The article went on to name a short list of actors who were speculated to be in the film, and talked about Mom’s work at Angry Elephant. Below, there were two head shots—one of my mom and one of Bill Hollis. Seeing his face filled me with a familiar mix of anxiety and hatred, while Mom’s picture made me sad and nostalgic. The emotions swelled into a soup of colors that swam across the paper.

I flipped to the article beneath: BILL HOLLIS INTRODUCES NEW DIRECTOR TO HOLLYWOOD SCENE. Another photo of my mom, beaming into the camera. I kept flipping through the articles, all of them with similar headlines—wildly famous producer gives a shot to a nobody director, and wasn’t she lucky to be making what would be such a smash hit movie?

So . . . what had happened to this movie? As far as I knew, Mom was never part of anything that actually made it to the big screen. She was amateur until the day she died. I checked the dates of the articles. They were all written about two years before she died. Something had happened in those two years. Something that made the movie go south.

Dad? Had Dad happened?

I flipped to the last article and froze. The headline was similar to the others. Nothing new about the story. It was the photo that sent my stomach to my feet. The first photo that showed them together. Mom and Bill Hollis, arms around each other jovially. Off to one side, my dad, unaware that he was being caught on camera, a scowl driving down the corners of his mouth.

And behind him, the white-blond man.

Luna’s getaway driver. The director at Pear Magic. The guy with the VP belt buckle.

The man in one of the photos in Dad’s desk drawer. The ones that went missing.

14

I COULDN’T TELL if things were falling into place or getting more confusing. I didn’t understand why the blond man kept popping up in so many places. He was connected to Luna. He was connected to the Hollises. He was connected to my parents.

Who the hell was he?

There was one way to find out.

I gathered the articles together, picking up the ones that had fallen on the floor, and crammed all but one of them back where they had been, then settled the cassette recorder on top of them and repositioned the bandage box. As far as Dad knew, nothing had been disturbed. Exactly the way I wanted it.

I couldn’t even begin to wrap my head around the fact that my dad was standing right next to the man who’d rushed Luna away from Tesori Antico. There was no denying it now—Dad had something to do with the Hollises. He had something to do with Luna’s getaway driver.