The Disappearing Act(92)
I watch the cinema screen mute. Spellbound as she laughs, dancing and scheming her way frenetically through the trailer, electropunk Vivaldi pulsating over it all. Oh my God. She did it, I realize with a shiver fluttering up my spine. She made it. She got what she wanted. She got her deal. And I kept my promise, whether I meant to keep it or not. I didn’t ruin things for her. My story has always ended without her name being mentioned.
The music crescendos as Marla grins straight down the barrel of the lens at me, at the audience, and winks. Then the screen flashes to black. I clock the old Moon Finch logo. One of their last productions before they folded.
I pushed her that night but she survived. She must have watched me win that award on another screen somewhere. And she sent her message. As a warning, I suppose, or as a thank-you. Either way a reminder to keep my promise. A reminder of how much skin I have in the game. How much skin we both have in the game.
The trailer’s credits burst up with the promise that the film will be COMING SOON.
God help us all.
And then I spot it, in black and white—above-the-title billing—INTRODUCING ANNA SANDERSON.
She changed her name.
My eyes travel to Nick in the darkness. He is watching the screen oblivious, and I realize he never actually met Marla. He has no idea.
I take in the rest of the mesmerized faces around us and realize I am the only person here who recognizes this woman. Who knows what she’s done.
And I have promised to spare her if she spares me.
For Clementine—and the hours we spent together in the British Library’s First Floor Reading Room.
Acknowledgments
It seems inevitable now that as an actor/author I’d eventually get around to writing a story based in the acting world. And here it is…it is both the most researched and least researched book I’ve ever written. While I wasn’t fact-checking with a neuroscientist as I did with Mr. Nobody, or watching hours of scuba diving videos, researching flight paths, and gorging on South Pacific documentaries as I did with Something in the Water, it could be argued that I’ve been undercover for the past sixteen years! Hopefully I’ve managed to convey a little of the raw excitement and bald terror of a first-ever pilot season for readers, bound up here in a what-would-you-do psychological thriller.
Acting is a strange job and LA is an even stranger place but then…wouldn’t the world be a little less sparkly, a little less interesting, without it?
There are a lot of people to thank for bringing about this book.
Firstly, a very special mention goes to my daughter. I finished the first draft of this story in the British Library at eight months pregnant so we very much wrote it together. Thank you, cookie, for not kicking me too much and, later, for allowing me to work on edits during your nap times.
Huge thanks to my wonderful husband for the lockdown shift work, cheerleading, and for being an all-round dreamboat. There’s no one on earth I’d rather self-isolate with/share deadlines with than you!
Thank you to everyone at PRH for their fantastic work on bringing this book to fruition during a global pandemic and all the logistical trickiness that that entails! I’d especially like to thank my fabulous editor Kara Cesare, whose wonderful notes and clear eye kept me going in the right direction.
Special thanks, too, go to my brilliant agent Camilla Bolton at Darley Anderson. I still can’t thank you enough for responding to that first email I sent back in 2016 and for everything that has happened since.