The Stand-In(40)

“Would you like the person who fired you?”

“It’s more than that. I could tell.” He raises his eyebrows. “I can read you.”

This is too true to debate. “He’s a jerk and I don’t like him.”

“Ah.” Sam regards me. “Did he recognize you?”

“No. I didn’t want to give him the chance to see me up close or speak to me, though.”

“Wise.”

I dab at my eyes with the tissue. “The art was nice.”

Sam exhales. “I think you might be the only person to describe contemporary art as nice.”

“Thought-provoking? Evocative? Bleeding-edge?”

“Is that better than cutting-edge?”

“One step beyond.” I hum a line from the Madness song and his lips twitch again. That’s a definite victory. “Do you ever get used to it?” The pillowy darkness of the car’s interior makes it easier to ask. “That attention?”

“I’ve never not known it.” Sam’s voice wraps around me. “You know who my parents are.”

Sam’s august parentage, a movie-star mother and director father, is mentioned in almost every profile. He takes my silence as a yes and continues. “My parents are many wonderful things but they both also crave attention. I’ve had cameras around my whole life.”

I try to imagine that. All the missteps I took documented and commented on, all the terrible hair days and disastrous fashion choices logged for posterity and resurfaced on listicles every few years. “I don’t know how you cope.”

“I don’t know another way to live.” He doesn’t say it with bitterness but as a fact of life.

“What if you want to be alone?”

“I stay in the house. It’s the only place I can be myself.”

“Oh.” Lonely.

“You’re improving.” He changes the subject. I parse his tone for an insult, and even though I come up short, I’m suspicious of this seeming goodwill.

I clear my throat. “Thank you. For asking if I wanted to leave earlier.”

He loosens his collar. “Seemed like a safer option to get you out of the situation rather than watch you blow it for Fangli.”

My insides shrivel. Of course it was because of Fangli. He wasn’t watching out for me, he was making sure I didn’t screw it up for her. I hold my expression under control, unwilling to give him the slightest hint that I might have thought otherwise, and keep my tone light.

“Since you thought I was terrible, it doesn’t seem like the bar was very high.”

“Fangli’s been better since you’ve been here,” he says. “She’s calmer now that she doesn’t have to worry about going out.”

“About Fangli.” I pause and decide to take the plunge. “She’s not okay.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know her very well.” I think about this and amend it. “I don’t know her at all but I think she’s depressed.”

He stiffens. “What would you know about it?”

I push on because if it’s true, Fangli needs more help than hiring a body double. “I remember feeling the same way when I was diagnosed. Her expression, it’s the same I saw in the mirror.”

Sam leans forward to take one of the bottled waters from the holder and cracks it open with a vicious twist. “I’ve worked with North Americans for a long time, but I continue to marvel at your openness in speaking of such things.”

“Not everyone can or does.” The world would be a better place if we did.

“It’s more than would happen at home.” He drinks half the water. “This is not your concern.”

“I think that—”

“No. Fangli is tired, that’s all.” He shuts me down and we ride in silence until the hotel.

Before we get out, I make one last attempt. “You don’t think that, Sam. She needs help.”

He doesn’t say anything, and I fix the smile on my face for the strangers in the lobby before I get out of the car.





Sixteen


Sam comes into my suite for a debrief but I ignore him as I take off the new shoes and wiggle my toes with pleasure against the cool wooden floor. Even though they were flat, they pinched. That jumpsuit was a definite winner; I might buy it off Fangli to keep for my own when the two months are done since Mei warned me I wouldn’t be able to wear it again while I was here. Fangli doesn’t wear the same outfit twice for events.

“You need to practice Fangli’s autograph,” Sam says when he comes back to the table with water. “That could have been bad, and I don’t know how Mei let it slip through the cracks. She’s usually so organized and perceptive about what needs to be done.”

I have to agree, even though it bugs me to admit he’s right. “Do you have a copy of it?”

“Here.” He scribbles three characters on a sheet, the strong lines swooping over each other. “Wei, there’s her family name. Then Fang, for fragrant, and Li for jasmine.”

I took Mandarin in university, and back then my painstaking strokes were like a toddler with a crayon compared to this confident scrawl. No wonder I got a D grade. He rolls up his sleeves (ding, ding, add that to the hot man list), then shakes the pen at me. I hitch a chair up to the table and admire his forearms. His wrists are broad and I realize I have never noticed a man’s wrists in my life, let alone known I had a preference for broad ones with very slightly visible veins.