Everything Leads to You(80)

“These tacos are delicious,” she says.

She takes a last bite and I have to look away. Even that is so beautiful it hurts.

“We should sit outside,” she says. “Look through what you brought. Did you see the view when you came up? It’s totally different in the daylight.”

“That sounds great,” I manage to say.

She stands up first and we get as far as the doorway before I blurt out, “I saw something in the credits that I didn’t notice before.”

She turns around to face me.

“A second assistant director credit for a guy named Leonard.”

Her eyes widen.

“It’s probably nothing,” I say.

But she’s already heading back to the corner. She kneels on the blanket and rewinds and then we watch the credits again.

“When is it?” she asks.

“Later on.”

“But you said director?”

“The second AD gets people coffee. It’s not exactly high profile.”

Caroline’s name passes.

“Soon,” I say. “Here!”

Ava presses pause. The name vibrates at the top of the screen: Leonard Pine.

I pull out my phone and search his name.

“Something’s here,” I say, opening the first link that appears, and I don’t tell her that it doesn’t say Leonard—it says Lenny—because I can’t stand the thought of disappointing her if he isn’t the right person. “He’s a producer now.”

“Is there a number for him?”

“Yeah, for his office,” I say. “I don’t know if—”

“What is it?” Ava asks.

I tell her and she dials.

“We don’t know it’s him,” I say. “It’s such a long shot.”

“May I speak to Leonard?” she says into the phone. She waits for a moment. “Ava Garden Wilder. Yes, okay.”

She looks at me and shakes her head. “She’s never going to connect me. We’ll have to go there.”

“Let’s just see what happens. Maybe I can find someone who knows him.”

“Yes,” she says into the phone. “Yes, Ava Garden Wilder. Is this Leonard? Lenny?”

The knuckles of one hand are white from grasping the phone, and then she reaches out to me and squeezes my shoulder with the other as she says, “Yes, her name was Caroline. Yes, I can come now.”

And I know that this is a major breakthrough. I know that all I should be thinking about is Lenny and what he’s about to tell us. But, instead, what I think about is how her hand squeezing my shoulder feels like a kiss.

She lets go.

Touch me again, I want to tell her. But I don’t.





Chapter Nineteen



“We found Lenny,” I tell Charlotte when she answers.

Ava is pulling her beat-up car out of her fancy garage and I’m sitting next to her in the passenger’s seat even though I’m due back at work in twenty minutes.

“Are you kidding?” she asks.

“No. And I know we’re supposed to be putting up the artwork but I’m sort of headed downtown right now.”

“We can do it tonight,” she says. “It’s fine. This is amazing. How did you do it?”

“I’ll tell you everything as soon as we’re done.”

“You’d better,” she says. “I can’t believe I’m missing this.”

“I know,” I say.

“It’s fine. I’ll do as much on my own as I can. I’ll tell Rebecca you got some great idea and ran off to make magic happen.”

“I love you,” I say.

“Yeah, I know,” she says. “Call me as soon as it’s over.”

And soon we are parked in a twenty-dollar-an-hour parking garage, riding a silver elevator to the thirty-seventh floor of a sleek office building, stepping out into a lobby with a pristine white carpet.

“How often do you think they have to replace this?” I whisper, but Ava isn’t looking down. She heads straight to the guy at the desk and tells him that Lenny’s expecting us. Then a door opens and a tall man with thinning brown hair and a white linen shirt appears. He looks at both of us but soon his gaze shifts to Ava only. A faint smile flickers and vanishes across his angular face, and then he ushers us in. We follow him down a hallway and into a corner office with a view of Los Angeles I’ve never seen before, so different from Ava’s view from only three stories up. From up here, it would be easy to forget that life exists below you.