Page 64 of Filthy Rich

“She’ll want a photo,” Philippe says.

“With or without Octavia?” I ask.

“I think with.” Philippe smiles. “My little Georgina isn’t delusional. She knows she’s not going to marry Jake. She just likes knowing the handsomest guy on the movie screen.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I say, slinging an arm around Octavia and dragging her over. “Snap away.” I can’t help noticing that Octavia still turns what she thinks is her good side forward. I guess I can’t blame her, but it bugs me to see it.

“Can I get a California club?” Octavia asks.

And then we’re finally alone. I reach across the table and grab both her hands. “So good to see you.”

She smiles. “You don’t look so bad either, ‘handsomest man on the big screen.’”

I roll my eyes. “She’s thirteen. She also loves Timothée Chalamet and Tom Holland.”

“At least you’re in good company.”

“Well, I am right now too,” I say.

She rolls her eyes so hard I’m worried they might pop out of her head. “No corny lines, please.”

“Look, I don’t have someone here to write them, so you get what you get. Beauty and smarts like yours don’t often coincide. Sometimes you have to settle for just beauty.”

She’s still chuckling when our food comes out, and her eyes widen until they’re enormous. “We placed our order like two minutes ago!”

“Maybe I picked this place for that reason—they really do love me.”

“Wow,” she says, as the waiter walks off, “you may have to hide in grocery stores, but being famous has some perks.”

“Unless you like spending food prep time chatting with someone,” I say. “Then I guess it’s a little annoying.”

She blushes again, and I realize that I really like making her do that. She looks almost like an errant child. It gives me an idea of how young Octavia must have been. She was every bit as adorable as she is now. “Well, after a morning like you had, I’m sure it’s nice to have some things go right.”

“You can say that again.”

“Did your dad come back to yell at you?”

“I’m assuming he’s at my apartment,” I say. “He has the code, and he disappeared after he stood up, or so the crew told me. Maybe he’s slashing my pillows and scrawling lewd words across my walls at this very moment.”

Octavia can’t tell whether I’m serious.

“Don’t worry about my boring walls. That’s not really his style. He’s more likely to steal all the money from my accounts and leave me with a pile of debt.”

“Shoot,” she says. “Would he really do that?”

“I’m his son,” I say. “I don’t leave any papers that would let him do something like that lying around, and my passwords would be hard for the Pentagon to crack.”

“At least there are some advantages to having a dad like him—you learn a lot.”

“You can say that again,” I say. “But it has plenty of disadvantages, too.”

“Like?”

I could tell her about the times I risked criminal incarceration as a child. I could talk about the times we were thrown out of apartments and hotels. Or I could share the feeling a kid gets when he walks away from his friends after stealing from them, knowing they’ll soon hate him, but instead, I shock myself by saying, “He stole the one thing that mattered to me when I was in high school.”

“What?” Her brow furrows. “Wasn’t he locked up? What do you mean he stole from you in high school?”

And now I’m stuck. I’ve never said a word to anyone about the photos Dad sent, but for some reason, I suddenly want to. Maybe it’s because I want someone to tell me that Dave’s not a bad guy, someone whose opinion I might believe. Even if a miracle’s unlikely, I want my dad to have been wrong. I want my faith back, in Dave, in life, and in the existence of goodness in the world.

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