Page 75 of The Devil Gets His Due

No, Idoknow: I want Graham. He’s waiting at the other end of the walkway, but before I can reach him, Trevor is standing in front of me.

“You were fantastic!” he says. “Come with us to La Piazza. There’s a private party afterward for the cast and crew, lots of Mills’s celeb friends coming too. It’ll be a good chance for us all to talk about the future.”

I have no desire to talk about the future, but I know I should go. I can’t abandon my mother’s dreams for me based on a five-minute interview. But Graham and I had a plan, and the truth is…I sort of wanted that too. No,notsort of. Ireallywanted that too.

“Sure,” I say. “Let me just talk to Graham.”

He pulls out his phone. “I’ll call over now to put your name on the list.”

I make my way through the chute to where Graham stands. He’s got a brow raised as if he already knows what I’m going to ask. “There’s a party at La Piazza,” I say. “Trevor invited us.”

He glances out across the square toward the restaurant. “How the hell are you even supposed to get there?”

I shrug. “We’ll just cut through the crowd.”

His nostrils flare. “Keeley, are you serious right now? You were just on stage. You can’t just go walk through that crowd.”

He’s being ridiculous. If I can make my way all the way from the main stage at SXSW to the back without my top on, I can walk through a crowd of middle-aged tourists who’ve already forgotten me. “Graham, did I suddenly turn into Beyoncé? No one is going to care.”

“This is areallybad idea.”

“Comeon,” I groan. “It’ll go fast. I don’t even want this job, but if I miss a chance to meet Khloe Kardashian, I’ll never forgive you.”

I head toward the main exit, certain he’ll follow. As I walk through the doors, I hear Mindy and Mills wrapping up the show, which means I’ll barely even have to push—the whole crowd will be leaving in a second anyway. I begin to cut through and someone says, “Oh my God, you’re the doctor!”

I smile. “That’s me!” I’d love to keep chatting but there’s a fifty percent chance of Graham having a public tantrum if I actually stop. I keep moving as the show comes to its end, waving to people who recognize me, and I’m over halfway across the plaza when someone jumps in my path.

“Can I get your autograph?” the woman asks. She’s so excited and eager that I don’t have the heart to remind her I’m no one.

“Um, sure? Do you have a pen?”

She starts to fish through her bag, but the mere act of us stopping like this has drawn everyone’s attention. They were all inagreementthat I was a nobody, and now the crowd is rethinking it based on one woman’s bad judgement. God, what must life be like for Mindy and Mills? They can’t walk to Starbucks in the morning without makeup. They can’t go to a grocery store and buy donuts and Froot Loops. They can’t chill with a friend who sleeps outside their building.

A circle forms around us, and someone else says they want an autograph, too, and then behind them the people who were dispersing suddenly turn to surround us, hoping to see someone famous.

It could turn bad really fast—which is precisely why Graham didn’t want me to do this. I’m no one, but there are hundreds of people here who can’t even see me but will push and fight simply to find out for themselves.

I look behind me for Graham but he isn’t there. Some part of me was assuming he’d fix anything that went wrong, and he probably knew that. I put myself in danger, I put our baby in danger, and then I told him he had no say in the matter…while expecting him to magically extricate me if things went awry. It was so stupid, and so unfair.

The crowd keeps pushing as I sign the first autograph, and the second.

I see no way to get to the restaurant now. I’m surrounded on all sides. My hands drop to my stomach as if that can protect my daughter when it obviously can’t. If the crowd keeps pushing, we’ll be crushed to death, and these idiots will still be shouting, “Who is it?” and pulling out their phones.

I turn again. “Graham?” I shout, and it’s only when I hear the panic in my own voice that I realize how scared I am, how desperate I am to be out of here, away from all this. Two seconds later, he’s knocking people out of the way with a violence I didn’t know he was capable of, and when he reaches me, I press my face to his chest.

I half expect him to respond poorly, to say, “I told you this would happen!”, but instead his arms band around me as if he knows. “Are you okay?” he asks against my ear.

I shake my head. I’m not and this right here—his chest under my nose and the smell of his skin and his soap—feels like safety, better than everything else I thought I wanted combined. “Make this go away,” I whisper.

“Okay,” he says, and then he’s got me against him and we’re shoving through the crowd.

A guy grabs my arm and Graham’s got the guy by the throat with his left hand while still holding onto me with his right.

“Drop her arm,” he barks in a tone no sane man would defy, and the guy does. Holding me close, he continues to move us forward, ready to extinguish anything that gets in our way, and when we finally near the restaurant’s entrance he glances at me.

I’m still shaking. I couldn’t show up like this if I wanted to, and I don’t even want to. “Let’s just go,” I whisper.

He pulls me over to the side of the building where a few limos are idling, and throws the door open of the first one we reach.

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