Page 27 of How Good It Was (Excess All Areas 3)

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“I need a beer,” Luke said, slamming the door after the tenth and final trip from the van to the apartment. His hands were full of bags containing cushions and throws. “And I told you to put those paint cans down.”

Willow rolled her eyes. “I’m only moving them behind the table so they are out of the way.”

“They’re heavy. And you shouldn’t be lifting in your condition.”

In pure defiance, she picked up two cans of paint, one in each hand and moved them. “I’m pregnant, not incapable. I lift heavier weights than this at the gym. And it’s perfectly safe.”

The bottles in the fridge door rattled as he opened it. Luke grabbed a beer, popped the top, and drank half of it before putting it down on the counter.

“We’ve already walked a hundred miles today; not sure you need any more exercise.”

They’d gone to the hardware store for paint, where Luke had been way more involved than she’d anticipated. Being a painter and decorator before the band took off, he had strong opinions about primers and finishes and colour saturation.

She’d taken photographs. Luke facing the wall of colour samples. A video of the paint mixing. When she’d asked Luke to pose, he’d refused, but when he’d caught her secretly filming him, he’d winked.

Winked.

And she’d found it hard not to melt. Okay, so maybe she’d melted a little bit, because, let’s face it, Luke and his wink and his broad shoulders and his charming smile was the reason she was stuck in Manchester with a baby inside her.

Making her melt wasn’t the problem. It was the wondering if he’d done it for effect.

Willow could hear the huff of Luke’s exasperated breath. “I’m not saying you aren’t capable of lifting shit, flower. Just telling you that you don’t need to. Can I get you anything?”

“A signature on this,” she said, offering him a pen. “Make yourself useful. The contracts are there on the table for you to sign them.”

Luke looked over at them. “Didn’t your parents ever teach you to not sign anything without reading it first?”

Willow sat down at the table. “No, because if they had, they wouldn’t have been able to steal my money.”

Luke reached for his beer and pulled out the chair opposite her, spun it around, then sat down on it. “You mentioned they’d screwed you over. How bad is it? How did you find out?”

“The most innocuous of meetings, to be honest. By the time I was nine, I was already on my third season of a TV show that was highly rated at the network. And I’d already done three movies the years before, but I remember filming a particular movie on my ninth birthday. The director, Calvin Waterstone, got nominated for an Oscar for it. And he was always so kind to me. Made sure they enforced all the rules about my working hours and tutoring and stuff. I remember feeling like it was a fun experience, even though it was this weird, cult-novel-type movie about the end of the world. I mean, the world literally ended. Everyone died, even me.”

“Sounds fucking depressing, but I’d like to watch it to see little you.”

Willow laughed. “Definitely not. Anyway, two weeks after you and I ... met, I saw Calvin in a queue at Starbucks. We drank our coffee together; fun walk down memory lane and all that. But then, he said it had been a tough negotiation on my salary because he’d never paid a child actor three million dollars before.”

“Fucking hell. Three million at nine years old. No wonder you are loaded.”

Willow huffed. “Here’s the thing. I’m not. Well, I mean, I am. In regular terms. But three million is all there was in my Coogan account when I turned eighteen.”

“That’s the account you told me about. The one where the studio puts fifteen percent of their salary straight into an account in kids’ names. The parents are never supposed to get their hands on it, then?”

“No.”

“That’s still a lot of dough, though.”

“It is, but I’m piecing together how much I earned. How much money there should be. Calvin has helped. It looks like I made over eleven million in movies alone. I know some of it had to go to expenses and taxes and shit, but also, none of this includes any interest that it should have gained in all the years since. I haven’t made a movie in a decade. I think I could be owed as much as twenty million. I did a bit of research, and the house—which is in my dad’s name—was about a million when he bought it nearly fifteen years ago, and it’s now roughly worth twenty-two million. He bought it when I signed the first movie deal. I think he used my earnings to pay for it. Then, there are so many endorsements I did as a kid, I don’t even know how to begin to quantify those.”

“Jesus Christ, Will. That’s a lot to sort out. Can you get any of it back?”

“I hope so. I’ve spent the last month, since I found out I was pregnant, collecting information from his office. I live in the Malibu property guest house. It didn’t occur to me that the whole house should be mine. I thought it was amazing I had my own mini-place at fifteen. So, every time my parents went out, I began systematically collecting evidence from Dad’s office. He’s a slob, so it’s been a mess, but I’ve managed to copy the files on his laptop and scan paper files onto mine. He definitely doesn’t know that I know. And I’ll admit, the idea of facing him to talk about it is terrifying. I wanted to pull it all together before I approached him.”

Luke finished his beer. “If you don’t mind me asking, if you were good at acting and made good money from it, why do you care about this social media shit? Why not go back to it?”

“I’m a persona non grata. A nobody. I was slow to develop, so I played younger than I was for a while, which is a director’s dream because working with young kids is actually hard. Having a twelve-year-old who can pass for ten is great.”

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