Page 40 of Better than Famous

Staring, Sutton lowered the carton of food to the coffee table. The resolve in her eyes mirrored my own. She was not a victim waiting for a rescue. She was a partner preparing for a fight.

A loud, aggressive popping sound echoed from the road outside, sounding like a discharging shotgun in the distance.

The overhead lights flickered violently before the hum of the air conditioning unit stuttered, groaned, and died. The refrigerator motor spun down into silence. The cottage plunged into suffocating darkness.

"Ben?" Sutton’s voice carried a sharp edge of alarm in the sudden blackness.

"A transformer blew on the main road." I set my food on the table and stood. The layout of the cottage was mapped permanently in my brain, and I navigated the dark room without hesitation. "Stay on the couch. I have emergency lamps."

I moved to the kitchen counter where my fingers found the cool metal base of the hurricane lamp stationed near the sink. I opened the top drawer, retrieved a box of wooden matches, and struck a match against the abrasive strip. The flame flared to life with a hiss, smelling strongly of sulfur. After I touched the fire to the oil-soaked wick, a warm, amber glow pushed the shadows back into the corners of the room. I adjusted the dial to stabilize the flame, then carried the lamp into the living room and set it gently onto the center of the coffee table.

The flickering light illuminated Sutton’s face and cast dancing shadows across her cream-colored sweater. The room transformed from a modern house into a primitive, secluded cave.

"No problem," I said, sitting back down on the couch. “Being off the grid is a part of life down here. What else do we need to plan about Nash?”

She picked up the burner phone and held it in her lap, her fingers tracing the smooth edges. The battle plan was starting now, in the dark, with the wind trying to tear the roof off the building. She pulled her knees tight against her chest, the amber light reflecting in her eyes. "Before we call a lawyer, you need to know exactly what we’re fighting."

I turned my body to face her completely. "Tell me."

Chapter Seventeen

SUTTON

The glow from the hurricane lamp flickered across the living room. The storm outside battered the metal shutters with escalating violence. Inside, the small circle of light offered total isolation. I sat on the gray couch, my knees pulled tight against my chest. The phone rested heavy in my hand.

Ben sat on the opposite end of the couch. As he leaned forward, giving me his absolute attention, the cotton of his shirt stretched across his broad chest.

"Nash didn’t hit me," I started. I figured that was foremost in Ben’s mind. "He never laid a hand on me. A bruise is evidence. You can photograph a bruise."

"What did he do?”

"He erased me. It started slow. When we met, I was nineteen. I was talented but green. He was ten years older and knew his way around the industry. He was the visionary producer. He told me I was a diamond in the rough, but needed polishing. So he started polishing."

Setting the phone down, I picked up a curly fry from the cardboard carton on the coffee table. The grease coated my fingertips. I broke the potato spiral in half but didn’t eat it.

"He called it ‘protecting the asset’. He hired security to dictate my movements and a doctor to prescribe pills when I pushed back against the control."

Ben remained perfectly still. He absorbed the information with the clinical focus of a paramedic assessing a trauma scene.

"In short, he made me doubt the one thing I knew I could do well. I couldn’t sit at a piano without my hands shaking." I dropped the broken fry back into the carton. "He gaslit me. If I got upset, he called me hysterical. If I cried, he labeled me unstable. He told me my memory was faulty and convinced me I was fragile, Ben. That without him, I would shatter into a million pieces."

"You aren’t fragile." Ben’s statement was delivered as an immovable fact.

"Still, I believed him for a long time. I thought I was lucky he put up with me. Then I found the emails."

I swallowed hard. The dry air of the air-conditioned room had vanished with the power outage, and the humidity inside the cottage was rising rapidly. "He was communicating with lawyers and doctors, building a case. He has statements from doctors on his payroll declaring me unfit to manage my own affairs."

Ben’s jaw tightened. The muscles corded along his neck.

Finally I met his eyes. "He wants a conservatorship. Legal control over my person and my fortune. If he gets it, I lose everything. I can’t sign a contract. I can’t get married without his permission, and I become a child in the eyes of the law. Permanently."

I leaned forward, needing Ben to understand the gravity of the threat. "If Nash finds me here with you, he will use that fact. He’ll point to your history. He’ll use your past to prove I am making dangerous, unstable choices. He will use you to destroy me."

I waited for Ben to recoil. I braced for him to calculate the liability and ask me to leave.

He didn’t flinch. "He made you believe you couldn’t survive on your own."

"Yes."