Page 43 of One Happy Summer

He nods, a quick dip of his chin showing me he understands, that he gets it. “So, back to your mom.”

“Right,” I say, giving him a single nod. “So, I’ve basically been working for fifteen years straight with hardly a break, not getting to go to regular school, and most of my time off was spent with my dad, because that’s all I’d have time for.”

“Are you close to him?”

I lift a shoulder and let it drop. “I guess. I mean, I love him—he’s my dad. But he’s kind of played a side character in my life rather than a main one.”

“That’s pretty sad,” Briggs says.

“Yeah, but we’re good,” I say. And we are. I love my dad, and he loves me. He may not have been a prominent figure in my life for the past while, but he’s always been there, in the background. Calling me occasionally, sending me supportive messages.

After everything went down on my last set, I sent him a text telling him I was going offline, and he wrote back right away telling me that if I needed him for anything to please reach out. I almost considered hiding out with him at his house, but my mom would have bullied it out of him. She can be a tyrant, my mother.

“So, anyway, I had filmed three movies since last June, ones where I had big roles. Lots of hours on set, all three were very physically taxing, and I even shot a couple of smaller parts for other movies.”

“Five movies in a year?” Briggs asks, and he doesn’t sound impressed exactly—more like it’s hard to believe.

“Yeah,” I say, bobbing my head up and down. It’s hard even for me to wrap my brain around it. “I needed a long break. I’ve needed one for a while. I landed that big role that I may or may not still have, and I was finishing up my last movie and there were no press tours coming up. Suddenly I had an entire summerwith nothing going on. So, I planned to go to Europe for a month or maybe two and do absolutely nothing that had to do with acting or any of the stuff surrounding it. I wanted to travel and see things with no one to tell me what I was obligated to do, and I had lots of plans, a whole itinerary full. I’m sure I would have had run-ins with fans and possibly paparazzi, because that’s part of the job, but I was going to try to stay away from it if I could. I was going to be on a hiatus of sorts. A little summer hiatus.”

“Hey, but you did sort of get one,” Briggs says, his arms outstretched, palms up.

I smile. “I did, but . . . it wasn’t exactly how I planned it.”

“It’s not so bad, right?”

I reach over and give his hand a squeeze. “It’s not so bad at all, actually.”

It’s really not. I’m on a small island, hanging out with a handsome man, and there are no paparazzi, or anything like it, around me. No movie sets or publicists telling me where I need to be. And there’s no Mom, trying to run my career. If I didn’t have the whole viral video hanging over my head, it might actually be idyllic. Exactly what I needed.

“Where were you going to go?” he asks, turning his palm over and intertwining our fingers, which sends a little tingle down my spine.

“Italy,” I say. “I’ve been to Venice before, to shoot a movie. I did a few touristy things during my downtime, but it was barely scratching the surface.”

“I’m assuming your plans were thwarted.”

“Right, yes. So, I was planning my trip, and none of my friends could go with me.”My so-called friends,I want to add, but I don’t. “And I thought, maybe I should ask my mom to join me for part of it. With all the work I’d been doing, and her basically managing my career, I was feeling sort of disconnected from her. Like our mother-daughter relationship was more like client-manager.”

“I get that,” Briggs says. “My mom is a tough boss.”

This makes me cackle. Like, the laugh that comes out of me sounds more witchlike than human. “She seems like she’d be hard to work for,” I say, sarcasm evident in my tone.

He shakes his head slowly back and forth. “You have no idea.”

“Anyway, so I invited her to go with me. And she was excited, I think. I started telling her about my plans, and she basically told me we could do whatever I wanted.”

Looking back now, I should have seen the next part coming. It seems foolish I hadn’t expected it.

“But about a week before the film I was shooting was set to end, she asked for an itinerary, claiming she just wanted to know what I had planned. Little did I know, she’d leaked it to somepeople so we could get some paparazzi shots while I was on my much-needed vacation. She was going to use it for publicity because ‘the world is always watching,’” I say, doing a poor imitation of my mom. “It’s something she’d often say to me. Especially when I’d try to go incognito to even the freaking grocery store. She didn’t like that.”

“I’m assuming you confronted her?” Briggs asks, giving my hand a little comforting squeeze.

“I did,” I say, rubbing my thumb over the back of his hand. “It was the last day of shooting, and my assistant handed me an invitation she’d received, inviting me to stay at a hotel in Florence, which surprised me because no one besides my mom knew my plans. So, I called the hotel and they said they had confirmed I was coming to their city and offered me a suite at their hotel. I confronted my mom right after, and she wasn’t even remorseful about it. ‘It’s all part of the job’ is what she said.”

“Wow,” Briggs says. “So then you, what . . . lost it on set, and it was recorded?”

“Yes,” I say. “Except, before that happened, it got worse.”

He pushes his glasses up his nose. “How so?”

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