Prologue
“Don’t worry kid, it’ll be okay…” The reassuring words were accompanied by a firm but kind hand on his narrow shoulders and made Quinn turn around and look up into the kind, but sad eyes of Barry Bing, his mother’s agent.
Even at fourteen Quinn Thomas knew those words to be a lie, but said nothing to dispute the kindness of the man he was only halfway aware of. Instead he stood in the sun drenched cemetery on a balmy spring day with his back turned to the grave stone of one parent as he watched the other walk out of his life for the last and final time.
The thought caused a fresh wave of grief to tear through his lanky body as his fists hung balled up and useless by his side. Still he stubbornly continued to watch his mother’s perfectly styled figure walk toward a waiting car and fought the need to call out to her.
Some small part of him still wanted to beg and promise anything his young mind could come up with so she wouldn’t abandon him and leave him in the care of strangers. But he knew from experience that it would do no good.
His mother was an actress and he’d learned at an early age that her career meant more to her than he or his father ever would. She’d pretended for a while when he was younger for appearances, but a couple years ago when her film career had finally started taking off, she had given up all pretense and had walked out to live fully in the limelight.
At first he’d known a guilty sort of relief that he wouldn’t be subject to her mood swings and erratic behavior, but as time went by he’d found out that something was better than nothing at all. So day after day, he called her and begged her to come back until eventually he’d given up hope.
Too bad he couldn’t say the same about his father.
His father had turned to alcohol everyday for the last year to numb the pain of a broken heart and the only reason his mother had come back today was for his funeral.
Had the sorrow etched upon her beautiful face earlier been real or just some act made to look real? He would never know.
Turning, he once again gazed down upon what was left of his father. As he numbly read the words on the headstone until they blurred before his eyes, Quinn’s heart hardened with the bitterness of one question:
How could his mother cause so much pain and destruction and say she loved him?
If this is what love did, he wanted no part of it. Quinn vowed right then and there that he would never again expose himself to this kind of pain. He would never give anyone the power to hurt him ever again.
1
Coming back to the east coast always threw Quinn off his axis and today was no exception. At the moment he rode an elevator that would take him back in close proximity of a world he’d washed his hands of a long time ago: the entertainment industry. Scars still too painful to talk about haunted him from his past and with every floor that the elevator gained that late October afternoon, he felt the weight even more so because of his destination.
In pensive silence he leaned back against the polished silver surface of the elevator car with only the faint hum of the lifting mechanism and the blurred reflection of his tall, blond bulk for company. He thought about what awaited him in Barry Bing’s office besides what he already knew.
BB—as he was known to most was one of the biggest talent agents in New York—if not the entire industry and had a hand in making some of the biggest movie stars out there—his mother included.
