But oddly enough, she wasn’t upset about it. The skills she’d learned over the past month had given her confidence in her ability to handle failures and figure things out. As long as the beach house sale went through, she could afford to take a few months to figure her life out. And she could start a repayment plan to Conrad. No way was she allowing him to pay for her rehab and adulting boot camp when she wasn’t going to pay off in dividends for him.

“You’re smiling a lot,” Lorna said, glancing over at her.

“I am, aren’t I?” Chase said, smiling even bigger.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER
TWENTY-THREE

Olivia had just finished cooking dinner—a nice shrimp scampi recipe handed down from her aunt Toni—when she got the call from Lorna.

“Chase is missing,” Lorna said, not bothering to respond to Olivia’s greeting.

“Wait. What?” Olivia looked around for an oven mitt with which to pull the crusty french baguette from the oven. She’d enjoyed cooking on the Malibu house’s Viking range, something she rarely had time to do, as her business took so much of her energy. Allocating over an entire month to work with Chase had a silver lining in that she’d cooked more during the past few weeks than she had in the entire year. Since she and Chase had concluded the Square One program earlier that day and Olivia would be moving back to her place the next morning, she’d texted her mother for the recipe to her favorite meal in order to celebrate the milestone. Besides, she was fairly certain after having caught Chase practicing her scene that the actress would be successful in nailing the audition. A double celebration! She’d realized that Chase was, indeed, quite talented, morphing into a paranoid, trembling ingenue with the flick of an internal switch.

Totally freaky how good she was at becoming someone else.

“I got a call from Marshall, who received an unexpected phone communication from Con Santos.”

“Chase didn’t get the role?”

“No, she didn’t. Because she quit in the middle of the audition. She told them she didn’t want the part!” Lorna sounded as if she were a lawn mower trying like hell to remain chugging but sputtering in spite of the effort. “And now she’s missing. I can’t find her. She won’t answer—”

“How can that be?” Olivia interrupted, locating the oven mitt and pulling the nearly too-brown bread from the oven. She switched the oven off and set the baking sheet on the stove.

“Is she there with you?” Lorna asked.