Page 50 of How To Plot a Payback

“No,” I reply, straightening my collar and picking up the cat crate to indicate we need to go. The door to the building is twenty feet away, and unless she decides to create another miraculously impossible dilemma out of thin air, we should be at her dressing room in less than five minutes. There I will promptly drop the animals at her door, sprint to the writers room, and, with any luck, make it with one minute to spare.

First, I do need to make this point very clear. After all, I’ve been sitting on this for almost fifteen years. It’s my origin story, really. The why (well, first why) behind my loathing of all things Lavender Rhodes.

“No, it’s not a stretch,” I say. “It’s an actual fact.”

I begin striding.

Lavender tries to follow along but the dog holds fast. A moment later she catches up to me, the dog in her arms, a giant hoop clamped in his mouth like a prize. “You’re actually holding that against me? That’s what that face of yours has been all about the past few days?”

I stop at the door and swivel on my heel to face her. “I have no face.”

“That one,” she says, pointing with her free hand at my nose. “The one where you look like you’ve swallowed a lemon. I was wondering if I was just imagining it.”

I turn back towards the door and swipe my ID over the handle. It beeps, and I pull the door open.

“You can’t actually hold that against me, Finn. Yes, I accidentally left the trapdoor open—”

“During dress rehearsal, two days before the performance.”

“—but people did that all the time. I mean, I admit, that was my mistake—”

“A mistake in the form of a four-inch-long screw in my ankle.”

“—but you have eyes, too, don’t you? Surely you don’t expect to just walk around, blindly stepping into manholes and blaming the construction worker who forgot to shut the hole? I mean, you can’t sue for something like that—”

“Legally you can. If a construction worker left a manhole open, that would be his liability.”

“—and anyway, it was almost fifteen years ago. Not to mention, nobody’s perfect.” She grabs hold of me, halting me in the hall. I turn reluctantly, because I have the great sense that if I don’t, she’s going to nag about this forever.

I meet her sapphire-blue eyes. They’re big and wide and innocent-looking and all those other things I’ve grown accustomed to seeing as I’ve been forced to watch episode after episode of her the past few days. It’s the face I have avoided looking at for fifteen years, the face I now live with in my own purgatory, the face I am required to stare at every waking moment. At work. After work. In my dreams. She’s always there.

I have dubbed the expression I’m seeing now as the I’m-about-to-tell-a-little-sentimental-story-that-will-have-us-hugging-and-forgiving-and-saying-things-like-“but-the-most-important-thing-here-is-love” face. That face.

I don’t want to listen, but at the same time I can’t get myself to shake off her hand and walk on. To tell her it’s not important. Because it is incredibly important, and I would like to see some remorse on that face.

“Finn, I really am sorry,” she begins, squeezing my arm. “You deserved that role, and you worked hard for it, and I can see that it meant a lot to you. I was the understudy Lower Sixth, and you were the very big, very tremendously talented Upper Sixth, and for what it’s worth, I looked up to you for all that. Tried to match your level of dedication. Studied up just as I saw you were doing. You were quite the role model for me.”

My chest swells ever so slightly against my will, and I force it to crumple back down.

No. There will be no winning me over here.

I am a steel wall.

“And that play changed the trajectory of my life,” Lavender continues. “So I guess in a very big way, I have you to thank. I don’t think either of us would be here today if not for the surprises that came our way back then. And look at us now, you big-time producer.”

She’s inflating things to soften me up. I know it.

“I don’t know about you,” she says, a smile tilting her lips, “but I like to think that we landed just where we are supposed to be. Don’t you agree?”

Did I agree?

Did I agree . . . that her leaving that trapdoor open without thought or care changed the trajectories of our lives?

I suck in a breath.

Of course.

Of course it did.