Publication Date: November 6, 2024

Publisher: Park Row Books

A young actress receives the role of a lifetime—playing a famous romance writer in a major biopic. But when she discovers a shocking secret about the author’s past, she realizes her own participation in the biopic is no coincidence. Perfect for fans of The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo.

Fledgling actress Amelia Grant is at rock bottom when offered the opportunity of a lifetime: to play world-renowned romance author, Gloria Diamond, in a biopic. To prepare for the role, she'll spend a week with Gloria at her secluded Washington estate. It's a chance to get out of L.A., away from her cheating ex-boyfriend, and to make her recently deceased mother proud, who was Gloria's biggest fan.

Amelia's excitement is short-lived, however, once she arrives at the estate. Gloria is cold, verging on rude, and so different than her public persona – a widow-turned-romance writer who used her own whirlwind love story as inspiration for her books. But when Amelia stumbles upon a secret from Gloria's past, she realizes Gloria's life story is more fiction than fact, and Amelia’s own participation in the biopic is no coincidence.

Told in alternating points of view—Amelia in the present day and Gloria in the past—the novel examines what it means to be a woman and an artist, and what lengths a woman will ultimately go to protect herself and her passions.

Excerpt

Prologue

Amelia

Sometimes the end of everything sneaks up on you when you least expect it.

I read that once, in a Gloria Diamond novel. Only she was referring to an asteroid. For me, the end came as a 32 DD red lace bra.

It happened on a rare rainy day in LA, two months after my thirty-third birthday. Two days after my mother had died.

She had collapsed quite suddenly in her garden, my mother. And forty-eight hours later, I found myself numb and standing in the open doorway of my walk-in closet in my underwear. I knew I needed something to wear to the funeral home to discuss arrangements, but I couldn’t figure out how to step inside the closet and choose what that should be. Young woman with newly dead mother. It was a role I didn’t yet understand and didn’t want. I stared at all my clothes blindly, as if I’d never seen any of them before.

“How about this?” Jase stepped around me, walked into the closet and pulled out a hanger with a simple black shift dress. Was it mine? I had no memory of buying it. The tags were still on.

“She hated black,” I reminded him. My mother had been in love with color, from the pink azaleas in her garden to the color-splattered abstract art she made in her studio to the bright orange plates she’d serve us brunch on each Sunday.

Jase raised his eyebrows, and I took the dress from him, ripped off the tags and quickly slipped into it. I glanced at myself in the floor-length mirror. The dress was shapeless, and I looked pale and powerless.

Jase walked up behind me and hugged me, whispering one more apology over not being able to accompany me this morning. His shooting schedule was intense. The director would get mad if he called out last minute.

“It’s fine,” I told him, again. Work was work. And he had fought so hard to get this far. It wasn’t like I could be mad he hadn’t planned ahead. No one could’ve expected my healthy fifty-eight-year-old mother to collapse in her azaleas when shooting schedules had been made. I’d just wrapped shooting on a supporting role in an indie film, so luckily my schedule this week was clear. My mother always had impeccable timing.

“Are you sure?” Jase released the words slowly, tickling my ear with his breath. When I nodded, he spun me around, planted a gentle kiss on my forehead. He took a step back, nodded approvingly as he glanced over the blah black dress, then flashed what I knew by then was his TV-doctor sexy grin. The smile was an apology, or a promise, or maybe by then it was more like a tic. Since he’d taken on the role of heart surgeon/ heartthrob on the überpopular Seattle Med last year, my boyfriend’s face had become familiar to every woman in America. But it had come to feel strangely unfamiliar to me.

“I’ll be okay,” I heard myself saying. And in spite of everything, I was still a good actress. I sold it.

“I know,” he said easily. Then he shouted after me as I walked out: “Call me if you need anything, though.”

“I won’t,” I yelled back.

But it turned out, I did need something.

Halfway to Pasadena on the 10, I realized I hadn’t grabbed my wallet, and I called Jase to see if he had time before the shoot to drop it off, or if he could at least text me a picture of my credit card so I had the number to pay. But Jase didn’t pick up, and if he’d already left for his shoot, he’d be no help.

I sighed and got off the next exit on the freeway to circle back. I knew I would be late for the appointment now; my mother had abhorred lateness and, more, she had never understood what she termed my spaciness—a lifetime of forgotten wallets and missing socks. But then it hit me, she would never know about this. A dead woman couldn’t get angry. And suddenly I had to pull off to the side of the on-ramp because I couldn’t see the road through my tears.

By the time I made it back to our apartment again, my face was puffy from crying, and I clutched a crumpled tissue in my hand as I unlocked the door. I was blowing my nose as I walked inside, so I almost didn’t notice that random red bra strewn across the floor until my foot caught on it in my path to the bedroom.

And even then, I disentangled it from my foot, picked it up and tossed it aside. I couldn’t process what it was, why it was there. I kept on walking like an idiot to my bedroom; all I knew in that moment was that my wallet was still sitting on my dresser. I opened my bedroom door and suddenly everything—and nothing—made sense. Jase was lying on our bed completely naked, a blonde woman with too-bronze skin, also completely naked, straddling on top of him.

“Jase?” I ran toward the bed and said his name like I was in some stupid movie of the week, and I was too naive to understand what was happening. What had been happening, right in front of me.

The naked woman turned at the sound of my voice and then I recognized her: Celeste Templeton, Jase’s gorgeous twenty-two-year-old Seattle Med costar.

I had this weird moment after she turned where I was nearly eye level with her breasts, and I found myself wondering if they were real. They couldn’t be. No one had authentic breasts that large and that perfectly symmetrical. Did they?

“Shit, Melly. It’s not what you think,” Jase said. But he didn’t move right away, and neither did she. Until she finally shifted off him to grab a blanket and I noticed her breasts barely moved. Definitely fake. I was trapped inside some awful cliché, and all I wanted to do was run. I had to get out.

“I forgot my wallet,” I finally heard myself saying, my voice coming from somewhere far away, above me, apart from me, the way it did when I auditioned for a role. I grabbed my wallet from the dresser and tore out of the room, then out of our apartment.

Just as I stepped outside, it started to rain. It had been raining on and off all week, and rain had been forecasted for today too. But I stood there, letting the water wash over me because, of course, I’d forgotten my umbrella too. And there was no way I was going back inside for it now.

Water flattened my curls and ran down my face, pelted my arms and soaked my ugly dress. My skin felt both numb and raw at once. But I stood there, in the rain, as the understanding hit me, that everything I was and everything I thought I knew, suddenly it was gone, just like that.

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About the Author

Jillian Cantor is the USA Today and internationally bestselling author of eleven novels for teens and adults, which have been chosen for LibraryReads, Indie Next, Amazon Best of the Month, and have been translated into 13 languages. She has a BA in English from Penn State University and an MFA from the University of Arizona. Born and raised in a suburb of Philadelphia, Cantor currently lives in Arizona with her husband and two sons.

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