Total pages in book: 115
Estimated words: 109783 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 549(@200wpm)___ 439(@250wpm)___ 366(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 109783 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 549(@200wpm)___ 439(@250wpm)___ 366(@300wpm)
I smiled indulgently. “Eils.”
“I mean it. You’re a special person.”
I inwardly ached because … I could see she really did mean it. “Eilidh.”
She shrugged, giving me a cheeky grin. “I know I’m just Lewis’s wee sister and my opinion doesn’t mean much. But I wanted you to know that. Oh, and I won’t tell anyone. Not Lewis. Not anyone. Promise.” She pushed up on her tiptoes and kissed my cheek before I could stop her. Then she hopped back onto her bike and rode toward her family home.
That night as I lay in bed for the first time truly alone, I held on to Eilidh’s words. They kept the question of why my mum couldn’t stand to stay around me at bay, when usually it would have tortured me into insomnia.
Instead, I wrapped myself in the phrase “You’re a special person” like it was sleep medication, hearing Eilidh Adair say those words over and over until I finally drifted off.
One
EILIDH
Three years ago
“Just a few more weeks and then you don’t have to deal with him ever again,” my makeup artist Suze reminded me as we sat in the costume trailer between takes.
Since I’d set foot in British Columbia, Canada, and met Eddie Coltrane, he’d been a pompous arsehole. I was the Bonnie in the Bonnie and Clyde–style indie movie I’d signed on to as soon as the second season of Young Adult ended. Young Adult had been my big break. We’d started filming when I was nineteen and I’d moved down to London to do it. My big brother Lewis was at college in the city, so he kept an eye on me. The show was a dramedy about a group of eighteen-year-olds who’d left school and started—or floundered about starting—“adulthood.” I played Mikayla, a foster child who grew up in London’s East End, a talented artist, and a drug addict.
The show was funny, emotional, harrowing at times, and even though none of us had known each other before, our cast gelled. And so the show took off in a way none of us could quite believe, becoming number one on the streaming platform. My Instagram followers went from a couple hundred to a hundred thousand in a few days. Now I had over a million followers.
To my agent Danny’s delight, the offers came flooding in after that first season of Young Adult aired. Feeling like I needed to keep the momentum going, I’d filmed a movie last autumn before filming restarted for the show, and now I was on set of another movie the following summer. I’d flown home to see my family at Christmas. But that was it.
And I missed them.
The missing them had grown into something approaching unbearable.
Being on set with someone who made me feel as uncomfortable as Eddie Coltrane pissed me off because I could be home in Ardnoch with my family instead of acting opposite this douche canoe.
The Clyde to my Bonnie was played by my fellow Young Adult castmate, Jasper Richmond. Jasper was one of my on-screen romances on the show. He was bisexual in the show and in real life, and we had great chemistry. But off-screen, that chemistry felt more familial. There had never been anything romantic between us, despite media and fan speculation.
Eddie Coltrane, however, was an actor I’d not met until now. He was playing a “friend” who betrayed us. To be honest, Jasper and I were playing very similar roles to what we played on the show, but that’s why the production company wanted us.
Suze, whom I met on Young Adult, had become my go-to makeup artist. I liked having her with me whenever possible. Someone familiar. My life sometimes felt like a nomad’s, surrounded by new people on every production. That had sounded exciting, like a dream, when I was a teenager. The reality of it was very different. Very isolating and lonely. You spend all this time with a cast on a movie, every day with them, growing close with them, and then once the movie wraps, everyone goes their own way. These people who had become your family for a few months go back to being almost strangers.
I found it disconcerting and upsetting, and I didn’t think I’d ever get used to the highs and lows of that part of the experience. Maybe that’s why this time, I had walls up. But that wasn’t my issue with Eddie.
Eddie had proven himself an arsehole from day one.
Suze was the only person to notice my reticence with Eddie. Usually, I could flirt with a lamppost. It was kind of my nature. I couldn’t help it.
But the first day I stepped on set and Eddie made it clear he thought I was an untalented nepo baby, I’d distanced myself from our costar.
I’d confessed to Suze about how I’d flubbed a line and Eddie had whispered in my ear I should switch to modeling because I was too stupid to act. I’d been so shocked, I hadn’t responded. Or told anyone but the makeup artist, who was well known as a trusted confidante.