Page 59 of The Reunion

Old instincts kick in, and I run to catch up with him—neither of us ever left set alone in tense moments.

“What happened?” I ask, but he keeps walking, like I haven’t said anything at all. “Are you okay?”

He turns then, his eyes empty of their usual sparkle. Empty of everything, really. “It has been aday, Liv, and I don’t want to talk right now.” His words slap so hard they sting.

I stop in my tracks, stunned.

Watch as he turns a corner. Disappears.

In the twenty years I’ve known him, I’ve never known him like this.

“Ransom didwhat?” Bre says, twenty minutes later when she arrives on set. We’re in a bit of limbo at the moment, with Ransom stewing inhis trailer and Bryan meeting behind closed doors with Nathaniel and Gabe. “Any idea what could have set him off?”

I glance over to the far corner of the soundstage, where Mr. Joel and Andrea are sitting in a pair of director’s chairs, scrolling separately on their phones. “Definitely something to do with his publicist and his dad, I think.”

My phone buzzes at my hip. It’s Attica—again.

Post something with Ransom, too, if you can!

I close my eyes, take a deep breath.

“Here, let me take a couple of shots of you on set,” Bre says, accurately interpreting the source of my increasingly irritated mood.

I touch up my lipstick to match the sparkly red vinyl of our set’s vintage diner booth and settle in for a quick pose. Bre takes a few more candids, then suggests we get a few in my trailer for good measure. We’re almost all the way there when Ransom’s door opens; his trailer is right next to mine.

We lock eyes when he steps out, but he immediately averts his. “Bryan wants us back on set.” He holds up his phone as if to show me proof of the message, but all I see is his lock screen: the photo of us with the strawberry shake, the one that went viral.

“Are you okay?” I ask, putting a hand on his arm. He doesn’t pull back, but when he meets my eyes, all I feel is distance. That, and the confirmation that whatever set him off is most definitely not over.

“I can’t—” Ransom starts, but cuts himself off, takes a deep breath. “Let’s talk later. I’ll text you, okay?”

It should be reassuring, and yet. It’s not likeIdid anything to set him off—so why can’t he look me in the eye for more than half a second?

“Yeah, okay,” I manage. “Sounds good.”

It sounds better than silence, anyway. Any explanation at all would be nice.

Wow, Bre mouths, once we’re on our way back to the soundstage, Ransom trailing behind us.

“Yeah,” I say under my breath. “This afternoon should be… interesting.”

Interestingis an understatement, as it turns out. More accurate would bedisaster. Ransom’s clearly struggling to get his head in the scene. His eyes are void of their trademark sparkle, and his lines—when he remembers them—are flat. The chemistry that usually comes so easily between us is nowhere to be found, and it’s starting to spiral, bleeding into my own ability to focus. We do take after take, each one worse than the last. By the sixteenth attempt, even Cassidy and Ford are starting to founder, Ransom’s dark mood an anchor dragging us all to the bottom of the sea.

“Cut!” Bryan calls, but it isn’t half a second before Mr. Joel starts speaking over him.

“Cardboard would perform better than you right now, Ransom,” he says, eyes steely and dark. “Pull it together.”

I feel Ransom tense beside me, see his knuckles go white. He glances across the table, at Ford, who subtly shakes his head in solidarity.

“We’re going to take five,” Bryan says with authority, his voice even but terse. “And in those five minutes, we are going to remember how to leave our personal lives out of our professional ones. We will try this sceneonemore time, and if we can’t manage to get it right, we’ll shoot it at five in the morning tomorrow. Five minutes startsnow.”

As soon as we’re all out of the booth, Ford drapes a casual arm across Ransom’s shoulders and pulls him off set, presumably to some quiet place where Ransom’s father and publicist can’t escalate things any further. I make a beeline for Bre in hopes she can calm my fraying nerves—but as soon as I get close, she looks up from her phone and I see stress all over her face.

“What?” I ask. “What’s wrong?”

She flips her hair over her shoulder, closes whatever she was looking at on the phone, and puts on the most obviously fake smile I’ve ever seen. “Nothing! Nothing. Everything is fine.”

“Bre.”

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