Page 70 of The Sun & Her Burn

“Like them?” he grunted. “I do not have words in the many languages I know to tell you how much I loved them. Genius, Sebastian, pure genius.”

I gaped at him. “You’re kidding.”

“Do I kid about such things?” he asked, as if joking about art was blasphemous. “Never.The Dream & The Dreameris award fodder. No doubt in my mind about it. With the right cast, this film could be iconic. One for the history books.”

“I hadn’t even finished what I sent to you,” I tried to push back.

He waved my words out of the air. “That does not matter. The bones? They are there, and they are gold. Have you finished the rest?”

I ran a slightly trembling hand through my hair and decided I had low blood sugar. “Yes, just now. I didn’t sleep for three days.”

Andrea laughed, so deep from his belly that his entire body swayed with the motion. “Eccellente. You will give them to me after you’ve had a coffee, hmm?”

He beckoned a server over and fired off my usual order of a double espresso before asking the kitchen to bring me a loaded breakfast. I was sure breakfast service was over, but the server was probably an aspiring actor himself, and he wasn’t foolish enough to say no to one of the greatest directors of our time.

“We will shop this immediately,” Andrea continued after the server hustled off. “Artfield Productions would be a good fit, maybe Hightower Studios. We need the budget to do it right and film on location. We could drum up a bidding war, but I’d rather you and I decide which fit is best.”

“I promised Tate Richardson I would offer it to him if I ever wrote again,” I admitted, staring down at the phone I’d placed on the table.

Savannah’s text was still up on the screen.

I didn’t know why it bothered me so much, but I felt like it was important somehow. Both the text admitting she wanted to spend time with me, and my own reaction to it. But everything was too tangled up in my gut, more emotions than I’d felt in years, and all through the fugue state of my exhaustion.

“Absolutely not,” Andrea said immediately, leaning forward to peer at me with dark eyes. “Why would you do that to yourself? It is bad enough you spend personal time with them. Working with them? And onthis?”

He saidthisas if there was a connection between the script and them.

As if he knew I was as obsessive about Savannah as Emerson was about Hallie.

The truth was, of course, that he was right.

It would be pure madness to work with Tate and Savannah on any film, let alone this one, which had roots in my own heartbroken past.

But a part of me also thought the making of the film should be as emotionally painful as the writing of it, as the story itself.

It was the artist in me.

I would always be willing to suffer for a good story.

Yet another part of me remembered how validating it had been to share that first screenplay with Savannah and Adam. How they had seen its potential and set both it and me up for the kind of success that had launched a long and fruitful career thus far.

“I’ve never done this without them,” I admitted in a small voice. “It feels wrong to create something like this separate from them.”

“You have been creating a career and life without Savannah Richardson and Adam Meyers for the last ten years,” he said curtly, but he wasn’t totally unfeeling, couldn’t be as an Italian or a filmmaker. He stared at me hard for a moment before sighing, rubbing a hand over his salt-and-pepper beard. “I won’t work with Savannah. I never liked her.”

I had known Andrea for long enough to read the space between each word. My heart kicked in my chest.

“You always liked Adam,” I said, forcefully mild.

The server returned with my espresso, opening his mouth on a smile that was immediately dashed when he caught Andrea’s glower. He scuttled away.

“Did I?” Andrea asked, sipping his grappa.

“It was he who introduced us,” I reminded him unnecessarily. “You once said he was the kind of actor who could convince you of anything.”

“That does not sound like me.”

I smiled because, of course it did. Andrea was almost as dramatic as Adam.