The Seven Pieces of a Feuilleton

Chapter 30

She had allowed herself to be bothered by one of David's statements for longer than necessary before she resolved to ask Dylan about it.

Why his planned visit to Paris had never come to fruition, when he had evidently been hell-bent on flying out.

She had been unaware he'd even considered the idea.

"I tried, Bren," said Dylan whilst sorting through the items he would bring abroad and the items he would discard, as she had instructed. "You were out at some top-secret filming location."

"Oh," Brenda realized, "that's the year we filmed in Croatia."

"So that's where you were," Dylan said.

He had been at Robinson's when he noticed an earmarked page in one of Donna's magazines, Dylan said. It had described the already-known Blaise Rennard's success in his new role.

"I couldn't shake the feeling it had something to do with you. Don isn't exactly up on her acteurs française, you know? Even if it is Blaise Rennard."

That was true, thought Brenda.

"So I tracked down the name of the studio and called."

"I didn't know that."

"Well, I didn't bother to say who I was after they said Madame Lamarre wasn't accepting visitors or calls."

She kissed away the agony reappearing on his face. He turned his cheek, keeping their foreheads connected before withdrawing to look at her.

"I wanted to know why the fuck my wife had started calling herself Mrs. Lamarre, but I wasn't about to ask them that and get you pissed as hell at me when I was only going over there to try to make us work."

He and Andrea had just returned to a good footing, Dylan said.

"When I mentioned it to her, thinking maybe Brandon had told her something, she told me to watch your show."

"You thought I was calling myself Mrs. Lamarre?"

"How was I supposed to know they meant your character? I'd asked for Brenda Walsh, not Anabelle Lammare."

"It's too bad they didn't tell you we were in Croatia."

"It is too bad," he agreed. "'Cause the next time I booked a ticket to go out there, that's when you told Don about Cavendish and my ass landed straight back in rehab."

That night, they watched a few episodes of Brenda's show, with Dylan querying when Anabelle would ditch her fiancé Henri and return to ex-husband Rémy, whom he said she clearly still loved.

It was then when Brenda realized that her art had become her life, and she told Mackenzie as much in their next session.

"Does your life often imitate your art?" Mackenzie asked.

Brenda considered the question, and responded by telling the doctor about Emily, about Tara, about Kelly, about the timely rescue of herself and Kelly from a fumigated vehicle by their respective other halves.

"And then Dylan persuaded me to take him back," she said.

"I definitely persuaded her, but she knew it was useless to keep fighting it."

"We weren't dating long before he proposed. Two weeks, I think?"

She knew it hadn't been two weeks, but could not resist the jest.

"Two weeks was when I started getting a feel for whether Brenda was ready to marry me," Dylan corrected. "We'd known each other for years by that point. Two weeks was nothing."