Chapter 7 #2
Sienna’s entire body went still. Her pulse kicked and her breathing caught and she sat motionless on her couch with the laptop open and Adriana Lovett’s voice in her ear.
“Ms. Lovett.” She kept her own voice level. “This is unexpected.”
“I’m aware. I’d like to request a private meeting.” A pause. Not the performative kind Adriana used in confrontations. A hesitation. More human. “No explanation in advance. No demands. Just a conversation.”
None of the obvious explanations fit. Not a trap, not a settlement offer, not a legal maneuver. Adriana’s voice was steady as always, but there was a strain beneath it that said picking up the phone had cost her.
“When?”
“Tomorrow evening. Eight o’clock. I’ll send a location.”
“Why should I agree to this?”
Another pause. Longer than the first. Sienna could hear Adriana breathing on the other end of the line. She sounded alone.
“Because I have information you need,” Adriana said. “And because I think you have information I need. And continuing to have those conversations in cocktail lounges is not producing results that are useful to either of us.”
The formality was still there, but Adriana had not wanted to make this call, and she was doing it anyway. Sienna’s documentary instincts caught it before the rest of her did—Adriana was afraid of what she was about to do by making this call.
“Where?” Sienna asked.
“A restaurant. Quiet. Private. Not in Hollywood.” A pause. “I’ll text you the details.”
Sienna pressed her thumbnail into the pad of her index finger, a grounding gesture so old she barely registered it.
“And if I don’t come?”
“Then I’ll understand that I’ve given you every reason not to trust me and no reason to start. But I’ll ask you to come anyway.”
Sienna closed her eyes. Adriana’s voice was low and sure and somehow, in this moment, the most honest thing Sienna had heard in weeks.
“I’ll think about it,” Sienna said.
She hung up and sat in the silence of her apartment with her heart beating hard and Adriana’s voice still echoing in the quiet.
Dani’s text arrived eleven seconds later: What happened? My Sienna senses are tingling.
Sienna called her.
“Adriana Lovett just called me.” Sienna was pacing, a habit Dani had been observing and tolerating since their second year of film school.
“WHAT?!” Dani’s voice went from zero to protective in a single syllable. “On your phone? She has your number?”
Sienna stopped pacing and stood at the window, her reflection a dark outline against the glass.
“I don’t know how she got it. She wants a private meeting. Tomorrow evening. No explanation.”
“Sienna, absolutely not. That is obviously a trap. Or a settlement offer designed to look like a meeting. Or a legal strategy to get you on record saying something they can use to challenge our sourcing. Every word you say to that woman is a word her firm can deploy against the project.” Dani’s words were coming fast, as they did when she was genuinely alarmed. “Do not go.”
“She said she has information I need.”
On the other end of the line, Sienna heard a cabinet door close, Dani moving through her kitchen, restless.
“She also said you should abandon your investigation. Multiple times. In public. In front of witnesses she probably planted there for exactly that purpose. She is not your friend, Sienna. She is the legal shield for the man whose crimes you are about to expose.”
“I know she’s not my friend.”
“Do you?” Dani’s voice softened by a degree, from alarmed to careful, the shift that meant she was about to be honest. “Because the way you’ve been talking about her for the last two weeks suggests a level of complexity that goes beyond professional adversary.
You’ve mentioned her perfume twice. You don’t mention perfume. ”
Sienna didn’t answer. Outside her window, Echo Park was settling into its evening rhythm.
Music from the bar down the street, the distant drone of the freeway, someone’s dog barking at the shadows.
The lamp on her end table cast a warm circle of light that ended exactly where the darkness of the hallway began.
“Don’t go alone,” Dani said. Her voice was softer now, the protective edge blunted by the tenderness she reserved for moments when she knew Sienna was going to be reckless and had already decided to support it. “Please. Take me with you. Or at least tell me where you’re going.”
“I’ll text you the location.”
Dani exhaled hard enough that the microphone crackled.
“And?”
“And I’m going alone.” The decision was already made, and Sienna was honest enough to admit, at least to herself, that it had been made the moment she heard Adriana’s voice on the phone.
Dani was quiet for three seconds. Sienna could hear her breathing, could picture her standing in her apartment with one hand pressed against her forehead and her eyes closed, doing the math that best friends did: risk versus trust versus the knowledge that Sienna was going to do this regardless.
“You are the most stubborn, infuriating person I have ever built a company with,” Dani said. “And I love you. And if she tries anything I will personally destroy her with a documentary so unflattering it’ll make her quit law and open a bakery in Vermont.”
“Noted.”
Sienna sat down on the arm of the couch, her pulse beginning to slow.
“Be careful.”
“Always.”
Sienna hung up and stared at her phone. Adriana Lovett’s number glowed on the screen, ten digits that connected her to a woman who had spent weeks trying to shut down her investigation and who had tonight called her from what sounded like a quiet room and asked, in a voice stripped of its usual armor, for a meeting.
She saved the number to her contacts. Typed the name. Stared at it for a moment: Adriana Lovett. Then she added the contact and set the phone face-down on the couch, gripping her knees.
The apartment was quiet. Through the open window, the sounds of Echo Park drifted in; a guitar from someone’s porch, the distant rhythm of traffic on the 101, the steady hum of a Los Angeles evening that was never fully silent because this city did not believe in silence.
The lamp cast its warm circle on the couch and the scattered notes and the phone sitting face-down with Adriana’s number now stored in a device that held everything important in Sienna’s life.
Tomorrow evening. A private meeting with the woman who represented everything Sienna was trying to expose, and who had, over the course of three encounters, become more complicated than an adversary.
A voice she had replayed in her head more times than professional analysis required, attached to a woman she couldn’t stop wanting to crack open.
Sienna was going to go. She was going to go alone, because Dani was right that it was foolish and Sienna’s instincts were telling her that this exact kind of foolishness was the only move that could break the case open.
Adriana had information. A tremor in her voice said she’d reached a decision that scared her. And scared people made honest offers.
She was going to find out what the Ice Queen looked like when she stopped performing.
Sienna turned off the lamp and sat in the darkness with the city’s light on her walls, breathing, waiting for tomorrow.