The Girl in the Mist (Misted Pines 1)

“She’s not an adult.”

“Mm-hmm,” I hummed, lacing the noise with how unconvinced I was by his lame defense.

Bohannan returned to unresponsive.

“I know it’s none of my business,” I began.

Bohannan re-entered the conversation. “You don’t know that. You know it became your business when I agreed to bring my family to dinner.”

I was taken aback.

But this needed to be confirmed, so I set about confirming it.

“Are you really giving me permission to meddle in your lives?”

He glanced pointedly at the Viking before looking back at me. “Are you really pretending you need permission?”

“Fair point,” I mumbled.

“So what’s none of your business?” he pushed.

This was serious, so I got serious.

“Jesse needs professional help.”

He nodded. “I got someone I talk to. In my line of business, shit can get dark. This is some of the darkest shit I’ve ever seen. So yeah, he needs some tools to deal. I’ve trained both my boys, this was not edited from their training. He’s just that fucked up by it.”

“I usually hate to point out the obvious, but this is a problem.”

Bohannan held my gaze.

And agreed, “Yeah, babe. This is a problem.”

Fourteen

Silent Treatment

I stood on my back deck and punched my phone with my finger.

I put it to my ear.

“What?” Bohannan greeted.

“I need to get out of here, or I’m going to kill somebody.”

“David says that’s the most complicated closet he’s ever seen. David says even the Kardashians wouldn’t dream up that closet. David says he’s installed a dozen custom closets, and they’ve all taken one to four days. And David says yours might not be done until his kid graduates from college.”

“I prefer you not talking.”

“You can’t ask a guy to build you a closet and then get hassled because it’s noisy.”

“And my clothes and shoes and handbags are strewn all over hell’s half acre.”

“I feel your pain.”

He did?

“Do you like clothes?”

“No, I had a wife who liked them, and she’d lose her shit if I put the clothes away, and I hung something pink in the wrong shade of pink section.”

“Not to defend a woman who walked out on you and your family, but that is a high crime in closet organization.”

“I was happy to be guilty. My punishment was that I didn’t have to put the clothes away.”

“I sense a scam.”

“Stop with the evasive maneuvers. You’re under house arrest.”

Why had I not worn sunglasses during our every interaction so he hadn’t been allowed to read me?

And what was the equivalent of sunglasses when you were talking on the phone?

“Bohannan.”

“The funeral was only a few days ago. Let Dern’s shit die down before you start showing up around town.”

“Bohannan, I can’t avoid town forever.”

“Give me three weeks.”

God, I hoped they found my stalker in less than three weeks. It had already been way more than that.

And those women…

“I can’t cook another meal,” I informed him. “I can’t believe I’m going to say this about the mastery I create in the kitchen, but I’m sick of my own food. I need to get out and not just to escape this closet. I haven’t been out since I visited Dern, and that was no fun. Wait, no, the grocery store, but that doesn’t count, because that was no fun either.”

“Baby, I’m tryin’ to find a kid killer.”

I shut up because one, that was way more important than me escaping the noise and dust and piles of clothes, and two, he’d called me baby.

“Babe” was common. You called your girlfriends that. You could call the grocery store clerk that.

“Baby” was something else.

He had not once given any indication he was into me.

He ate my food. He watched me banter with his son. He allowed me to take some of the onus off his daughter.

That was it.

In large part, I’d left the public life.

Every year, my agent and I selected—from the hundreds of requests we received—a half a dozen high schools and universities for me to visit to talk about We Pluck the Cord.

Other than that, nothing.

Yearly, and sometimes more often, I got requests to do reunions or make a movie or star in the first episode of a reboot of Those Years, and I always turned it down.

Incidentally, this was to my costar, Michael’s, extreme displeasure.

Constantly, I had offers to do other things. TV shows. Movies. Advertisements.

I turned those down too.

I was not a recluse, but I was private.

It was the enduring love for that show and the reach of the book that kept me rather forefront in the public conscious.

That, and the fact I’d married a still box-office-topping action star (Warren) and a rock ’n’ roll legend (Angelo), and whenever they did something—and they were always doing something—my name got dragged into it.

Which made it all the more important to keep the work I currently did strictly secret.

I shared all of this because I was no longer an actress. For all anyone knew, I wasn’t anything (even though I was).