Chapter Two
Chapter Two
Max’s phone is off for the rest of the evening, my “can we talk please” texts going unread. So the next morning, I haul my iced coffee onto the stoop of my new apartment building and do the one thing Sarah asked me not to do.
I research Arthur Bianco.
Chalk it up to natural curiosity… and needing a backup plan in case I do have to get through a few days of filming. It’s eight a.m.—not too hot yet—and condensation drips down my fingers as I tap through his train-wreck documentary interviews, carefully filed away on Ignition’s server. Every question, any angle, Arthur shuts down the conversation. He’s marginally polite at first, allowing Sarah to go so far as setting up a nice talking-head angle with him in a chair, the tacky key-shaped Ignition logo blurred behind him. Then she asks for him to say his name and he stares back at the camera, an empty smile fixed on his face.
And the articles . The press has lovingly and expertly torn Arthur Bianco to shreds. Running an internet search on his name yields half a billion results, give or take. I click through the childhood driving prodigy years, the seven-year stint with Leone Racing— that Leone, the luxury sports cars nobody can afford—then stumble on a treasure trove of Party Prince Arthur. So many photos of him in clubs, massive and hazy-smiling, a cocktail in one hand and his other arm around two models. According to the tabloids, this twenty-nine-year-old man is an international heartbreaker; there’s one story about a champagne-brand heiress who was so bereft that he couldn’t commit, she told her family she’d never touch alcohol again. It reminds her too much of him, says the unnamed source.
True love, right there.
Briefly, I wonder why Arthur doesn’t want to be in the glitz-glam-danger movie. He’s been in commercials. Magazine spreads. It isn’t like he’s camera shy. I wonder what his angle is; as Tolstoy put it, each overly controlling man is controlling in his own way. And being in a documentary does cleave you of a certain amount of agency. He’d be putting his life story into my hands—does he not trust people he doesn’t know well? Or is there a reason I wasn’t supposed to research him?
“Hey, new girl.”
I look up at the voice. An older woman in a striped dress is on her balcony, next to a withered tomato plant. She smiles and motions for me to walk closer.
“Did you just move in?” she yells down.
Good lord, the pipes on her. I clear my throat. She’s on the second-floor balcony of the studio next to mine—so time to yell.
“Yeah.”
“Where are you from?”
“Kentucky, then D.C.”
She nods and wipes the back of her hand across her forehead. The heat must be worse for her. “Do you need any help with your plants?” I say loudly. “If it’s ever too bad this summer, let me know. I used to garden back home. I could hop to your balcony from mine.”
She waves that idea away. “I’ll give you a key.”
We talk for a while more. I learn her name is Lucia, and that she’d moved to Glory Run to be closer to her grandchildren. Like me, she lives alone. “Are you sure about that, though?” she asks when I tell her I don’t know anyone in this town yet.
“Positive,” I say, cracking a real smile for what feels like the first time in weeks. “Honestly, I’m not sure how long I’ll be living here.”
“I figured as much.”
That isn’t my neighbor’s voice. In fact, that’s a soft bass my suddenly pounding heart recognizes. I turn and find Max standing on the scraggly front yard of my run-down apartment building. “Hey,” I say, lighting up. I always do when he’s around.
He does not light up. “Can I come in?”
Reading people by how they present themselves is the documentarian’s curse. Appearances are like personal billboards. Designer clothing, squeaky-clean shoes, wearing a watch when everyone has clocks in their pockets. People scream stories about themselves, begging us to listen to what they don’t want to say out loud.
This morning, Max’s scruffy appearance is screaming, Danger .
We’re inside my apartment. Note the word my. We’d been able to get away with living together in D.C.—everyone needs roommates there—but Glory Run is ninety minutes of solid traffic away from Austin, there’s nothing to do if you don’t work for Ignition, and rent costs two nickels and a salute to the American Flag. Of course, I’d reassured Max that it was fine. I’d gone from college dorm roommates to splitting a cheap studio with him, and haven’t lived alone since my birth mom’s periodic vanishing acts. In a way, I’d kind of liked the idea of decorating this tiny apartment however I’d like. It’d been fun. Feminist, even.
Max eyes the Laughing Buddha–print tea towel hanging off my stove as I hand him a mug of black coffee. It’s one of the only things I’ve unpacked.
“Thanks,” he says.
I take the chair across from him. “Need any sugar?”
“Not today.”
“Oh.” I shift in my seat. He always takes sugar. “Cool, yeah.”
He looks tired. His sleepy puppy dog expression hasn’t changed a bit since we were in college and I had to explain calculus to him so he wouldn’t flunk his Gen Ed. His long black eyelashes crisscross in front of his exhausted brown eyes, the same color as mine and barely visible beneath waves of dark hair he never learned to manage.
“Lilah,” he says after a record-breaking stretch of silence.
“Max,” I reply, trying to smile. I’m nervous. I don’t know why, but I am so nervous.
“This feels kind of impossible to say.”
“So just say it.” I laugh, then stop as his eyes flash. He hates my nervous giggling. You’re always laughing at me.
“Okay. I’ll say it.” Max circles his thumb over the top of the mug, slow, steady circles that should relax my heartbeat but don’t. “There’s someone else.”
“Someone else,” I repeat back, not understanding. “Like, in the apartment?”
“No. Someone else… to me. I’ve been, you know. God, it’s so weird to say this out loud.” He trails off, and I follow his sentence into silence. Because my brain isn’t working, isn’t beeping the right beeps and booping the right neurons, and this isn’t an ADHD medication issue since I took that this morning. This is dread, all natural.
Then, all at once, every single brain cell I have fires. “Are you cheating on me?”
Max’s puppy dog expression stalls out somewhere between sweet relief and horrible frustration. “I’m sorry, okay? I didn’t mean to. It just… happened.”
“Who? What? How?” I stare at the overpriced Criterion Collection logo on the coffee mug in front of him. Debate the pros and cons of smashing it against his phone.
“It’s, she’s… you know Sarah, who you met yesterday?”
He keeps talking. I watch his mouth shape the words. Sarah. I do know Sarah. I remember every bouncy swish of her ponytail, how she’d glanced at him for approval, how marketing-nice she’d been to me. Then I’m thinking about bubble tea. Max and I would always grab them before our night classes, buzzed on sugar and the idea of living out our dreams. We got coffee when we watched The Big Lebowski , brownies burning to a crisp in his oven. And that time I showed him how to sew the rip in his favorite sweatshirt, his big fingers fumbling the needle so many times that we’d cried laughing. Thrifted picture frames, rain boots, drafting documentary proposals, unstoppable together. Nobody else knows me like he does.
And he cheated on me.
“Does she know about me?” I say, interrupting whatever speech he’d been giving.
How many times have I seen Max rake his hand through his hair and let out a gigantic, frustrated sigh? Sometimes, it’s my favorite thing he does. “No,” he says, raking, sighing. “And I know this makes me the worst person in the world, but… things would be better off if she didn’t.”
“You don’t want to tell her that you cheated on me with her,” I clarify. Slowly.
He gives me that little smile that used to bend me in half. “Yeah?”
Swallowing, I almost taste the milk-tea sugar on my tongue. There’s one question I haven’t asked yet. I know I don’t want to ask it. But I also know that in approximately thirty minutes, once Max has inevitably left, I’m going to spiral into the cigarette-stained carpet unless I muster the courage to confirm my worst fears. This one question is standing between me and the depression moving in faster than a storm front.
“Why?” I whisper. “Why her? Why… why did you wait until I’d moved here?”
His mouth wobbles like he’s chewing the inside of his cheek, as if he’s the one withstanding an endless time loop of emotional land mines. “I didn’t mean to be this shitty, okay? It’s just… she’s fun. She actually laughs at my jokes, and likes Marvel movies, and likes to wear makeup—”
“I told you I’d learn how to put it on if you wanted me to—”
“I don’t want you to.” Max sighs. “I want someone who already wants the same things I do. I don’t have to make her like Formula 1 or make her listen to good music or make her be normal.”
Like he has to with me. Had to, until today. His unspoken words send a lasso around that depression storm front and yank it closer. “I know you, Lilah. I know you only agreed to do Ignition’s movie for us, and that you were probably planning on getting me to quit somehow. That means there shouldn’t be an us.” Max stresses that final word. Us. “We’ve grown apart, and this is what I want to do.”
Red-hot humiliation sends a wave of heat over my face. I can’t stand it when he knows something I don’t, the obvious things, the social cues I miss. Here I was, determined to talk Max out of making this colossal career mistake, dreaming about moving back to D.C. together, and he’s been secretly fine-tuning his brand-new life with his brand-new work girlfriend. It was never going to happen. He never would’ve listened to my concerns or dropped off this project now.
It was already over. I just hadn’t known it.
“You could’ve broken it off while I was in D.C.” My voice is a shredded whisper, burning its way out of my throat. “I’d still have my normal life there.”
“Well, not really.” Max looks down, worrying his lower lip. “That’s the other thing I wanted to talk about. The company… we kind of started it in my name.”
My body does that funny dream thing. You know how when you’re almost asleep, and then your entire muscular structure tenses because you feel like you’re about to slam into the sidewalk from a fifteen-story drop?
That.
“No, our company is Black & Graywood. We both own it.”
Max has the audacity to look apologetic. “I started the LLC. Technically, everything belongs to me, including the name. Remember? You’d been swamped our senior year, and I offered to handle the paperwork.”
I think I know where this is going and I can’t breathe. “Don’t,” I say, somehow managing words of all things. “We should shut the company down, then. If we aren’t, if you don’t, if this is it, then Black & Graywood should be done. You can’t take my last name from me.”
Max’s eyes harden. “I don’t want to do that. But Lilah, I’m—sorry—I’m firing you.”
Done. No more breathing. His words sting like a slap across the face, but more than anything, more than the embarrassment and anger and pure, sickening panic, I hate that I hadn’t put this together myself sooner. Silly me, for trusting my male partner to keep my best interests in mind while filing business paperwork. Whoops for thinking that a global sports conglomerate had pursued a co-woman-owned documentary company strictly because they admired our political work. My thoughts don’t stop there, either. Who reached out to who first, Max or Sarah? Over which email chain sitting in the Black & Graywood inbox did my demise begin? There had to have been signs this was coming. Zoom meetings. Calendar invites. I know we haven’t been overjoyed and in love lately, but our career is hard. Max was the one who’d begged me to date him.
And now he’s dumping me for another woman and stealing the business I built. And my name . Doesn’t he know how much it means to me to be a Graywood, after sixteen years of waiting for my birth mom to want me? I barely feel like I deserve the name.
“You can’t fire me. I’m on contract with the team,” I try. “They want me to film Arthur.”
“Again, Black & Graywood is on contract. I signed everything as the business. I’ll text you a screenshot of the paperwork if you don’t trust me.” Max is slipping into annoyed. He’s done with this conversation already, and frustrated that I’m somehow not, somehow clinging with my claws sunk into my life. “Also, I already let Sarah know you’re off the project. She’s sad, but she understands. She knew you weren’t an F1 fan. I mean shit, Lilah, you can’t even drive.”
“I know how to drive.”
“You don’t have your license.”
“I’m just… not good at parking—”
“Same difference.”
The ringing in my ears has turned into buzzing, and the longer Max is sitting at my kitchen table, surrounded by my unpacked life, the louder it gets. “Maybe you’re right. But can’t we just go back to being friends? I get not wanting to date me. I wouldn’t want to, either. But this, the business… Max, we make great films together. Please. Don’t throw that away.”
Me. Don’t throw me away.
Max’s frown widens as we grow quiet again, and it’s such a silly little thing, how much I wish my best friend was smiling at me instead. But I don’t know who else I can talk to about this except for Max. My birth mom had never been able to handle having a kid, let alone a neurodivergent one, and my birth dad had left the picture so quickly, there wasn’t a trace of him in our house. No photos. Gone. And Max is the last person who met me as that nervous, traumatized foster kid, with my new college textbooks and glittery dreams. He saw parts of me that nobody else ever will, those final wispy moments of my childhood before I became a real person. Making other friends—letting anyone else in—would mean having to reopen the wound and share that pain again.
And… I’d thought I’d gotten better. I’d thought that maybe, when I’d grown up and become a successful person, and Max had taken me under his wing and made me as palatable as possible, I’d somehow become less disposable. Because the terrible truth is that losing my birth parents had been like watching wind rip dandelion fluff from the stem—natural. A little expected.
Losing my best friend is unfathomable.
“Jesus, this is exactly why we can’t work together anymore. You never let anything go.” Max rakes his hair back and sighs sharply. “I don’t want to make sad docs about creepy old politicians anymore.”
“But we won awards.”
“Winning isn’t all that matters.”
“But—”
“I know you don’t want to be like your mom, dude, but seriously. Let it go.”
Tears. I’m officially crying. “That’s a low fucking blow,” I say, grabbing a napkin and twisting so he can’t see my red face.
“Sorry,” he mumbles. Tears always hit him right in the feelings, though he’s trying to stay in his anger. “Think of it this way. This can be positive for the both of us. We’ve become completely different people as we’ve gotten older. I’m going to make the sickest movie about Formula 1 ever, and you can do whatever weird artsy shit you want to.”
Everyone has certain words they never want to hear. For Max, it’s that he’s ugly. He isn’t, of course. He’s ridiculously striking, a Norman Rockwell painting animated into life. But his knees and arms grew before the rest of him, and getting called gangly and awkward for years warped him into a man who desperately craves positive attention. Even now, in the thick of the worst I’ve ever felt, I understand why he’d cheated. He couldn’t not. With a sporty, fun woman who admires his work, it was game over.
My fatal flaw—the words that secretly kill me? Mom, different, weird. And he’s used them all.
I swallow back acid so I can speak. “Can you just go now? Please?”
Max is on his feet instantly, coffee abandoned. “Okay.”
I almost wish he’d ask if we can talk in a few days, try to schedule closure that I could sneer and reject, but… he doesn’t. Nor does he ask what I’m going to do now that I have nothing. Max goes to the front door of my brand-new apartment and leaves with a creak, then a click. I kind of wish the door would fall off its hinges, too. Explode. My best friend of six years breaking up with me, firing me, then leaving me in a new town—no, an entirely new state—merits a more dramatic exit.
But this is real life, not a movie, and real life is quiet when it destroys your dreams.
So I lean against the door. Feel the wood against my back. And breathe, in for five, out for five.
Then I look at my phone.
It’s 8:30 a.m. on a Tuesday. I was supposed to be at the Ignition practice facility at nine so I could start filming Arthur. My argumentative, self-centered, womanizing documentary subject, who’d seemed hell-bent on making my life at Ignition unfathomably difficult. Normally, I’d call a subject to let them know I can’t make our scheduled time, but the idea of speaking to another man who wants to hurt me is pretty unappealing right now.
What is appealing, though, is getting out of this apartment. And this town. And Texas.