Passion on Park Avenue (Central Park Pact #1)(54)

“I’m sure she’s perfect,” Naomi said with a smile. “But when we do open it up for casting, can we be sure to put feelers out in the outer boroughs? It may be a long shot, but I’d love if we could find a girl actually from the Bronx.”

“Absolutely. You got it,” Dylan said. Naomi thought she might have seen Libby give just the slightest eye-roll, but the other woman nodded and jotted something in her black notebook.

“Naomi, Caleb Davis, head screenwriter,” a bald guy to her right said, standing to shake her hand. “I’m delighted to say we’ve already got some homework for you.”

Caleb pushed a fat stack of paper across the table. “The pilot. I’ll send you a PDF, too, but I find sometimes the old-fashioned way is best.”

“Wow.” Naomi blinked down at it.

“Told ya we were moving fast on this,” Dylan said.

“Take your time reviewing it,” Caleb said. “And by take your time, I mean if you could have any feedback by next Monday, that’s my deadline.”

Naomi laughed as Deena pulled the script toward her and took a peek at the first few pages. “Got it. Anything I should look out for?”

“Actually, yeah.” Caleb shot a quick look at Dylan, who took over.

“The script’s good,” Dylan said, leaning forward with a smile. “Caleb’s a genius, and pulled together a pretty compelling story of your childhood from the dozens of interviews you’ve done over the years, plus interviews with people who knew you back then—”

“Wait.” Naomi held up her hand. “What?”

A man from her left wearing the most boring blue suit, white shirt, and blue tie combo on the planet jumped all over her incredulous tone. “It was in the contract. Page twenty-three, section 5C, specifically authorizes us to interview all sources we find relevant.”

“Don’t know if you could tell, but lawyer alert,” Dylan whispered loudly, nodding toward Blue Suit.

Everyone chuckled, and Naomi forced a polite smile. “I read the contract. I guess I didn’t expect that people who knew me twenty years ago would be considered relevant.”

“Well, they’re not, really,” Caleb admitted. “We rounded up a few former classmates, but while there was no shortage of people who wanted to tell us about how they ‘knew you when,’ nobody seems to really know you.”

“I was a shy kid.”

It was her standard line, but it wasn’t really true. She’d just been a smart kid. Smart enough to know that most people would throw you under the bus to save their own ass. She could thank Oliver Cunningham for that lesson.

“There is one gap we’re hoping you can fill,” Caleb said, flipping through a yellow legal pad until he found the note he was looking for. “One of our researchers discovered that you briefly transferred out of the Bronx school district when you attended the third grade in school District Two?”

Naomi went still. She didn’t know crap about school zones, but she knew exactly where she’d spent the third grade.

“What does that mean?” Deena asked.

Dylan studied Naomi for a moment, then looked at Deena. “It means Naomi went to third grade in Manhattan.”

Deena shook her head. “Nope. They got it wrong.”

Dylan looked back at Naomi, and she realized she should have seen this coming.

That they wouldn’t be satisfied summarizing her childhood with a series of inspirational anecdotes about how instead of a lemonade stand, she’d sold her own jewelry made out of paper clips and buttons, or how she’d made her own Barbie clothes out of bits of cloth she’d swiped from the mean seamstress who’d lived upstairs. Of course they would want the drama.

And she had to give them credit. They’d gone sniffing and found the jugular of Naomi’s childhood in under a week. Might as well admit the bare minimum now to stop them from digging further.

“They’re not wrong,” she told her assistant quietly.

Deena gave her a startled look. “Really? You grew up in Manhattan?”

Naomi snorted. “Hardly. I lived there for a year. Less than.”

“Why? Where?” Caleb already had his pen ready.

“Park Avenue.”

Deena’s gum stopped smacking for a moment, then resumed a moment later, and she wisely kept from mentioning the calls from 517 Park Avenue and the fact that Naomi had made a last-minute decision to buy that apartment after signing a lease on the Tribeca condo.

Caleb frowned, flipping through his notes. “You live on Park Avenue currently, right?”

“Right.” She sat back and crossed her legs, hoping her clipped tone and cool demeanor would signal nothing to see here, move along.

“What brought you and your mom to the Upper East Side?”

Naomi swallowed. “My mom was sort of a housekeeper/cook/ nanny for a family on Park Ave for a while. We lived with them.”

Caleb nodded, jotting something down in his notebook. “Good, this is good stuff. Cinderella stuff. You said you were there for about a year?”

“Yup.”

“Why’d you guys leave to head back to the Bronx?”

You and your daughter are trash, and you will always be trash. Get out of my home before I call the authorities.

It was funny that what Naomi remembered most about that awful day was the way Margaret Cunningham never used contractions, chose words like authorities instead of cops, police, or any of the other less flattering terms Naomi was used to hearing, even by age nine.