three

MOLLY SETTLED INTO the soothing buttery leather of seat 3A and instantly understood all the fuss over flying first class: It was like therapy without all the intrusive questions.

Right now, Molly’s particular ailment was nerves. Excessive ones. The chaos theory kind where a butterfly flaps its wings in your stomach and it causes your ears to ring and your left toe to swell up enough that your Converse don’t fit. Yesterday, she’d been excited; today, without Charmaine to distract her with jokes, the monumental significance of this move was turning her brain to mush. She needed soothing wherever she could find it, and being able to recline fully with a container of warm nuts—and drink Diet Coke out of a crystal glass—really did help a little.

“Going on vacation?” asked the aggressively mustachioed man sitting next to her.

“I’m going to visit my dad,” Molly told him.

It sounded so profoundly normal coming out of her mouth. Natural, even, despite the fact that she’d gone sixteen years without saying anything remotely similar. The butterflies gave way briefly to a pleased warmth. She flipped open the magazines she’d purloined from Charmaine’s stash. People showed Brick beaming as part of a story about him buying an alpaca farm for a costar who’d expressed a passing yearning to make sweaters, and he was in Us’s “Stars… They’re Just Like Us!” section as someone who “loves sandwiches,” illustrated by a grainy photo of Brick coming out of a Subway restaurant.

Away from the prying eyes of family and friends—who all seemed fixated on interpreting her body language as a way of gauging her emotional well-being—Molly stared intently at Brick and searched for something, anything, of herself. Charmaine said their eyes were the same. A shadow of Molly’s dimple seemed visible on his cheek, and from his gym shorts Molly could tell they had the same runner’s quads. She wondered if his hair stuck up in the back as much as hers did in the mornings, and if he also liked strawberry Pop-Tarts better than actual strawberries. Was he allergic to pomegranates, too?

The sheer force of her interest in the subject surprised her. Molly had never thought much about what it would be like to have a father. In fact, she’d never thought much about the one she’d believed she had. An orphaned college fling of Laurel’s who’d died in Iraq before Molly was born, Army Captain Hank Walker had been a picture painted only with words, because, as Laurel used to say, Molly was the only memento he’d left behind (which of course made a whole lot of sense now, given Laurel’s confession that he was actually an invention based on the novel she’d been reading when she went into labor). At first Molly had pressed for more details, but as she got older, Laurel’s answers got more vague, and her expression increasingly sad and remote. So Molly stopped asking. And after a while, she stopped wondering. Aside from the odd curiosity brought on from watching the neighborhood dads play catch with their kids, Molly had never felt anything lacking in her life—especially because her grandmother Ginger had enough stern looks and abstinence lectures in her arsenal to raise sixty teenagers. But here was this big bear of a man, grinning broadly at the camera, seeming familiar to her in a way she’d never noticed before. It was tangible, breathing proof that her tastes, her eyebrow furrow, or the fact that her big toe always seemed twice as big as it should be had an origin outside Laurel’s DNA.

Molly’s eyes stung. Thinking about her mother was like slamming her hand in a car door: It hurt too much to consider doing it on purpose. She especially didn’t want to dwell on how Laurel had almost chosen to die without telling Molly that her father was arguably the most famous movie star in the world. Focusing on that made Molly kind of angry at Laurel, and then she felt terrible for being angry, and then she resented feeling terrible….

The memory came anyway: Laurel setting aside her ever-present knitting needles and beckoning for Molly to sit next to her on the bed, her face almost lost beneath her favorite chemo turban. It was exactly thirty-two days before she took her last breath.

“I’m so sorry,” she’d said as her opening gambit. “I lied. I’m selfish, and I lied. Here, I knitted you another scarf. It’s green. I love you in green.”

The story poured out of her mother like she’d turned on a faucet, and the scarf hadn’t helped Molly absorb it any faster: how Laurel had fallen in love on set; how she’d discovered she was pregnant after the actor had married someone else; how she’d moved home and had Molly and then, impossibly, kept quiet about this whole incredibly dramatic series of events.

Afterward, Molly spent the entire night staring at her bedroom ceiling, trying to put herself in Laurel’s place and wondering how it was possible that her free-spirited, bubbly mother, who never had a thought she didn’t blurt out, could’ve spent the last sixteen years holding on to the most mammoth secret Molly could imagine. Her father was Brick Berlin? Whom she’d just seen on Access Hollywood talking about a fund-raiser for hearing-impaired dogs? How was it possible that one minute you could be giggling at someone for mispronouncing the words cochlear implants, and the next, be that person’s daughter? And how could anyone refrain from sharing something that monumental, that crazy, at the first opportunity? Charmaine, for example, couldn’t keep to herself what she spent on shirts at Forever 21, much less anything legitimately juicy.

“Molly, you have to understand that I truly thought this was for the best,” Laurel had said, her wan face showing the strain. “I saw what Hollywood did to people. I didn’t want to raise you in that world. And Brick is Hollywood.”

“What does that even mean? Is he evil, or something?”

Laurel sighed. “Brick is not a bad person. I promise. Please don’t blame him for this,” she said. “He always wanted to be a part of your life. And he’s always said you’d be welcome there when we were both ready.”

“You’ve been talking to him?” Molly squawked.

Laurel covered her face with a thin hand.

“He calls to check up sometimes,” she admitted. “I know I should have told you. I know I handled this about as wrong as a person can handle anything. But I was so tired of the showbiz rat race. I didn’t think that would be much of a life for you, especially with his other family and something like three big film franchises to distract him. So I talked him into thinking you’d be better off with me in Indiana until… well, I don’t know. Until the time was right. He didn’t love the idea, but he agreed. For me.” Her eyes misted. “And then somehow I guess the time never was right.”

“You guys could’ve let me make that decision,” Molly had pointed out.

“Yes. I could have. I should have. But I kept telling myself I was saving us both from something. I was young and I was an idiot. I know that’s impossible to imagine.” Laurel laughed without humor. “But he’s your father. I wish I hadn’t been so cavalier about ignoring that. I wish… well, I wish a lot of things. But mostly I wish I’d come clean sooner so this transition might’ve been easier for you.”

Molly hated the word transition. Laurel used it countless times to describe what would happen after her death, like Molly was just switching lanes on the freeway.

In the end, Danny had been the one to remind Molly that she had a limited amount of time left with her mother, and that Laurel hadn’t kept that secret out of malice. So Molly had laid down all her resentment and accepted the situation as well as she could, so their last months together wouldn’t be any more terrible. But all that suppression left Molly feeling as if she’d grown a very nosy five-year-old inside her brain who refused to stop shouting: How much does he know about me? Does he really want me? Or is he just doing this because he thinks he has to? Is that why I’m doing it, too?

Deep down, she knew the last one wasn’t true. Molly hadn’t truly appreciated the intangible aspects of having a parent until she’d lost hers, so knowing there was one more of them out there felt an awful lot like a life raft. And Molly did think she detected sincere warmth in Brick’s eyes. Having plowed through his essential filmography, Molly suspected Brick wasn’t a good enough actor to fake friendliness that well during his off-hours—especially for the paparazzi. But it also seemed like ninety percent of celebrities came across as relaxed and stable, and then inevitably the Enquirer would unearth photos of them playing naked mini golf at the Playboy mansion with three call girls, a chocolate fountain, and a chimp.

What if he turns out to be crazy like that? Molly thought. Wait, maybe I don’t care, as long as he likes me. Oh, God, what if he doesn’t like me? What if he thinks I’m this ridiculous, unsophisticated obligation and everyone at my new school thinks I’m totally lame, and I end up a miserable outcast in really old sneakers?

Sometime in the last five minutes, Molly’s thumbnail had found its way between her teeth, and she’d gnawed at it unconsciously until her hangnail began to bleed. She wiped it on the hot towel sitting next to her glass. She had to calm down or else she’d show up in Los Angeles with hands that belonged on a horror-movie poster. This was scary, but it was all going to be okay. It had to be. Laurel wouldn’t have pushed this if she hadn’t believed it would work out, and if Molly excluded the rather enormous lie regarding her parentage, Laurel had been a great mom. Besides, surely she wasn’t going to lose her mother and get rejected by her father in the same three-month period. Wasn’t that statistically improbable?

Molly decided to make the thrill of anticipation unseat her nervous energy. She closed the magazines and let out a shaky, cleansing breath that drew the attention of the flight attendant (everyone seemed to care way more about your feelings in first class).

“Would a chocolate chip cookie help?” the lady asked. “Fresh-baked.”

See? The positive attitude was already working.

Molly’s feet were on the ground barely fifteen minutes before her life took another Hollywood turn. A uniformed driver whose sign read MS. CHANANDALER BONG grabbed her at baggage claim and escorted her to a glossy Escalade with tinted windows—one of which was cracked enough for her to see a man wearing a deeply fake beard in the backseat.

“Sorry for the cloak-and-dagger stuff,” the guy said, leaning out the window and peering at her over a pair of reading glasses with the lenses removed. “I didn’t want the paparazzi to ruin this moment. Get in!”

Brick Berlin ripped off his chin fuzz with the gusto of a Mission: Impossible spy and threw open the door. His voice was every bit as deep and rich as it was in the movies—if it could have a flavor, it would be chocolate—and he looked exactly the same, right down to the unrealistic accessories.

Molly froze. When she’d pictured meeting Brick for the first time, she’d thrown herself into his arms (and Brick hadn’t been wearing a beret). Instead, her legs abandoned her, so Brick scooted toward the edge of the seat and scooped her inside the car practically with one hand, while she did nothing but stare.

Hazel. Like hers. She did have his eyes.

As the driver slammed Molly’s door shut, Brick hugged her so hard she felt a few ribs quit on her. He felt as densely muscular as he looked on film, and he smelled like spray tan and expensive cologne (definitely not Trick by Brick). Molly was torn between being touched and wondering if he was acting, since this was exactly what his character did in Tequila Mockingbird when he rescued his fiancée from South American sex slavery. It made the moment that much more surreal.

Brick pulled away and ruffled Molly’s hair.

“You have Laurel’s freckles,” he told her. “Molly, I’m so sorry she’s gone. She was a wonderful woman.”

“It’s okay,” she said, her voice trembling. “I mean, thank you. I mean…”

“This is an emotional time for us all,” Brick said kindly. “Cancer is a vicious thief.”

He paused to let that sink in and then grabbed her face. “I’ve been waiting to meet you all your life, Molly. And now that you’re here, I hate to look into those eyes and see an ounce of pain, sweet child of mine!”

Molly’s heart skipped as she noticed she’d been right about their shared cheek dimple. She blinked back fresh, unexpected tears. Maybe it was the effect of being comforted by her father for the first time in her entire life, maybe it was that meeting a new parent reminded her of the one that was gone, or maybe it was the fact that he was gazing searchingly at her through fake Harry Potter glasses, giving him an air of permanent surprise. Probably, it was all three. Molly had gotten used to feeling every possible thing at once.

Brick gave her damp cheeks a firm pat.

“Let it out,” he advised. “Tears are full of toxins. If you hold them in, they’ll flood your brain.”

Molly chuckled in spite of herself. Brick frowned and then took off his glasses.

“That does sound kind of ridiculous,” he admitted with a grin. “My trainer told me that. But I’m sure it’s true on a deeper level. I’ll ask my hypnotherapist.”

The driver started the car and pulled out of the parking garage, at which point twenty or so photographers descended upon the Escalade, yelling and shoving one another.

“Damn, I thought we’d lost them back on Sunset,” Brick said, shaking his head. “This disguise sucks. I told Stan I should wear the headdress.”

Molly had seen footage of paparazzi scrums on TV, but it was ten times scarier in person. A woman getting her hair pulled by a cameraman slammed against the window, begging Brick for “the goods.” The guy closest to Molly, who couldn’t have been much older than she was, wore a trucker cap that read PORN STAR IN TRAINING.

“Molly, open up,” he shouted, jiggling the door handle.

Molly grabbed the nearest object she could find—which turned out to be an ice bucket—and tried to hide behind it.

“How do they know who I am?” she gasped.

“Well, here’s the thing, Sunshine,” Brick began. “There’s going to be a tiny little story in Hey! about this. About you, I mean. Being my love child.”

“What?”

Molly was reminded of the time she belly flopped off the high dive at the local pool: The wind was knocked out of her, and she thought she would drown. The entire student body of both her new and her old high school might read some sordid tabloid story about her? How was that even possible? She’d only been in Los Angeles fifteen minutes.

“I’m sorry,” Brick said. “But fear not! It’s not a smear job. Here’s what already ran.”

Molly scanned the crinkled magazine Brick handed her from his back pocket. The weird breathless feeling eased up when she realized the blurb didn’t actually use her name.

“ ‘Children, like protein shakes, are God’s greatest present’?” she read, trying to sound cheerful. “I’ve never heard that one.”

“Well, protein shakes are delicious,” Brick said. “And they make you a better version of yourself.”

Molly stared at him. “Okay,” she said, after a beat. “But how did those guys know my name? It’s not in this article.”

“I almost forgot!” Brick evaded. “I brought you an ice-blended from the Coffee Bean!” He opened a mini cooler set into the console at his feet. “I got vanilla. Laurel loved vanilla.”

Brick handed her the drink. Molly took it silently and cast another uneasy glance out the window as they crept along. A photographer was trying to climb up the trunk. The driver finally found a spot of open road and floored it toward the airport exit.

“Sunshine, this is just how it works around these parts,” Brick said. “Everything gets out eventually, so we decided, hey, let’s leak it on our terms. So I’m sure they know your name because of the party.”

“What party?”

“Well. That is a long story,” Brick said. “Why don’t we talk about it when we get home?”

“Sure,” Molly said, wanting to seem agreeable. She took a long sip of her drink and privately hoped a crippling brain freeze would shove her into a coma before that conversation, or the mysterious party, ever even happened. Suddenly, it seemed awfully naive to think she could drop into her world-famous father’s life without anybody caring but him. As if to underline the point, they passed a building bearing a giant poster from Brick’s latest movie that read BRICK. BRUCE. BEYONCÉ. BERGERAC. The shoot-’em-up remake of Cyrano made $98 million its first weekend. Molly and Charmaine had seen it twice. For research. Obviously.

“Oops, almost time for E! News,” Brick said.

He clicked on the TV in the back of the limo and cranked up the volume. In what Molly found was a welcome and pressure-free silence—she could let her emotions settle down a notch—they watched a story about Ed Westwick shaving his head to play Howie Mandel in a biopic called No Deal, and then a piece about Chris Pine hurting his hamstring doing a stunt for the next Star Trek.

“Oh, no,” gasped Brick. “He can’t play the second lead in Avalanche! if he can’t climb!”

Brick whipped out his BlackBerry, then boomed frenzied instructions at whatever poor sap from his office was unlucky enough to have answered his call. So she wouldn’t sit there and just stare dumbly at her father, Molly gazed out the window. It was a relief to see L.A. had McDonald’s and Starbucks and supermarkets and crappy bumper sticker–covered cars, just like West Cairo. But it also had a brilliant azure sky unmolested by anything except sky-high palm trees ruffling in a gentle breeze—so Californian that it almost seemed fake—and about ten tons more traffic. It was 2 p.m. on a Monday. Didn’t anybody have a job? Where were all these people going?

After about an hour, during which Brick made four more phone calls and arranged to send a ham to Chris Pine, the car exited onto Sunset Boulevard. The concrete jungle vanished, replaced by a winding, tree-lined road dotted with palatial houses lined up like beads in a necklace, broken only by UCLA’s redbrick campus. Eventually, the Escalade pulled up to a huge set of wrought-iron gates set between two tiled outbuildings, one of which was marked in cursive with the words Bel Air. A man inside the security kiosk waved them through with a smile.

“Almost home,” Brick chirped, stowing his phone back in his pocket. “Look, that’s the country club. Maybe I should send them a ham. They think I use my phone on the golf course too often. Crazy!”

The car began its climb up a curving road. Molly hadn’t realized the term Hollywood Hills was actually descriptive—for some reason, in her mind, the city was all sand and blazing heat bouncing off flat pavement. But Bel Air was lush and green and rolling.

“That’s where the crown prince of Saudi Arabia used to live,” Brick said, pointing at yet another gate, behind which was a driveway so long Molly couldn’t see the house at the end of it. Her nosy days of staring out her bedroom window at the neighbors across the street were probably over, which was a shame, as these neighbors were doubtless way more interesting. No offense to Danny.

“That guy threw the craziest parties,” Brick said wistfully. “But my pool is nicer.”

They pulled up to an ivy-covered brick wall and robust fuchsia bougainvillea bushes. The gate swung open to reveal a gravel driveway running through a tunnel of trees and across a green and perfect lawn, up to a white house larger than Molly’s high school in Indiana. As they parked, someone wearing a gray workman’s jumpsuit hurried past toward a spherical chrome-and-glass greenhouse that looked suspiciously like the bad guy’s laboratory in Rad Man.

Whoa, Molly thought. This place was no house. It wasn’t even a mansion. It embarrassed mansions.

Brick hopped out and opened Molly’s door with a flourish. “Welcome to Casa Berlin!”

Molly slowly climbed out of the car, making the most of this first chance to take in all of her father in one go. Divested of his disguise, Brick was even better-looking than he was on-screen: well north of six feet tall, with thick red-brown hair and familiar hazel eyes surrounded by long lashes Molly wished she’d inherited. They crinkled warmly at the edges when he smiled, like the kind of candy wrapper his muscles suggested he hadn’t actually untwisted in years. He also had the whitest teeth Molly had ever seen.

I am Brick Berlin’s daughter. Somehow, standing right in front of him, it was both easier and harder to believe than when she was back in Indiana.

Molly followed Brick up the steps, through a midnight blue front door with a snarling half-man, half-lion doorknocker, and into a marble foyer flanked by two identical wide, curving staircases, meeting underneath a crystal chandelier. It made her feel very small. She had joked to Charmaine that her first seconds in the Berlin house would play out like in Annie, when Daddy Warbucks’s staff bursts into song and dance upon her arrival. Molly now had to admit a little choreographed welcome sounded much more appealing than the echo of footsteps on chilly marble.

The driver lugged in her bags and disappeared up the left flight of stairs. Molly started to follow him, but Brick stopped her.

“You’ll have time for the tour later,” he promised. “First, your sister is really excited to meet you.”

For the next ten minutes, Molly trailed after Brick through room after empty room. They wandered through an enormous kitchen (where Brooke was not, as Brick had hypothesized, baking flaxseed muffins), the plush screening room (where Brooke was not watching Diaper Andy), and Brick’s gym (where Brooke was not doing squat thrusts), only to end up back in the cavernous foyer.

“I can’t believe this!” Brick said. “She swore she was going to be here.”

“It’s okay. Something probably came up,” Molly said, to allay his distress. “We have ages to get to know each other. I’m not going anywhere.”

This brightened Brick, who actually clasped his hands together with glee.

“That is true!” he said. “And this way, we can have some private bonding time. I want to hear everything that’s ever happened to you.”

He was slinging a beefy arm around Molly when she felt something in his pocket buzz. Brick disengaged and pulled out his phone.

“Tell me you have good news, Mitch,” he said. “What? No, we can’t shoot in Key West. The movie is called Avalanche!”

Molly took a seat on the staircase and watched as Brick walked in ever-tighter circles.

“There are no polar bears at large in Key West,” Brick shouted. “That will ruin the last half hour. Do not call me back about this.”

He hung up with a dispirited punch to the phone.

“Sorry about that,” he said, turning to Molly. “My lead actor is a yutz and so is his manager. I mean, we can’t do it without polar bears. White fur is the apex of fear. Everyone knows that.”

“And it’s probably hard to find mountains off the coast of Florida,” Molly attempted, sensing the situation demanded sympathy even though she felt a bit out of her league in this conversation.

Brick frowned. “My God, you’re right. This will not stand. I don’t care how much he spent on his bungalow. Just give me a minute to call him back.”

He scuttled down the hallway, leaving Molly totally alone. She paused and rubbed her forehead, vainly hoping that would help make sense of what just transpired. This day was getting more surreal with every moment that passed, and it made her want to lie down for a second. She assumed the driver had gone in the general direction of her room—so, upward—but Brick said he’d be right back. Should she just sit there and wait?

The air conditioner whooshed on right over her head. Molly broke out into goose pimples.

“Home sweet home,” she whispered to the cold and empty room.