As it turns out, Tate was taken by Emmeline to a small town north of San Francisco, where she assumed the name Tate Jones. Emmeline—who managed to stay under the radar as Emma Jones—has lived a quiet life in the small resort town of Guerneville, California. Although custody battles raged behind the scenes, eventually Emmeline won full custody of Tate, and worked to keep her away from Ian, and the spotlight.
Tate’s first trip out of the country was to London, and it was here that she told a trusted confidante everything.
“I don’t get the impression that he was a very good father,” the source says. “Despite his side of the story, Ian didn’t make many attempts to connect with Tate. She has been incredibly sheltered. No one—except maybe three or four people—knows who she is. It was a priority for her mother and [her grandmother] Jude to keep Tate out of the spotlight, and they’ve done that. But she’s an adult now. It’s time for her to start living her life freely.”
ten
I WAS HYSTERICAL ON the phone—a bubbling cauldron of panic. After Mom admitted that there were photographers outside the house back in Guerneville, she could barely get a word in edgewise.
“I’m sorry, Mom, I’m so sorry.”
“Baby girl, listen,” she said, “this was going to happen at some—”
“But I told him everything. I told him about you,” I choked, “and Dad. What is Dad going to say? Is he going to sue us?”
At this Mom laughed. “Don’t be silly.”
Don’t be silly.
She sounded so sure. So unworried.
Meanwhile, Nana paced the room behind me, on the phone with the airline, trying to rearrange our flights. Once that was sorted, she called Mom’s old agent, coordinating to have someone meet us at Heathrow, to get us home without incident.
I was just holding the phone to my ear, listening without hearing to the words Mom was sending across the line. Soft sounds of reassurance, telling me she loved me, it would all be okay.
But it wasn’t okay. I knew I’d made an enormous mess.
And a small voice in the very back of my head kept whispering, He’s going to remember he has a daughter now.
A man met us at the airport. He opened the door as our car pulled up to the curb. Before I could catch a glimpse at his face, the door closed and he shuttled Nana past a throng of photographers, into a tight circle of airport security guards. And then he came back, holding his hand out for me.
He smiled. “Hey, Tate. I’m Marco.”
He was in his late twenties: fine, carved features, jet-black hair, penetrating blue eyes—and yet somehow he managed to exude calm rather than panic, like he’d navigated this sort of thing a thousand times before. I took his hand; it was warm. His skin was soft, but I could feel the strength of the tendons and bone beneath when he tugged me forward, out of the backseat.
To my surprise, Marco didn’t pass me off to a crew of security guards. He ushered me in under the blinding hail of flashes, hiding me beneath his own coat. The airport wanted even less to do with this madness than we did, so they let us through a private security line and into a secure room while we waited to board our flight.
Nana stepped out, telling me she needed to call Mom, needed to get water. To me, it felt like she needed to get away from me and my terrible decisions for a few minutes. My eyes were puffy; so puffy I felt like I could see my own eyelids. My nose was sore from being wiped on tissue after tissue, my lips were chapped. I hadn’t brushed my hair.
I looked up at this polished, composed stranger, and his expression was exactly the same as it was when there were a hundred photographers on our trail: mouth a faint upward curve, eyes steady.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Are you kidding?” I ran a shaking hand over my hair. “I’m great. You?”
He burst out laughing, but I couldn’t keep up the surreal joke. I felt the tears swell in the back of my throat.
“I didn’t mean for any of this to happen,” I told him, voice thick.
“Of course not.” He waved like my intention was the least of his concerns, and a smile lit up his entire face. He was too pretty to be very masculine. Elfish. I remember seeing Lord of the Rings with Charlie and laughing for hours when she quipped that Legolas was the prettiest woman in the movie. Marco was like that.
“Ian has been on four major magazine covers this month,” he said. “So finding you is the biggest story anyone has on either side of the ocean. There’s no way around this circus.”
Whether we were past it or not, I needed to know. “Not to be rude . . . but who are you?”
He pressed an apologetic hand to his chest. “I’m sorry. Of course. My name is Marco Offredi. I’m a PR manager. I was hired by your trust to handle all of your publicity-related concerns for as long as you should need.”
“My . . . trust? Hired you?”
He laughed. “Technically. The trust pays my salary, but your father called me.”
I squeezed one eye closed, squinting the other at him. My thoughts were windmilling around my head. “I’m so confused. I haven’t spoken to my dad in ten years. I didn’t know I had a trust.”
If this surprised Marco, he hid it. “From my very basic understanding, all the money your father owed in child support was set aside.” He spread his hands, and the gesture opened my entire world. “The trust covers anything you might need after you leave home.”
Slowly, my head started to spin. I was a carousel, gathering speed. “Who’s in charge of the trust?”
“You are, as of your eighteenth birthday.”
“But,” I spluttered, forcing the right questions to form in my mouth, “who was in charge of it before me?”
“Your parents.”
Blackness threatened at the edges of my vision, and Marco became blurrily framed. “Both of them?”
“Ian and Emmeline.” He leaned in, his light eyes steadying me. “When the news broke, Emmeline called Ian, and Ian called me.”
“I didn’t even know they spoke anymore.”
“They hadn’t been,” he said. “Not outside of the occasional legal correspondence, anyway.”
But they were now.
“There is nothing sinister happening,” Marco assured me, maybe sensing my panic. “Your parents don’t get along, but the priority here is you. I am not here for Ian, or for Emmeline. I am here for Tate Jones, Tate Butler—whichever Tate you want to be. I work for you.”
This entire situation was a chaotic mix of titillating and alarming. Beneath the guilt and devastation I felt, there was a curiosity lurking, an odd sense of power.
Marco seemed to see this reaction pass over me. He reached into a leather laptop case near his feet, and produced a bag of trail mix, handing it to me. “Want to tell me everything?”
Managing my first smile in what felt like days, I admitted, “Not really.”
“I’m not here to judge,” he said. “I know the story of your mom and dad, but I don’t know anything about you after you left LA. Why don’t you tell me a little bit about who I’m working for?”
I glanced anxiously at the door. No sign of Nana yet.
When I looked back to Marco, he didn’t look away. He blinked slowly, giving me that same gentle smile. There was something in his posture—he exuded a sense of tenacity and loyalty that made me want to go sit next to him and cry for an hour. I wanted to trust him, but I trusted Sam and look where that landed me. What if my internal compass was broken?
“I confided everything to the wrong person,” I told him. “That’s how we ended up here.”
“I’m sure that makes it hard to say it all over again. Can you tell me about him?” When I remained quiet, he added, “It will help me know how to best manage this for you.”
“I thought he felt the same way I did,” I said quietly. “We . . . yeah.”
My face crumpled, and his expression broke from the gentle calm into genuine empathy. “He broke your heart.”
So I spilled it all. Every last detail. I told him about the garden, about meeting Sam every night. I told him about all the things I confided and about our day of freedom in the paddleboat. I admitted that I slept with him that day and nearly every day after. I told him that Sam seemed like the first person who knew me as me—the Tate I felt like I’d never been allowed to be.
“What do you want to do?” he asked once I finished.
“Whatever Mom has planned.” I shrugged, feeling sick. It was both the truth, and a lie. I wanted to do whatever made this easier for her and Nana, but there was something else glittering there, winking at me from a distance. “I’m not sure what she and my dad will want me to do once we’re home.”
“I’m not here for them. I’m asking you, Tate,” he said. Marco leaned his chin in a cupped palm. “What do you want to do now?”
Shaking my head, I asked him, “What do you mean?”
“Do you want to live in the sun?” he asked quietly. “Or do you want to go back in the shadows?”
eleven
SEPTEMBER
Now
IT’S NOT UNTIL I’M facing the entrance to Twitter headquarters that I realize I’ve personally only tweeted from my account twice in ten years. Even so, I have over four million followers and I’m supposed to do a live chat in ten minutes. I can already see an enormous crowd of bodies just inside the doors and have no idea how I’m going to do this without screwing up.
“So, if I start the tweet with someone’s Twitter name,” I say, looking up from my phone, “everyone who follows me can see it?”
Marco is leaning back in through the passenger window, telling the driver where to meet us, and when. He straightens, glances at my phone, and waves me away. “Don’t worry about any of that. I have all the answers typed out for you. Just use the hashtag, and you’ll be fine.”
I take the folder he hands me, scan the questions and answers inside, and gaze up at him with melting gratitude. “How would I function without you?”