Emma sat cross-legged on the chaise on her balcony, thankful the sun had gone behind a huge storm cloud, as she searched her mind and reviewed the notes she had written. Again. She had never had a memory of her abduction, so despite the potential damage to her psyche, she wanted to cling to every detail of the flashback. She was wearing one of Nathan’s Harvard Business School T-shirts and her favorite cutoffs. Her hair was piled on top of her head in a messy bun. She doodled on the legal pad she held in her lap, wanting to begin the exercise, but also stalling. Thunder rumbled in the distance. She started to scribble down notes.
She had had enough therapists assure her that if she did, in fact, recover any memories, they might not be reliable. Nevertheless, this is what she remembered, so she recreated it on the page, starting with the small tattoo: a rectangle with an ornate cross flaring out at the four ends. She admired her handiwork.
“How many pairs of sunglasses do I need in LA?” Caroline was leaning against the open French doors, scrolling through her iPad.
“For three days? I don’t know, seven?”
“You think? I was hoping to get by with four.”
“I was kidding, you loon.”
She sat at the foot of the chaise and shielded her screen with her hand as she showed Emma a variety of celebrity sunglass candids.
“I’m not. It’s LA. It’s a movie star interview. I’m considering changing sunglasses midway through.”
“Car, you are entering a race you can’t win.”
“I know,” she sighed defeated. “I can’t pull off a Christine-style interview.”
Christine Lamont was her mentor at CNN and more of a diva than any actress Caroline could imagine. She once notoriously cleared out an entire wing of the Bellagio to accommodate her needs during a Britney Spears one-on-one.
“Car,” Emma pinched her forearm and she looked up, annoyed. “This is going to be the easiest pep talk in pep talk history.”
“Okay, I’m ready.” She set her tablet aside and gave Emma her full focus.
“Don’t strive for a Christine Lamont-style interview. Strive for a Caroline Fitzhugh interview. You’re sunglass shopping when you have the most beautiful eyes ever. You’re preparing questions that Christine would ask. Ask him what Caroline wants to know. Remember when we would sit up and watch A Walk in the Park or Broken Vow and you would ask me if I thought he would like popcorn with Junior Mints mixed in? Or if he did anything crazy at night before bed, like when you checked for ghosts?”
“I still do that.”
“Ask him! Clark Rhodes wants a change, and you are the biggest breath of fresh air out there. You can’t win trying to be a cheap imitation of Christine, because Christine is a cheap imitation of herself as it is. But if you go out there as you, real and unedited you? You with no filter and inappropriate sense of humor? Clark Rhodes won’t know what hit him.”
“Damn.”
“Good, right?”
“Seriously, that should go in some sort of book of pep talks.”
Emma made a tiny bow from her yoga pose. “Thank you, thank you.”
“I’m going to go pack.” She snatched Emma’s legal pad. Their friendship had absolutely no boundaries. “What’s this?”
“I’ve been writing down everything I remember from the flashback.”
“That’s the tattoo?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s weird. It looks Middle Eastern or Eastern European.” She squinted and amended, “Maybe Egyptian?” She pinched the thin skin between her thumb and index finger. “And it was here?”
“Yes, right hand.”
“You know, there’s a guy at work who hunts down shit like this. He sources weird symbols associated with terrorist groups and stuff. I could ask him to research it. See if it’s a common symbol, or if it has meaning.”
“Yeah, that would be great. I’ll tell Dad you’re doing that when I give him the notes. We can all put our heads together when you get back.”
Caroline snapped a photo of the drawing with her phone.
“I’m gone for three days. I think the flight will last longer.”