Page 48 of Unspoken Tides

Hilary wasn’t so sure. She was burdened with memories. Her head echoed with Ingrid’s teenage angst. “Mom, lighten up. Mom, I’m not hungry. Mom, I have to be in Italy tomorrow. I can’t go out with you. Mom, you have to understand. I’m stressed! Mom, leave me alone!”

“She was just a girl,” Stella repeated softly, touching Hilary’s hand.

“Our children have infinite chances to come back,” Robby said. “I can’t think of anything my kids could do that I wouldn’t forgive.”

Hilary’s heart pounded with recognition. She knew the Salt Sisters were right.

That evening, Hilary visited Ingrid’s agent’s website and found her email address. The agent’s name was Bonnie, and she had a better smile than Janice had—a welcoming one that didn’t immediately say, “I’m going to steal your daughter away from you.”

A quick Google search told Hilary that Janice had gone on to work with three child stars after Ingrid. She’d probably helped to ruin their lives, too.

Hilary wrote to Bonnie, asking for Ingrid’s contact information. She watched herself type: “I’m her mother. We lost touch.” When she felt a wave of patheticness rise up, she pushed it back. This was the only way.

If Ingrid contacted her, great. If she didn’t, fine. She would carry on.

She tried to shove it into the back of her mind. She tried to remember the warmth of the Nantucket summer, the gorgeous breeze, the bright blanket of stars.

A few days later, Hilary was at Stella’s place, helping her look through a humane society website. Stella was pretty sure she was ready for a new dog. She called this “window shopping,” and she’d been doing it for the better part of that week, daydreaming about her new hairy friend. She had a healthy glow already, presumably from imagining this new kind of love. Hilary had said, “Stella, you’re a dog person! You’ve always been a dog person! Make yourself happy!”

Hilary’s phone rang. She flinched, then read the name, “Marty Zhang.”

“Who is it?” Stella asked.

“It’s the director of that film.” Hilary frowned, stood, and answered. “Hey! Marty! How are you?” Her voice sounded falsely happy, and she knew it was because she’d learned Marty was good friends with her daughter. Anything she said could get back to Ingrid.

“Hey, Hilary,” Marty said. “I have good news! We have new funding for the film. A different source entirely. We’re going to set back up next week. I know it’s short notice, but what do you say? Can you come back?”

Hilary was flustered. “What? Of course!”

“Great. We’ve already put so much work into it. I can’t wait to finish it out.”

Hilary let her phone fall to her side and blinked at Stella, who had abandoned the image of a Goldendoodle to stare back. “What was that about?”

“The film,” Hilary explained, her heart thudding. “It’s back on.”

“Rodrick had a change of heart?”

“No,” Hilary said. “Something tells me I’ll never see Rodrick again.”

Just saying that aloud felt like a soft breeze across her face. It felt like freedom.

Chapter Twenty

It was a miracle to be back in the trailer again—her lips lined with pins and boxes of costumes and accessories surrounding her mirrors lining the walls. Lucky for Hilary, the Boston warehouse where she’d rented all the costumes for A Nantucket Family hadn’t yet gone to the trouble of separating them and renting them out to other productions, which meant that all she had to do was drive back, pick them up again, and return to Nantucket. Now, she slipped the trousers, dresses, overalls, and blouses onto their hangers and hung them on their racks, going through her iPad to make sure she had all the correct accessories for the coming scenes. She’d made thorough notes, thankfully.

In the makeup trailer next door, the makeup artists and actresses discussed the whiplash of being back.

“I’m so thrilled,” Stacy was saying. “I thought I was going to have to book a commercial for cereal.”

“Commercial work pays well,” Candace Grune said. “You shouldn’t scoff at it.”

“I’m an artist, Candace,” Stacy said.

Hilary laughed inwardly. Stacy and Candace were playing a fictional mother-daughter duo. But it seemed they’d taken on a mother-daughter dynamic in real life—the daughter telling the mother what was what. Just as Ingrid once had.

Candace snorted, then rebounded. “I just can’t understand what happened. Rodrick pulled the funding, right? Where is all this money coming from? Did he have a change of heart?”

“The way I heard it, Rodrick has nothing to do with the film anymore. They bought the rights to the script from him and want to completely scrub his name from the production. Of course, they’ll have to say, ‘written by’ in the credits,” the makeup artist said. “But that’s about it.”

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