a
split
, Michael was painfully aware of how he’d aged. How narrow his face had gotten, how all his years spent in L.A. and Miami had weathered his skin. If only he’d figured out how to use the
splitting
to his advantage at a much earlier age. If only Raymond had actually explained it to him. Or talked to him even. Ah, youth. Wasted on the youth. And Michael’s was most definitely a waste.
He and his double didn’t need to speak. The other automatically knew what he needed to do and by when. He nodded to Michael, stepped out from behind the boxes and headed back toward Waterleaf. They didn’t share a consciousness, but instead melded together their separate conversations and emotions and occurrences upon reabsorption. He never worried the other would rebel; they had the same goals, the same mind. Within three hours, because that’s how long the energy could last, the two would rejoin, and Michael would learn how the “surprise” meeting with Bridger went.
Michael stayed huddled behind the boxes until his watch said the screening had started. Then he turned out onto Groundcherry and headed back uphill. He waved down the first cab he saw, only realizing he’d stolen it from someone else when
the jilted, irate couple stood on the curb and windmilled their arms. The rusting white minivan with the faded taxi decals pulled away. He couldn’t have called back the limo driver who had toted him into town earlier that day because technically Michael was supposed to be in the screening. The first trick to being two people was to never get caught. The second trick was to use it for every advantage.
Divide and conquer, he always said.
The cabdriver whistled as he pulled his rattling source of
income into the driveway of the sprawling, two-story fieldstone house Michael had rented for the next two weeks. The driveway made a wide circle around a dry fountain still topped with a decorated Christmas tree.