Claudine took two steps closer to me. “So, Mademoiselle Everly, what exactly did you have in mind?”
Over the next hour, I walked Jack and Claudine through my revamped version of the show. Elliott shared the clips we captured around Maubec, at Camp des Milles, and in the archives of Saint Orens. We showed them the interviews we’d conducted over our stay and the dozens of artifacts we’d painstakingly collected during any downtime we could find away from the show.
“This is a tale that has remained lost for more than eighty years. If you’re looking for a hit, why not go with the unexpected? Plum Everly getting humiliated on a grand stage? Well, it’s been done. More than once, in fact. And if I’m being candid, more than I care to remember. But what if all the intrigue, heartbreak, drama, and tension, what if it didn’t need to be manufactured the way it is in so many reality shows? What if it didn’t have to be staged, because it’s already all here,” I said, pointing to the stack of materials and research, which was more than enough to prove my point. “This history, although certainly devastating, is compelling and honest and is one that I know will affect an audience in a way that a cheesy, made-up love story never could. It’s the difference between making entertainment and making art, making something fleeting versus making something that will remain a part of this town’s story and could be part of Tributary’s story long after it’s aired.” I surrendered a silent exhale and said, “Well, what do you think?”
Claudine eyed Jack, who stood with his arms crossed, as they both deeply considered my pitch.
Jack scrubbed at his chin and nodded his head. “This is going to require a bit more discussion and consideration on our part before we can say one way or the other what we’ll decide to do. You’ve certainly given us a lot to consider, and in light of this new information, let’s take a few days while they are putting the finishing touches on the house for filming, and we’ll get back to you with a decision.”
Less than forty-eight hours later, I received a text from the production team to meet them at Château Mirabelle so they could render their final decision. Though confident the idea to change the focus of the show from me to the château was a solid one, I was still plagued by doubt, knowing that salacious gotcha-style reality TV might, at least on its face, seem like more of a surefire hit. But when I spotted Kate carrying an armful of items and rolling her suitcase behind her as she made her way out of her trailer and through video village, my heart leaped at the notion she was leaving and hopefully taking her fake show and her even faker friendship with her.
With where I was positioned, concealed out of sight, I considered letting Kate disappear off into the sunset fairly confident (and content) our paths wouldn’t cross again anytime soon. The timid lion I used to be would have stayed safely tucked away behind the large mirabelle tree until she was gone, but the brave lion I’d become needed to face her head-on and demand closure.
I stepped out onto the path, heading Kate off before she made it to the car that was waiting for her at the gate. Not sure what to say or how to even start, I just opened my mouth and hoped the right words would follow, but instead I uttered a simple, “We need to talk.”
Kate rolled her suitcase in front of herself on the dusty road, the wheels kicking dirt onto her black pumps and up to the hem of her pencil skirt, and then set her belongings on top. “You must be pretty pleased with yourself. Hijacking my show and getting me fired, I really didn’t think you had it in you.” She slowly clapped her hands together, the pace more sardonic than celebratory. “Congratulations, they loved your pitch and decided to take the show in a whole new direction and scrapped everything I worked on, the entire brilliant concept. Such a shame, their shortsightedness. But hey, that’s showbiz, right?” She smiled smugly, her attitude still oozing with poor-me energy.
“You really still think what you did was okay, don’t you? You still believe that it was perfectly fine to tear me down in order to build yourself up?”
Her face looked hardened and unflappable as she held her ground. “I’ll repeat what I said back at the château. You know how this game is played, Plum. You and your family practically invented how it works, and you continued playing long after everyone else had grown tired of it. So don’t stand there on your soapbox and act like I did anything different than the rest of them. Christ, your own boyfriend sold you out with a sex tape. What exactly did you expect from me?”
As she continued to dig her heels in justifying her duplicity, my anger softened into pity shaded with a dull sadness for her. She would likely return to Hollywood and continue to hustle and grind, use people and fight to get ahead, having learned absolutely nothing from this incredible place or the people who inhabited it. And realizing that she’d missed it all made me even more grateful that I hadn’t.
“What did I expect from you?” I repeated back to her, almost incredulous at the audacity of the question. “I expected better, that’s what. I expected that as a woman, you would have understood that tape changed the way people saw me and worse, the way I saw myself. And I would have expected for you not to have exploited that vulnerability.”
“Hold on, I really don’t think—”
“Yes, you do. You know exactly what you did, and maybe you’ll never be sorry for it. But it doesn’t matter now because through this experience, I’ve learned to stand on my own two feet, and the promise you made to me when we first met about how I could reclaim the narrative came to fruition not because of you, but in spite of you. So it looks like, on this one and only score, you were telling the truth—I do get to write my own ending.”
Kate grabbed for her belongings and the handle of her bag before lifting her chin a bit higher. “Au revoir, Plum.”
“Au revoir, Ms. Wembley.”
And with that, Kate turned on her sky-high heels and teetered down the path, back off to La-La Land.
Chapter Forty-Two
The gentle sunshine warmed my face and shoulders as a light summer breeze wafted in the faint aroma of lavender, wild thyme, and ripe plums—the garrigue I’d come so fondly to associate with Provence. I inhaled deeply and hurried down the front steps of Château Mirabelle to meet the Vespa I spotted turning off the road. René climbed off the motorbike and set his helmet on its seat before ambling up the driveway to meet me.
Now that Jack and Claudine were 100 percent on board with the show’s new direction, Tributary had signed off on a few more weeks of filming for the fully reimagined Heart Restoration Project. Though Elliott was less than pleased to be working alongside Bastien, the three of us had agreed to a reconciliation in the name of shooting material worthy of the show now built around our new star, Château Mirabelle.
Bastien accepted the fact that, though his heart was in the right place, his prowess with a hammer and nails (among many other construction skills) left much to be desired. He stepped aside as foreman, and we decided to call in the professionals to whip the house into better shape for the real renovation effort. Now that the house was actually the show’s real focus, all the smoke and mirrors needed to be replaced with drywall and support beams, and the crew would have to work tirelessly to make as many improvements as they could with the limited time and budget we had left.
“Monsieur Laroque,” I said, extending my hand, “thank you so much for agreeing to meet with me. I can certainly understand why you may have wanted to rid yourself of this project completely.”
“Please, Mademoiselle Everly, call me René.”
“Plum, then, please,” I said, placing my hand to my chest, and smiled. “René, I’m truly sorry for how you were treated. Bastien never had the skills necessary for a renovation like this one, and we are all in agreement you should have been project manager from the start.”
“Well it seems, if the rumors are true, that I was not the only one . . . how do you say . . . dans la merde?”
“Dans la merde?” I thought for a second. “Um . . . screwed?”
His eyes brightened, and he lofted a finger in the air. “Oui! Yes, screwed! Tous les deux.” He gestured between the two of us with an enthusiastic wave, and then, as if running out of steam, he just sighed. René dug into his back pocket, pulled out an iconic pack of Marlboro Reds, and tapped one into his fingers. With the other hand he brandished a lighter, igniting the thin white end, and drew in a lazy drag before blowing it into the breeze. He offered me one, and when I shook my head to politely refuse, he tucked the lighter into the cigarette box and shoved it back in his pants. “Besides, ce qui est fait est fait,” he said, waving his hand in the air.
“What is done . . . is done?” I translated.
The corners of his mouth lifted. “Très bien. It is a shame you are going back to Californie just when your French lessons are starting to really pay off.”
“Actually, I’m not sure I am going back to Californie, I mean California, at least not right away. In fact, that’s what I wanted to speak with you about—in addition to the apology, of course—I don’t quite think ‘what’s done is done.’ As you may have heard, the merde hit the fan when Jack and Claudine found out about Kate’s twist for the show, but we managed to pitch a different spin on how we can deliver an even more compelling season, and we were hoping you could help us bring it across the finish line.”
“I don’t know if I quite understand.” His forehead and lips both puckered in confusion. “What, uh, exactly do you need from me?”
“We were given another three weeks of budget to cover whatever we can finish of the restoration. Also, to finish gathering as much footage and conducting the rest of the interviews to piece together with the material we already have. As you can see”—I gestured to the lumber and materials still strewn around the front of the property—“we don’t quite have a fully renovated château. So I guess I need you to give it to me straight. What are we working with? Are we days away from being able to finish this thing?”
Taking a minute to digest it all, he inhaled a long drag and blew it out in a forceful stream of smoke as he nodded. “Do you want the looking-at-life-through-rose-colored-glasses answer or the truth?”
I pounded my chest and raised my chin a little higher. “Go ahead, hit me with the truth. Who knows? It might actually be a welcome change.”
He took one last drag, then started walking and talking like he was leading a tour through the Louvre, and I realized I was supposed to try to keep up. “The biggest lift was the foundation. Fortunately, the explosives that were detonated through the house did more superficial damage than structural, and we were able to repair all of it.” He motioned upward. “As you know, there was quite a bit of mold in the upper level bedroom walls on the south side of the house where the roof was the most compromis. We have removed it, replacing all the Sheetrock and beams.”
“And the roof itself?”
“The slate roof is brand new, and we managed to keep it as close to the original as possible down to the copper nails. It took some doing, but I was even able to procure enough zinc to re-create the ridge work. And finally the plumbing,” he said, sucking in air. “Luckily most of the piping was still in decent shape. We replaced the kinked or broken pipes and introduced hot water into the kitchen and toilettes.”
So far this all sounded pretty encouraging. Given how erratic the construction had been, I was astounded by how much of the renovation was actually completed. “Okay, so then what wasn’t touched?”
