The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea (The Devils #2)(71)

“I’d stake my life on the fact that he’s been taking your money,” he says. “It’s just a matter of how much money, and how many other people have been helping themselves alongside him. He’s gone to great lengths to keep you out of the loop, and there’s probably a reason for it.”

“Are you really going to be able to figure all this out, though?” I ask, feeling winded. Sure, I have money. I have a lot of money. But most of my revenue from the last tour and the most recent album is still “out there” somewhere, theoretically being held until venues and the crew and a thousand other entities have gotten their cut. I wouldn’t know where to begin trying to separate out the truth from the excuses.

“With some help, yes,” he says. I like that he’s so sure of himself—one of us needs to be. “But if my suspicions are correct, he’s going to fight you tooth and nail to hang on to control, and you’re really going to need a backbone when it happens. He’s going to try to convince you to let him handle everything with the house, and he’ll go out of his way to make you back down.”

I want Ben to be wrong about all this, but what he’s describing sounds exactly like what Davis has done all along.





“Why the fuck are you buying a twenty-two-million-dollar house?” Davis demands when I arrive on set the next day.

I shouldn’t be surprised but somehow I am. Ben contacted my accountant, and my accountant ran straight to Davis. That, to me, is the first nail in the coffin for them both.

“Why shouldn’t I?” I reply. “I can afford it, right?”

I see the way frustration twists inside him. There’s a momentary flare of his nostrils, a curl of his lip. “You’re famous,” he says after a second’s pause. “You don’t need to go through a bank for a loan like you’re Bob and Betty Sue of Buttfuck, Nowhere, hoping to qualify for a new condo. We’ve got people who can take care of all that for you.”

“I don’t want it taken care of for me, though,” I tell him. “I’m twenty-six and buying my first place. I want to do it myself like any other adult would.”

“Normal adults do things themselves. The benefit of being a celebrity is that you don’t have to. I need you focused on your job—you know, the one you haven’t exactly been crushing of late.”

My chest is growing tighter and tighter the longer this conversation goes on. Exactly how much does he have to hide?

“Except I’ve already handled it,” I reply. “You’re the one wasting my time arguing. And why would my accountant be calling you?”

He’s flustered then. I’m sure he anticipated I’d hand this over as readily as I have everything else. “He was just concerned. He didn’t understand why you’d be dealing with a stranger for all this.”

“Everyone I deal with is a stranger,” I reply.

He sighs heavily, as if I’m being childish. “A stranger to me. You should only be going with people I’ve vetted. I’ll find you someone else.”

“No,” I reply. “Just tell the firm to give Ben whatever he needs.”

“I’m very uncomfortable with bringing in outsiders,” he says.

Yes, I think. I bet you are.





Beth and I chat on the phone the day after my meeting with Ben. I don’t reference her cancer, since I’m not supposed to know, but I do ask how she’s doing and she dismisses the question, wanting instead to know how I am. I stammer through a conversation about the tour, about the sitcom I’m filming. It’s hard when the most exciting thing in my life—the only exciting thing in my life—is my relationship with her son.

We make plans to get together when I’m back in LA, which is when she asks if I’m going to see my mother before I leave.

I blink in surprise. Beth and I have never really discussed my family before. “I hadn’t planned on it,” I reply, gazing at Central Park through the hotel room window. It’s March, but still fully winter here. There are lots of things about New York I don’t miss, and the weather is high on the list—but not first. “We don’t really get along all that well.”

“How could any mother not get along with you?” she asks. “You’re an angel.”

My throat swells. Obviously, I have to take what Beth says with a grain of salt—she’d say the same of Six, I’m sure—but the simple fact that she still likes me, even after I broke up with her son, feels like a gift I can never repay. “I’m not really an angel,” I say quietly. “I’m frequently kind of a jerk.”

She tsks. “I can’t see that. But even if it’s true, I’ll bet you have your reasons. And I bet your mom has her reasons too, and they probably don’t have much to do with you at all. Give her a chance, honey.”

I smile and tear up at the same time. Beth is trying to fix her boys’ lives before she dies. And I get the sense she’s trying to fix mine too.

“Life isn’t black and white, Drew,” she says. “And you have to learn to live in the gray a little, accept that it can be perfect in all its imperfections.”

Because she asks me to do it—and only because of that—I meet my mother for lunch the day before I return to Europe to finish the tour.