Page 35 of The Dirty Version

The studio had planned to change the ending all along; Ram had even said “save the baby” to Tash at their first meeting. But she’d allowed herself to get preoccupied with Caleb. And now her worst fears had become reality.

“Reggie! I thought you couldn’t make it.” One of Caleb’s white-blazered shoulders sliced between their tête-à-tête.

Regina. Reggie.

Of course.

Executive producer Reggie . Story team Reggie . This bullish woman in thousand-dollar footwear was Reggie —Regina Bond.

Tash’s dense preconceptions collapsed inward. Whenever Caleb had mentioned Reggie , Tash had imagined a dumpy dude. Not a woman with expertly engineered Hollywood Hills contours, who’d called Caleb a fucking dish .

Who greeted him dulcetly. “Would you believe my mom got stuck in Saint-Tropez? She called yesterday from someone’s yacht, insisting I come here in her place.

” Reggie dismissed the thought with an entitled quirk of one embellished cap sleeve.

“She and Ram were only married for a minute, and she only had a small role in Big Gun —but she’s bizarrely sentimental about it. ”

Busy monologuing her dynastic family drama, Reggie might not have clocked Caleb’s ashen expression—but Tash saw it plainly.

He hadn’t expected Reggie at this party.

He had not intended for Tash and Reggie to ever meet.

Because Reggie Bond had sights set on The Colony ’s “new ending”—a detail Caleb knowingly kept from Tash.

Reggie Bond was also Braverman’s stepdaughter. Reggie led Braverman’s Executive Production team. The only decision-maker to outrank Reggie was Ram himself—who just then arrived stoutly beside them in his tuxedo.

Tash’s tailspin gained speed.

“I sense young people discussing me.” Ram had a young, blond person on his arm.

Regina raised her double vodka in a glib greeting. “I was just telling Caleb and Natasha that I’m your Ghost of Starlets Past.”

Ram obliged the reminiscence with a theatrical nod of his silver head. “Regina’s mom was terrific in Big Gun. We fell in love on that set.” He patted the hand of his companion absently. “You know, back then, I thought Big Gun was the most exciting thing I’d ever do. Then I discovered peyote.”

Regina pointed at him. “And I discovered your stash.”

They both laughed, as if the one-two had been practiced, as if Doolittle had written them a partner stand-up routine to use at formal events.

“Now here we are, decades later, and the stepkid who used to sneak around my pool house runs our fastest-growing division.” Ram spoke in rehearsed tones, delivering a cocktail keynote, the sentences tired from making the rounds.

He angled his lowball glass at Regina. “She tells me blockbusters are dead and the market only wants streaming content.”

Regina’s élan picked it up unabashedly. “Streaming content with universal themes that drive consumption, and a finale that draws us crazy buzz. Like the one I’m waiting to hear about.” She pushed her impatience at Tash again, and then at Caleb, a chummy smile on her face.

Caleb’s own expression approximated winsome, even though his color was still gray. “Reggie, come on. You know we’re off the clock.”

Tash’s filmy dress suddenly felt like a cinched-tight corset, making it difficult to breathe.

She surveyed Caleb’s facade, watching him balance on the knifepoint of this melee.

Then she turned to Regina, putting on false innocence, deciding to plunge to the bottom of everyone’s maneuvering.

“And what finale could draw you crazier buzz than throwing a baby off a cliff, anyway?”

Reggie pursed consummately lined lips. “Well—as Caleb has heard me say too many times—human sacrifice doesn’t play well to women between the ages of twenty-six and fifty-nine.

Which is the demographic your show needs to satisfy so we can sell the next two seasons.

Creatives don’t like to hear this, I know, but actual humans don’t decide what gets renewed—the numbers do.

” She shrugged. “We have to please the data.”

Tash had gone cold. “If you wanted to please the data, perhaps you should have bought a different book.”

Reggie countered affably, reaching a hand to Tash’s arm.

“Oh, no! Alternate worlds are entertainment gold! They’re our bread and butter.

Sci-fi series have some of the longest runs, especially when they tap into retellings.

That’s why I had to have The Colony in the first place—you gave us a Garden of Eden, a Red Sea.

.. It’s the type of broad, biblical underpinnings the data eats up!

” Reggie crossed her fingers. “Honestly. We could be sitting on a smash.”

Her profound misinterpretation rendered Tash absolutely speechless.

Reggie continued to pick up steam. “Now just imagine if someone saved the baby—then we’d have a Moses!” The loaded glance she darted to Caleb suggested she’d floated this before. “Trifecta, right? And a literal cliff-hanger.”

Tash’s eyes began to water. Her body was lead weight in a gown. This woman had disemboweled her book’s meaning and replaced its insides with algorithmic stuffing wrongly mapped to theologic themes.

The volume of Tash’s voice rose argumentatively. “You can’t change the most important part of your source material, though. Not when the ending is integral to the plot.”

Regina looked at Tash with pity. “Oh, hon. That hasn’t been true since they changed the ending to Forrest Gump .”

The blonde on Braverman’s arm perked. “ Forrest Gump was a book?”

The ice cubes in Regina’s vodka rattled, pointing the verdict at Tash. “Exactly.”

Through the narrowing tunnel of her vision, Tash recognized Reggie’s ilk—she was that special strain of woman who had the means and education and the network, but made the wrong choices, for the wrong reasons.

In another life, Regina could have championed The Colony and been a friend.

But in this life, Regina sold herself to the data.

And for sure, the data was compiled by a guy.

Tash persisted in quarreling. “Okay, but—”

“Wasn’t Big Gun based on a book, too?” Caleb’s palm landed in the middle of Tash’s back, the same place he’d held her when they slow-danced. Only now it had a different purpose, guiding her slightly away from Reggie, signaling for Tash to Shut. Up.

“Actually, it’s based on a Japanese cartoon. The term we use is ‘manga.’” Unselfconsciously, Ram began to extemporize.

Tash disassociated from the conversation.

She knew—for certain now—that Braverman Productions would change the underpinnings of her story. Their take on The Colony would celebrate male energy that Tash had set out to exorcize. The same male energy Tash meant to purge with the novel’s writing.

She came back to her body only when an industry crony dragged Braverman and his budding blonde away, and when Regina Bond had coasted off, perhaps to butcher a new crop of literary content.

Leaving Tash and Caleb alone together, once again.

The romantic guise dropped. Tash stood, disillusioned—in a cacophony of caricatured Cuban music, in a sea of tasteless canapés, with the very real knowledge Caleb had just been busted. He’d tried to keep Braverman’s plans under wraps. He’d silenced Tash in front of Ram and Reggie.

Tash’s brain rebooted.

She found herself outside, where the red-carpet corridor remained floodlit and jammed.

Paparazzi blocked her path to the valet, so Tash stumbled deeper into the fortress.

She sensed Caleb following her, past wood-and-iron doors, against a stream of bow-tied waiters, through an industrial kitchen, around trays of lipstick-smudged glasses and ruined florist Styrofoam half domes.

Out to the waterside service entrance, to a driveway clogged with party-rental trucks.

“Tash, wait!” Caleb had trailed her across the street, down a grass slope bordering a bay with bobbing, tied-up dinghies.

She felt the night look on and laugh at them in mean déjà vu, ridiculing all the other times Tash had bolted and all the other times Caleb had chased her.

“Tash!”

She used to be angry; once upon a time, Caleb had urged her to dig beneath that fury, to tell him about her fears. Like an idiot, she’d laid them out for him on a platter. And apparently, he’d taken his pick of which to exploit.

Tash spun to face him now—too shredded to breathe fire, wishing for that old rage.

“You knew they planned to change the ending this whole time! You haven’t been managing the studio, you’ve been managing me !” The enormity of what she’d yielded to him sent Tash reeling. “You got me to give Braverman everything he wanted!”

Wet grass clung to the ankles of Caleb’s navy trousers, his white blazer flapping open in the wind. “No! That isn’t—”

“Don’t try to convince me it’s okay!” Tash shook her head fiercely, not falling victim, guarding against more of his spells.

“That’s what you did with Episode Nine, and what you’ll do to Ten, too—anything to make sure Braverman gets their finale.

I should have just signed the decline and spared you the extra effort.

” She broke on the accusation: “But then you wouldn’t have been able to fuck me to fuck me over, right? You must be so pleased with yourself.”

Caleb took a step forward, his face in shadow in the unlit bay—and despite the catering clang and the noise of seagulls, despite the impromptu pursuit, he still wielded reason like a weapon.

“Tash.” Imploringly. “What you heard inside was office politics. That was Reggie flexing focus group numbers—which is her job, and literally her religion. You don’t have to deal with Braverman, I do.

I know Reggie has ideas about the finale. We can find a balance.”

Tash ruptured further. “I thought Reggie was a guy!”

“So?” A truck rumbled past them, up the slope, spewing sports radio. Caleb waited for it to dissipate. “Who cares? She doesn’t write the scenes—we do. Nothing is in ink until you and I decide it.”

Tash’s anguish gathered his words up and packed them bitterly into a grenade. “You mean until you manipulate me into yet another thing I don’t want to do.”

He stopped short then—his supplication turning into stone. “I have never manipulated you, Tash. Not once.”

“Please!” She snapped at his sanctimony. “You got me to compromise on every line we wrote!”

Caleb’s tone stayed infuriatingly even. “No, I guided you through script polishes. I kept lawyers from snatching The Colony out of your hands. I helped you find a way to maintain the story’s integrity.”

“You cut me out!” She jabbed indignantly toward the castillo. “You cut me off! Just like you did back there!”

“Tash.” His hands went frustratedly into his hair. “You were about to blow your chances with Reggie—the same way you blew up your line to Ram. I covered for you then, and I covered for you just now. You should be thanking me.”

“For what?” She was yelling, and she didn’t really care. “Letting Reggie measure my book for Bible data? Letting Ram make this series into a tit parade? What do you want credit for, Caleb? Corrupting my book or demeaning my characters?”

He marched closer. “Hey. The Colony is not a political movement. You demean it when you call our work a ‘tit parade.’ The scenes we wrote are smart and careful, Tash. The fact they’re sexy makes them skilled.

Most people can’t strike that balance. What we did was special.

” He retreated momentarily, just to challenge her again.

“And what would even be so bad about more seasons? Don’t you want to explore more of what you built? What if the property had real legs?”

She was disgusted with his word choice. “Don’t call it a ‘property’! It makes you sound like one of them.”

Caleb finally lost his cool. “I am one of them!” He shouted it skyward. “You know that!”

The waiters dumping trays of half-eaten foie gras tartlets in the service alley paused their scraping. The bayfront water ceased to lap. All nearby creatures stunned at Caleb’s outburst.

Tash realized she’d never really seen him angry; she took a disturbed satisfaction in finding the end of his rope.

Then she picked up the calm demeanor he’d discarded.

“I know that now.” She remembered his claim to be the opposite, during that first, piano-bar parking lot brawl: “one of the good ones,” Caleb had said. It turned out to be untrue. “But guess what, Caleb? The property isn’t yours to give away.”

A chapter closed. Tash was done trusting. She was done behaving.

She scrambled up the wet lawn and pushed past him.

Caleb wheeled around to follow. “Can you just listen? Tash! It doesn’t have to be so black and white! I’m not giving anything away! There are lots of ways to solve for Ten’s finale!”

Back on the service drive, she hitched her dress in two fists to mask their shaking. “I don’t want to solve anything with you. I’m not your problem anymore. Don’t come near me, and don’t come near my book, Caleb. I’ll finish what I owe Braverman without you.”

She stumbled by a set of dumpsters, turning back to make sure she got the last, acidic word.

“Actually, maybe I should be thanking you. You said to start with the emotion beneath the action, right? And I’m feeling perfectly violated.

So thanks for that inspiration—I’m sure the writing will be great. ”