“It is true, Barbie. You know me. I would never lie about that. Mike had just cornered me in the back parking lot and told me that he’d always had a thing for me.”

After several seconds of tense silence, Barbie said, “So...you were never going to tell me? You’ve been asked over and over again what made you run that red light. And you’ve never said a word about this.”

“After the accident, I was pretty sure whatever he’d felt before would be gone. We were all in an odd situation, all wanting to attain something that is almost impossible to attain, and I was the only one who was getting it. I was trying to give him the benefit of the doubt because of that. And then you sic the paparazzi on me, knowing how badly I was struggling to cope?”

“Don’t make it a bigger deal than it has to be. I wouldn’t have done it if I didn’t need the money. And it’s not like I told Kouretas you come from a Mennonite family and changed your name. He only wanted to get your picture—something that was going to happen eventually, anyway,” she said and then hung up.

Tia groaned as she dropped her phone in her lap and began to massage her forehead.

“So that’s what happened when you ran that light,” Seth said, holding the ball Kiki was waiting for him to throw. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because I wanted to forget it, pretend it never happened. I couldn’t hurt Barbie that way. She loves Mike too much. So I convinced myself he was just a little too eager to be part of my success. And even if I decided to tell her later because she needed to know, I wasn’t going to allow her to be publicly embarrassed on top of it—or to feel as though the accident was in any way her fault.”

“It was Mike’s fault,” Seth said.

“He was also the one who hatched the plan to cash in on the aftermath,” she added sadly. “And cost me my best friend.”

Twenty-Nine

Friday, December 31