In her platform stiletto sandals, she was taller than Tallie, her makeup was perfect, she never went out without it, and her outfit suited her to perfection, showed off her incredible body, and made her look irresistibly sexy. She was the opposite of Tallie in every way. Everything about her had been carefully thought out to catch the eye, as opposed to Tallie, who preferred to think of herself as invisible, and liked it that way. Her whole business was to show off others, not herself. Brigitte Parker loved the attention she got and had none of Tallie’s subtlety and shyness. The two women had similar looks, both tall, thin, and blond, but did entirely different things with the attributes nature had given them. Tallie hid them, and Brigitte shone a spotlight on them. Tallie honestly didn’t care how she looked and never thought about it. Brigitte put a lot of thought and effort into her dazzling appearance.

They were the same age, but Brigitte had knocked ten years off her looks, although Tallie had done so inadvertently too. By looking as though she dressed out of a rag bag, in high-topped Converse sneakers, torn jeans, and T-shirts, she looked like a kid. Brigitte had had her eyes done, was proud of her breast implants, got Botox shots regularly, collagen in her lips, and spent time every day at Hollywood’s most exclusive gym. She worked hard at how she looked, and the results were great. She was as beautiful as any star.

They had met at film school at USC seventeen years before. Brigitte had wanted desperately to be an actress, and was determined to learn everything about films she could. Everyone knew she was a debutante from San Francisco and didn’t have to work, but all she craved was an acting career. Like Tallie, she had lost her mother at an early age. Her father had remarried a much younger woman very quickly, and the prospect of dealing with her “evil stepmother” had driven Brigitte to L.A. Tallie had hired her to help her with her first independent film, while she was in school, and Brigitte had been so efficient, so organized, and such an enormous help to her that she had asked her to work on her next film too.