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said thank you, and I was always grateful. But I was also embarrassed.
    It felt like I could have done more to deserve all that gushing.
    “That was an awesome shoot,” I told him—because being on the show had been great. The rest of the truth was I’d missed the shit out of Vinnie during those years. Of course I went back down to LA on breaks and holidays and over hiatus, and Vinnie visited me on his breaks, but still . . . we’d struggled so hard to get an agent and an audition and a break, oh holy God, just a motherfuckin’ break, but once I had one . . . God, we’d learned how much we had together when we were forced to live apart.
    “Yeah—it was a fun show,” Noah said. I watched those remarkable brown eyes take me in through the rearview mirror. “Not your best work, really, but I get the feeling you haven’t done that yet.”
    I gaped at him, a thousand critical reviews spooling behind my eyes. “Montgomery did what he did best—amiable beefcake seems to be his calling.” “Connor Montgomery is infinitely watchable, but he’ll never be Oscar material.” “Pretty and charming are Montgomery’s calling cards, and he pulls them both out here with a flourish.”
    Nice things—people said nice things about me. But they never, ever said I had more in me than what I’d put out there on the screen. Not even my directors—but then, Jilly told me straight out she picked the softball scripts for me. I could run from a fake explosion on a green screen like it was an Olympic sport. Just, oh God! Don’t give him dialog, we’re afraid the guy can’t read!
    In the course of the last week, Jilly and I had shotgunned the first season of Wolf’s Landing , and sitting here, making eyes at the pretty kid driving my car, I had a flash of panic. That show was written really well— in fact, that was part of my planned press release to put a good spin on the fact that I wanted to ease back into the land of the living by doing TV instead of movies. “It’s an honor to be asked to do a guest spot in a show written as well as this one. I hope I do the show’s writers justice.”
    Oh God. What if I couldn’t do the show’s writers justice? What if Jillian was right? I wasn’t good enough for more than amiable beefcake?
    The flash of panic through my chest and the adrenaline dumping into my brain were pretty much the granddaddies of all surprises. If you’d asked me a week ago, I would have said it was impossible for me to care about my career.
    I realized Noah was waiting for an answer—and whether she was looking at me or not, so was Jillian.
    “Hopefully I can do my best work here.” The words were clichéd, and probably sounded rehearsed—but the delivery was thoughtful and engaged. Wouldn’t that be great, to find I wasn’t done with my life at twenty-nine.
    “We surely would love to see that, Mr. Montgomery,” Noah said earnestly. “I’ve been waiting to see your best work since high school!”
    My brain shot off a warning flare that a long-defunct operation was about to boot up, and I had another hit of panic.
    “So, what was that? Two years ago?” I asked, hoping I didn’t sound like a heel. Jillian smacked my knee, so I must have, and Noah stopped looking in the mirror, so I probably embarrassed him too.
    “Closer to six.” His voice kept that edge of good humor, and I blessed him. “I’m more a runner than a bodybuilder, you know?”
    “Yeah,” I said, regretfully. “I know all about that.” My first year doing Warlock Tea had been spent getting phone calls from the studio execs every day, asking me to bulk up, while Jillian and Vinnie had been sending me vanilla whey protein to put into everything from my oatmeal to my fruit smoothies. “I miss the days when I could go running on the beach and call it good.”
    “Maybe if you’d just fucking eat, we could go back to those days again.” Jillian inspected her manicure.
    “Sure, Jilly,” I soothed. I had a cookie leftover from