cut and color Shea had ever seen.
“Hey, girl!” Shea detoured to her favorite table and set down her white leather purse with the stitched circle design. It was large enough to carry her slim laptop, her wallet, and the vacuum sealed water bottle she took everywhere with her. Shea made it a point to miss the breakfast rush. Delilah’s was the best place to eat in Sapling and Shea liked to take her time. At least half the town passed through on a daily basis. Before ten-thirty, she’d be hard-pressed to find a table, let alone get any writing done.
“Did you even get any scenes written yesterday?” Delilah wanted to know. “You were in and out of here so fast…”
She also had a bluntness about her. Benignly nosy and to-the-point, Delilah was never shy. Just like the vermillion lipstick she always wore and her ornate heart-shaped arm tattoo with the words “My Own Damn Self” written in the middle, everything about Delilah was unapologetic and bold.
“I had a phone call.” Shea waved it off, using the same excuse she’d given to Deputy Brody. The morning before, after the officer’s unannounced visit, Shea had been sufficiently spooked and had cut short her writing time. Instead of her normal routine, she’d spent a brief half hour at the bakery before leaving to deal with the money.
Before Shea even made it back up to the counter, Delilah was already busy making her usual drink: a whole milk hot chocolate with half sugar and plenty of whipped cream.
Shea followed her complete lie with a complete truth. “I’d like to catch up today. Let’s hope I can win the staring contest with my cursor.”
The high-pitched squeal of the steaming wand interrupted their conversation. Delilah never made it so hot that it decimated the whipped cream. Attention to detail was one of the many things Shea liked about her.
“Janet Brewster’s been writing a cozy mystery going on ten years,” Delilah lowered her voice to inform Shea. “Some days, I don’t think she writes a word.”
Shea had noticed the gray-haired woman with the severe ear-length cut who barely looked up or spoke. Shea had guessed the woman was writing something but had never caught enough of a friendly vibe to ask.
“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that,” Shea murmured.
“Yours sounds edgy. I’ll take psychological thriller over cozy mystery any day,” Delilah said as she shook the stainless-steel dispenser and began to squeeze out whipped cream.
“It’s an allegory for our troubled times.” Shea tried to sound flip. What Shea didn’t say was that it was also loosely based on things she had seen firsthand. Some days, she thought her screenplay was her creative outlet for processing her marriage to Keenan.
“What did you say it was called again?”
Shea wrinkled her nose as she thought of her working title: Greed. “I don’t like the current title. But the story is like Wall Street meets The Bonfire of the Vanities. What do you think of the title, Maiden Lane?”
“I’m guessing that’s a landmark?” Delilah asked.
“It’s a street in Manhattan that ends at the East River, underneath the Brooklyn Bridge. Shady as hell at night. But during the day, it’s all office buildings filled with the power elite.”
The double-entendre was the “maiden” part. Shea’s main character was a young ingenue who got involved with a powerful, dubious man. Her loss of innocence was a key theme in the story.
“Not bad…” Delilah said, her face drawn as she appeared to think. “But what do you think about Black Collar? You know, since your script’s about white collar people feeding black market crime?”
“Wow…” Shea didn’t know what impressed her more: Delilah’s title or her recall for the details of Shea’s script. Shea had shared the premise just once, some two weeks before.
It was loosely based on business dealings Shea had seen in Keenan’s circles. The antagonist was a publicly lauded businessman whose success was tied to deep, systemic corruption. Shea could never admit that the story was autobiographical—that she and Keenan paralleled the main characters. Details had been fictionalized but she couldn’t say the same for outlandish events depicted in some of the scenes.
Shea’s story was juicy. She’d been writing long enough to know that it had legs. Her hunch that she could sell the screenplay and actually see a movie made from it created yet another reason to cut ties with Keenan. He didn’t need to know that he’d been her inspiration. And she’d need a pen name to write this one under