Total pages in book: 154
Estimated words: 144628 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 723(@200wpm)___ 579(@250wpm)___ 482(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 144628 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 723(@200wpm)___ 579(@250wpm)___ 482(@300wpm)
“Because I want to support you. Because my son loves you, and I’ve come to adore you, darling. I wanted to know more about you. Those films you made with her, they were personal to you.”
Lara had made films about women. About their worries and struggles. About how women fit into a world that hadn’t been made for them. She’d told her own stories. “They were always about her, but she was so good at what she did that it was easy to see myself in every role. I felt like a real actress for the first time, not just the star of a film.”
“You were very good in them.” Ava’s lips had turned up in an almost sad smile. As though she knew how hard it was to think about what could have been.
“I wish she’d lived. That was what George and I talked about a lot in the beginning. What she could have done if she’d lived, the people she could have touched with her unique talents.”
“I don’t understand how a woman like that…” Ava stopped as though realizing she was about to say something wrong.
But she wasn’t. Staying silent about these problems exacerbated them. It made the problem something to hide, and this was a problem that flourished in the darkness, that lived in the shadows and fed on shame. “She struggled to fit in all of her life. Wealth doesn’t necessarily equal happiness. Her mother and father loved her, but they didn’t always understand her. She spent much of her life with undiagnosed clinical depression. Her mom didn’t want her to see someone because of how it might look to the family.”
“But I knew her mother,” Ava began.
“Her mother didn’t understand,” Vanessa pointed out. “No one talked about mental health in her world, and even if they had, she’d been raised to believe it was a weakness and something to hide. It’s hard to break out of a lifetime of teaching, and a lack of courage doesn’t mean someone is terrible. George felt that guilt. It was only after her mother passed that Lara sought some help, but she would get on her meds and feel good and then get off them because she thought they held back her creative process. She didn’t talk about the issues behind her drug use in public because it was shameful to her and her family. But talking is exactly how to address the problem. Talk and support. She was about to go into rehab. That’s the ironic part. She was supposed to go in when we finished filming, but I think she wanted one last night.”
“I’m so sorry, darling.”
Vanessa took a long breath. It did feel good to talk, to process through emotions that still swirled inside from time to time. If there was one great thing that had come from this, it was spending time with her therapist. Michael had forced it on her, but it was a good process. Emotions weren’t a thing a person confronted and then discarded. They lingered and had to be brought out time and time again, examined with new facets found and explored. There was often no “getting over” a trauma. There was hard work to do to ease the pain and work around it or work with it, because sometimes trauma could bring about strength and empathy that hadn’t existed before. “She was part of my family. The one I chose. Nicki and I weren’t close. Our mom…well, she made us compete. If one of us got better grades, she would use it against the other.”
Ava reached out, putting a hand over hers. “That wasn’t right of her. You can’t do that when you have children. You have to love and appreciate them for who they are separately. I should know. I sometimes worry I treated Michael like he was another JT. JT was easier. He was a clone of his father. Michael was someone different. I think I pushed him away sometimes.”
Vanessa turned her hand over so she could hold Ava’s. “He adores you. And he knows who he is now. He loves his job. He needed the military, and he needed to be away from the world he grew up in for a while. But never doubt how much he loves his family.”
Ava sniffled and gave her a squeeze before she sat back and dabbed at her eyes with her napkin. “Thank you, dear. I needed to hear that. And you need to understand that not all women in your life will be like this Ashton. Or your sister. I know she was a good woman, but she hurt you, too.”
Vanessa’s heart ached. “She didn’t understand me. Very few people do. She understood that I cared about George, but she didn’t understand why I had to marry him. Sometimes I think that was the mistake I made. If I’d told him no, simply lived with him those last few years, maybe the press would have been easier on me.”