“It’s your mother who’s useless!
Maybe I really was never cut out to be an actress.
Maybe I made the wrong call from the very start…”
Rosalie couldn’t hold back any longer and pulled Mark into a hug, breaking down into sobs.
After five years, Rosalie and Mark had built up a decent reputation in Hollywood’s commercial circuit.
By all rights, some agency should have snapped them up by now.
But in reality, not a single one had.
Every time Rosalie auditioned for a substantial role over the years, she’d been turned away without exception, sometimes not even given the chance to audition at all.
This time, she’d spent nearly a month preparing, walking into her audition for a lead female role in the film *Tomb Terror* full of confidence.
And the crew had rejected her anyway.
It hit her hard.
She’d started questioning whether coming to Hollywood, even severing ties with her own family over it, had been the right call after all.
“Mom, is it possible someone important in the industry has it out for you?
Maybe someone’s been working against you behind the scenes.”
Mark offered gently.
“That’s impossible…”
Rosalie’s first instinct was to dismiss it outright.
She was just a background extra.
What reason would anyone important have to target her?
But once she calmed down, she found herself digging up a few directors’ phone numbers to ask around.
Years of commercial work had given her some real connections in the industry after all.
A short while later, Rosalie set down the phone, her face dark with anger, and spat out a name.
“Cathy Dale!”
After some careful digging, Rosalie had finally learned the truth: Cathy Dale had been the one blocking her all along.
Cathy Dale was one of Hollywood’s biggest stars, backed by CAA, the largest talent agency in the country, if not the world.
Countless A-list names in Hollywood were signed under that agency.
Cathy had apparently made it clear, publicly, that if any agency dared sign Rosalie, she’d never work with that agency again.
A star of Cathy’s caliber generated hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
No agency was going to risk crossing someone like that for a nobody like Rosalie, not until she’d proven she was worth the trouble.
Cathy Dale.
Tony Stark’s ex-girlfriend.
The very same woman Tony had blown up at during that celebration party years ago, right before he’d taken Rosalie to a hotel that same night.
Clearly, Cathy had never forgiven Rosalie for it, and had gone out of her way to crush a nobody like her out of pure spite.
“Cathy Dale, you damn…”
Rosalie caught herself mid-curse, noticing Mark beside her, and swallowed the rest.
If she’d simply had bad luck in this industry, Rosalie could have accepted that.
But knowing Cathy Dale had been sabotaging her behind the scenes this whole time was something she couldn’t just let go.
“Mom, do you want to see Cathy Dale get what’s coming to her?”
Mark’s eyes gleamed as a plan already began forming in his mind.
“She’s one of Hollywood’s biggest stars, and CAA’s biggest cash cow.
What could we possibly do to her?”
Rosalie looked at her impossibly clever son, baffled.
Over the years, Mark had been gradually revealing more and more of his extraordinary intellect to Rosalie.
She’d been stunned at first, but the more she thought about it, the more she’d come to accept it.
His father was, after all, the smartest man in the world.
Was it really so strange that his son would turn out brilliant too?
By now, Rosalie no longer thought of Mark as an ordinary child.
She’d started discussing family matters with him as though he were an equal.
“Mom, watch me get you your revenge.”
Mark turned and sat down at the computer, powering it on.
*Clack, clack, clack…*
His fingers flew across the keyboard, and in no time at all, he’d written a trojan program and hacked straight into CAA’s database.
From there, he dug up Cathy Dale’s home address, phone number, social security number, license plate number, and every other scrap of personal information he could find.
“Mark, how…
how did you even do that?”
Rosalie’s eyes went wide with shock at the information filling the screen.
“I just taught myself on the computer!”
Mark said it as though it were the most obvious thing in the world.
With his formidable learning ability, less than a month of studying networking had already brought him up to the level of a top tier hacker.
“You…
you can just teach yourself something like that?”
But then she remembered whose son he was, and it somehow made perfect sense that he’d be capable of something like this.
“But, isn’t this illegal?”
She watched Mark keep working the keyboard, a fresh wave of worry creeping in.
“It’s only illegal if you get caught, right?”
Mark waved off the concern.
He had full confidence in his hacking skills.
There weren’t many people in the world capable of catching him.
Moments later, using Cathy’s home address, Mark broke into her personal computer.
Fortunately, it hadn’t been powered off, or he’d have had to wait for another opening.
He combed carefully through her hard drive and quickly turned up a few things that caught his interest.
“Well, well.
Cathy Dale’s been quite the busy woman.”
Mark clicked his tongue.
Tucked away on her hard drive were intimate photos and videos of her with a string of famous actors, along with all sorts of personal items scattered throughout the files.
Mark had known Hollywood actresses tended to have messy private lives, but he hadn’t expected it to be quite this messy.
“Mark!
You’re a child, you shouldn’t be looking at that!”
Rosalie’s face flushed red, and she lunged forward to clap her hands over his eyes.
“Okay, okay, Mom, I’m not looking anymore.”
Mark quickly closed the files.
Leaking those photos and videos online would certainly cause a stir and damage Cathy’s reputation.
But it wouldn’t be nearly enough to truly ruin her or end her career.
A messy private life was practically an open secret among Hollywood stars; nobody batted an eye at that kind of thing anymore.
Mark hadn’t actually planned on using any of that against her anyway.
Instead, he started searching through her email inbox, running searches for racially charged slurs and similar language.
The year was 1998.
Instant messaging existed, but most people still considered email the safer, more private option.
Cathy was a household name, careful never to say anything questionable in public, but privately, she might have let her guard down.
Sure enough, it didn’t take Mark long to dig up email after email full of deeply inappropriate remarks from Cathy.