Page 59 of Always You (A Lilac Bay Novel)

CHAPTER 11

On Wednesday morning I got a call from Gina. “Heather was so pleased with the episode,” she told me. “You guys really did do a wonderful job. We’re so happy you got through to the next round.”

“Thank you,” I told her, sitting up straighter for some reason, as if she could see me and would deduct points for being unprofessional. “We’re happy too. Everyone had such a great time.”

“I might as well tell you, the ratings were quite a bit higher than we were expecting.”

I felt a little thrum of excitement. “Yeah?”

“I mean, nothing crazy. I don’t think any of you have to worry about getting mobbed by paparazzi.” She laughed, the sound relieved even over the phone. “But there were some people here in the studio that thought this one might be a hard sell.”

“But…it’sHeather Dale.” How could anything she put her name on be a hard sell?

“And that’s exactly why the network snapped it up,” Gina said. “Heather’s production team originally thought they’d try to sell it to one of the cable channels, travel or home improvement, something like that. It is kind of a niche topic.”

She had a point. Most of the reality shows that made it to network TV were a lot sexier than small town America.

“Anyhow, a few people here at the show were worried.” Something about the way she saida few peoplehad me thinking of Chris and her disdainful, bored expression. “So we’ve been really happy with how the premiere went and the volume of voting we’re seeing.”Take that, Chris, I thought, smiling to myself.

“Well, we’re pretty damn happy to hear that,” I said, and she laughed again.

“Anyhow, I wanted to give you a heads up for the next feature.”

“Great.” I grabbed a pen and pulled my notebook closer to me. Across the room, Andrew raised his eyebrows at me and I pointed to the phone, mouthing the wordGina.

“As we told you last week, we’ll be there to shoot on Friday night. For this round, we don’t want you to prepare anything.”

I frowned. I wasn’t very good at spontaneity. “Okay.”

“We’re going to be looking to see how well your town works together as a team. To that end, we’ll be giving you a task to complete together. All you need to do is have everyone prepared to gather at six PM for further instructions. They should plan to participate in the activity for most of the day Saturday, as well.”

I scribbled furiously on my pad of paper. “Got it.” Shit. I didn’t really like the sound of this feature at all. I felt much better about things when I could prepare my neighbors for what was coming—and lay down some ground rules.

“I also wanted to talk to you about getting some B-roll footage,” she went on. “We’re going to be talking a lot about what each community has to offer visitors over the next few weeks. The camera crew would like to get out to the island a few times over the next couple of weeks and record some footage of various activities people can partake in on Lilac Bay.”

“We can do that. When will they come?”

She rattled off a few dates and I wrote them down, my mind already spinning with ideas for them to shoot.

“I think that’s all for now. Do you have any questions on your end?”

“No, I think we’re good.”Unless you want to tell me what the hell is going on this weekend.

“Great. Then I’ll see you Friday.”

“Thank you, Gina.”

Andrew was at my desk before the phone hit the cradle. “What’s up?”

“They want us all to gather for the feature on Friday night, but she wouldn’t tell me what we were doing. She said it will last through Saturday.”

His brows furrowed in thought. “No clues?”

“Apparently they want to see how well we work together as a community.”

He made a scathing noise. “Better tell Crystal and Fran to stay home, then. They’ll get us voted off for sure.”

“She also wants me to set up some time for the camera crew to come out and get shots of people participating in local activities.”