all my money. Erik had finally agreed to an outrageous lump sum payout. The number of zeros on the check I’d had to write to get him out of my hair and out of my life for good made me physically ill, but it was worth it to be free of him.
I was ready to get back some sort of normal, which meant getting back in front of a camera and creating something I could be proud of. It would be nice to disappear into a character again. I missed being able to be someone else for a while.
Lennon cleared her throat and started to tap one of her long nails on the table in front of her. Her blue eyes shifted away from mine: a dead giveaway that I wasn’t going to love whatever she had to say next.
“I know you’ve been preoccupied by your personal life, so you may not have heard that Salinger Dolan started his own production company recently. It’s actually been the talk of the town as of late.”
I frowned at the mere mention of my old nemesis’s name. I reached for a french fry that was now kind of cold and soggy. “Last I heard, he was doing another stint in rehab. This is like the third or fourth time he’s tried to get clean. I can’t imagine someone like him trying to run a company. Who would trust him?”
Lennon cleared her throat again, and I watched as she crossed her long legs and started to bounce a high-heeled foot up and down.
“He’s actually been clean for over a year. He’s been working hard to get his career back on track. I guess he realized people would be reluctant to work with him since he’s been so erratic and unreliable after his first drug-related incident. The only way he could get involved with the kind of projects that would help him make a comeback was if he footed the majority of the bill. It’s a big step, and kind of admirable if you think about it. It’s a massive undertaking for someone so young.”
I frowned harder and felt my back teeth grind together. “He’s gotta be, what, twenty-five or twenty-six now? He’s old enough to face the consequences of his actions.”
Not that I ever expected that to happen. Even when he’d endangered others with his behavior and indifference, it still seemed like he got a free pass to wreak as much havoc as humanly possible.
Lennon sighed. “He’s also old enough to have matured and learned from his many mistakes. I think you, more than anyone, would be a little more open-minded when it came to knowing what you see isn’t always the entire story. Where would you be in your career right now if the general public hadn’t given you a second chance?”
I chomped on the fry and scowled.
She wasn’t entirely wrong. The world that had loved me had turned on me the instant the show wrote me off in the worst way possible. My character betrayed Salinger’s, which ended with him getting injured and clinging to life in the season finale. It was such a one-eighty from who I’d always been on the show; the change didn’t go over well with the audience. And when news leaked that Salinger and I didn’t get along, and that I’d tried to intervene with the showrunners, I became public enemy number one. Suddenly, my head was too big, and I wasn’t grateful for the opportunities I’d been given. Everyone who’d thought I was friendly and easy-going started to question if it was all an act. I was called fake and pretentious. When my agent dropped me, and it became close to impossible to book anything else, I was told I deserved it for trying to make things difficult for Salinger.
Even when his team released a statement saying he had nothing to do with the decision to not renew my contract, it did more harm than good. Somehow, he was the victim, and I was seen as a greedy woman trying to use him to claw my way to the top. Salinger was the first man who made me feel invisible and worthless in the industry, but in the nine years that followed our fateful encounter, he was far from the last.
I struggled to find new representation after my agent dropped me. Luckily, Lennon found me right before I was about to get on a plane and head back home with my tail between my legs. She’d