The Interview That Shook My World
The seagulls were winning.
Freya Holloway wiped the back of her hand across her forehead, leaving a smear of potting soil just below her hairline, and watched another paper plate spiral into the air. The wind off the harbor had teeth today, snatching napkins and festival flyers with equal contempt. She’d pinned her display table with cinder blocks an hour ago, but the blue gingham cloth still billowed like a ship’s sail catching a gale.
“Mom.”
She turned. Jace stood with his arms crossed, plastic sunglasses pushed up into his dark hair, looking at her with the kind of disappointed gravity only a seven-year-old could manage.
“You missed a spot.”
He pointed at his cheek, mirroring the exact location of the dirt on hers. Same stubborn chin. Same watchful gray eyes. Same everything, really. She’d given him her laugh and his father’s face, a genetic roulette that had landed on maximum resemblance the moment the nurse had placed him on her chest seven years ago.
Freya bent down and wiped his cheek with her thumb. “Better?”
“No, yours.” He reached up with his sleeve and scrubbed at her face with a vigor that bordered on aggressive. “You’re going to scare the customers.”
“I scare the customers because I have dirt on my face, or because I’m the one charging them twelve dollars for a mason jar centerpiece?”
“Both.” He grinned, and she felt the familiar ache of loving someone so completely it hurt.
The Seaside Summer Festival was in its third hour, and the Holloway Florals booth had sold exactly fourteen arrangements. Not a disaster, not a success. Her rent was due in twelve days and the shop’s cooler had been making a grinding noise that sounded expensive. The numbers in her head clicked over like tumblers in a lock she couldn’t crack.
But today was Saturday. Jace was eating a funnel cake across the aisle at Mrs. Chen’s baked goods table, and the sun was actually visible for once, burning through the coastal gray like a half-hearted apology. She’d take it.
At exactly 2:47 PM, the journalist arrived.
Freya didn’t notice the man at first; the festival had drawn a decent crowd by then, families and teenagers and old couples holding hands like they were still proving something. Jace had abandoned his post at the Chen table and was crouched by the edge of the pier, watching a fisherman reel in something small and silver. The boy’s attention had the quality of a laser—when he focused, the world fell away.
The journalist noticed.
He was young, mid-twenties, carrying a camera with a lens that cost more than Freya’s car. A press badge hung from his neck, but she didn’t recognize the outlet. He was supposed to be photographing the pier restoration display. That’s what he’d told the festival coordinator. Instead, his lens swung toward Jace.
The shutter clicked.
Freya’s pulse jumped. She’d spent six years perfecting the art of invisibility, of not drawing attention, of keeping Jace’s face off social media and out of public view. She knew what his father’s face looked like on billboards and magazine covers. She knew what it meant if someone noticed the resemblance.
She was halfway across the grass before she realized she’d moved.
“Excuse me,” she said, planting herself between the journalist and Jace. “He’s a minor. I need you to delete that photo.”
The man lowered his camera, unperturbed. “I’m just documenting the festival. Public space. He’s not the main subject.”
“The main subject is the pier.”
“It’s a wide shot, ma’am.” He smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “Nothing to worry about.”
Freya knew that smile. She’d seen it on every reporter who’d ever circled the Holloway name, hoping for scraps. She’d seen it on the process servers and the private investigators and the man who’d shown up at her door asking if she knew the father of her child.
“Delete it,” she said again. “Or I’m getting security.”
The journalist held her gaze for a beat longer than comfortable. Then he shrugged, pulled up the image on his camera, and pressed delete. The screen went black.
“Happy?”
She wasn’t. But she nodded, watched him walk away, and told herself the danger had passed.
It hadn’t.
The journalist—his name was Derek Moss, not that she’d asked—had a memory card he’d swapped thirty seconds before she’d reached him. He also had a burner phone, a freelance arrangement with three gossip sites, and the kind of ambition that didn’t care about ethics. By the time Freya was back at her booth, ringing up a customer for a dried lavender bundle, his images were uploading through the festival’s open Wi-Fi network.
The first photo to go viral was a close crop: Jace Holloway kneeling at the edge of the pier, the light catching his face at an angle that made the resemblance undeniable. The boy had his father’s sharp cheekbones, his father’s mouth, his father’s particular way of tilting his head when he was concentrating. It was like looking at a photograph of Sebastian Davenport from his own childhood, time-stamped and retrofitted into the present.
Caption: *Davenport’s secret son? Spotted at Seaside Festival. Sources say the boy lives with florist mother in Cedar Cove, CA.*
The internet did what the internet did. Within three hours, the image had been shared forty-seven thousand times. Comments ranged from disbelief to delight to the kind of invasive speculation that made Freya’s stomach turn. The gossip blogs picked it up, then the entertainment news sites, then the cable shows with their panels of experts on other people’s lives.
By 5:00 PM, Jasper Vance was on the phone.
“Sebastian, you need to see this.”
Jasper was the head of security for Davenport Enterprises, a man with shoulders like a refrigerator and the emotional range of a brick wall. He’d been with Sebastian for eight years, through two divorces, three box office bombs, and one career resurrection that had turned the actor into a legitimate franchise franchise. He did not get excited about much.
He sounded excited now.
Sebastian Davenport looked up from the script he wasn’t reading, the one about the astronaut who falls in love with an AI that’s secretly controlling the shuttle. His penthouse overlooked the Pacific, blue glass and white marble and the kind of silence that came from spending two million dollars on soundproofing. He was thirty-two years old, worth approximately two hundred and seventy million dollars, and bored in a way that had become a permanent part of his architecture.
“What am I looking at?”
Jasper turned the tablet around.
Sebastian’s hand stopped moving.
The boy in the photograph was kneeling on wooden planks, backlit by salt water and afternoon sun. He was skinny, wearing a faded green t-shirt and sneakers with fraying laces. His hair was dark and uncombed, falling into his eyes in a way that suggested a mother who loved him but had given up on battling bedhead.
But the face.
The face was a mirror. Sebastian saw his own cheekbones, his own jawline, his own mother’s eyes staring out with a clarity that knocked the air out of his chest.
“Who is this?” His voice came out flat.
“His name’s Jace Holloway. Seven years old. Lives in Cedar Cove with his mother, Freya Holloway.”
Freya Holloway.
The name hit him like a memory he hadn’t known he’d stored. Freya. Seven years ago, give or take. A film festival in Santa Barbara. A woman with dirt on her hands and a laugh that had made him forget, for one weekend, that he was a product being managed by people who didn’t care if he broke.
He’d given her a fake number. He’d told her he was a carpenter from Oregon. He’d left at dawn and told himself it didn’t matter.
“How did I not know about this?” Sebastian asked.
“You made it difficult to find out. Very difficult.” Jasper’s voice carried no judgment, which was itself a judgment. “She never filed for child support. Never went to the press. Changed her name back after her divorce—she was married briefly, to someone else, about four years ago. Lives quiet. Keeps the kid out of sight.”
Except today. Today, a photographer with a long lens had broken the invisible barrier she’d built.
Sebastian stared at the grinning boy on his phone screen, then dialed a private number. “Jasper, I need a location on Freya Holloway. Now. Before the Ravenwoods find her.”