“I love our little bubble, too,” she said. “But it just needs to get a little bigger. One that we can invite Marvin Iakova over for dinner.”
“Ahhh,” I said. “He’s fine to do business with, but I don’t think we need to invite him into our personal life.”
“Oh, yeah?” she said.
“He seems a little shady,” I said. “I don’t know that I want to get too tangled up in his web of deceit and political intrigue.”
“Okay,” she said. “Fair enough. How about Andrea McClellan?”
“The mayor? Oh, Jesus,” I said. “We’re having her over for our fake dinner party?”
“Yeah, her husband and two kids, too,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said, “then we’re going to need a bigger place. Much bigger. With a pool and shit.”
She laughed. “Now we’re talking. Hot tub.”
“Oh, yes,” I said. “I want one of those decks with an outdoor kitchen for pool parties.”
“We don’t even cook,” she said.
“I would cook if I had an outdoor kitchen,” I said.
“No you wouldn’t,” she replied.
“You’re right, I wouldn’t,” I admitted. “But it would look cool.”
“I can totally see you hosting some barbeque pool party,” she said. “And you would be wearing one of those dorky aprons that says ‘kiss the cook.’”
“Oh, God, no,” I said. “No, no, no.”
She laughed harder and had to stop and catch her breath before she finished. “And you would stand around and hold the spatula and talk the entire time. Not a scrap of cooking would get done, and all your guests would starve. But you would solve a murder, though... waving around your clean spatula.”
“First of all, my apron would not be dorky,” I corrected her.
“Oh, the dorkiest,” she said. “A white one, with a French chef on it.”
I groaned and covered my face. “Just for that, you’re paying for dinner tonight.”
“Oh, I am so buying you that apron,” she said.
I headed off to the shower to wash the long day of psychics, and ghosts, and senate bills and angry filmmakers off me.
“What do you want to eat?” she called out after me.
“Surprise me with something good,” I said.
In the end, she stole Landon’s idea and ordered delivery from Fifth Street Bistro. Over a California sushi roll and cauliflower rice, we settled in for our usual evening of take-out and binge watching. We curled up in our bed and flipped on the TV.
We had started the year with Mad Men, and we finished that. Then we moved to Game of Thrones. Now, we were on to Vicki’s latest choice, Downton Abbey.
It was a British show, put on by the BBC, but the negotiations for the American release were done through our firm in L.A. I didn’t have any hand in it, but several of the partners I worked with did, and Downton Abbey was all the rage in the firm for a bit.
I saw a couple of episodes at a screening party we were all invited to attend, and I didn’t like it then. If I remember right, I only went to impress some woman, and I spent the entire party strategizing on how to get her to go home with me. She ended up going home that night with someone else, and they have since married and divorced.
But, watching the same episodes with Vicki was different. Doing everything with Vicki was different. The subtle British humor that I found boring at a screening party full of narcissistic entertainment executives, now in our cozy little lamplit haven, I found entertaining and relaxing. For the first time in a long time, maybe ever, I was home.
We ate and watched British aristocrats in the 1910s live their lives, until we fell asleep. Somewhere around midnight, I awoke and switched off the TV. She had fallen asleep in the crook of my arm. I watched her sleep, and my heart swelled. A thought occurred to me that had kind of been rolling around in my head for a while.
I was in love.
Chapter 6
“I just think we’re sitting on something really big here,” Landon was in our office. He sat in front of my desk, casually slouched with one ankle draped over his knee, and shook a big clunky combat boot.
He wore black jeans, an open red plaid button down, and a white t-shirt advertising a craft beer brand I had never heard of. His dark hair was pulled into a red beanie, and he wore green gauges in his earlobes, and he had a silver stud poking out of a black scruffy beard. He stroked his chin, and his expression was bright and animated. It was so much different from the first time I had met him, morose and cynical.
“What’s the angle again?” I asked.
“It’s a documentary on the whole murder trial,” he explained. “Kind of like a reality show.”
“Hmm…” I said. “You want to make a reality show out of our legal team?”
“Nah, nah,” he said. “It’s not a reality show exactly. It’s more like how you defend the unjustly accused. Get it all on film, you know, cause if more happens, you know…”
“What do you mean ‘if more happens’?” I asked.
“Well, you know,” he nodded at me like I should know, “if... uh... you know, we run across more to the story, we’ve already got it on film.”
“By that you mean if we find out that the Illuminati conspired to kill Beowulf?” I tried really hard to cover my sarcasm, I really did.
He cleared his throat. “I think it goes a lot deeper than you think, than all of us think. I really believe this could be our Ed Snowden moment, you
