39. Anna
ANNA
Jen takes me to a place for breakfast two streets from the hotel that she loves.
Small. Tiled floors. A terrace that opens onto a narrow alley where a cat is already sitting in a patch of morning sun like it reserved the spot. The coffee comes in small glasses and is stronger than anything I've had.
We order. The kids are with Danny in the room — Jen negotiated a morning off with the precision of a hostage negotiator.
"He owes me," she says.
I laugh.
We eat. We talk. It's easy the way it was always easy with Jen — no performance required, no version of myself I have to maintain. Just two women at a table in Morocco eating bread.
She tells me Luke watched the kids one day so they could have a night alone.
"How'd that go?"
"They're still alive."
She tells me what I can expect from pregnancy. Having a kid in LA. She's full of the ins and outs. Doctors. What to pack in the hospital bag. Which apps are worth downloading and which ones will make you insane? She's texting me stuff as we speak.
I look at my phone. "Got it."
And just like that I open Instagram.
I know I shouldn't. I reinstalled it in Montana and haven't deleted it yet.
The pregnancy conspiracy theories have evolved since I last checked. Side-by-side comparisons. Due-date math. Photos from three months ago next to photos from this week. A fan account with sixty thousand followers has posted a thread titled Anna Simons Pregnancy Fake: The Truth. The Lie.
"They think I'm faking it."
"I know."
"There's a whole thread."
"I know. I saw it."
"They did a timeline."
"Anna." Her voice is gentle but flat. "Done."
"Done." I delete Instagram.
Put the phone away.
I look at the cat in the alley. It has not moved. It has no feelings about any of this.
"Okay," I say.
She pushes the bread toward me.
I eat the bread.
A couple of days later I knock on Rebecca's trailer door.
She's in her robe. No makeup.
An assistant opens it. "Can I help you?"
"I'm Anna Simons. I wanted to say hi to Rebecca."
"Let her in," I hear from inside.
I go up the steps.
"Give us the room," Rebecca says to the assistant.
The assistant leaves.
Rebecca looks at me for a moment.
"So," she says. "You're the one who caused all this ruckus."
"Yeah," I say. "I'm her."
There are photos on the makeup table. Two kids. A boy and a girl, maybe seven and nine. Both with her eyes.
"Yours?" I say.
"Mine." She glances at them. "They're in London with their father. We take turns."
"If I'm staring it's hard not to look at you."
She smiles.
"It's nice to finally meet you. I've heard a lot of nice things."
I don't know what to say to that.
"How far along?" she says.
"Twenty-two weeks."
"Boy or girl?"
"Boy."
"You're an actress?"
"I am."
"Good luck with that."
"Any advice?"
"Be prepared. And know the different camera lenses and what they do."
There's a knock at the door.
“And blink about seventy percent less than you would in life, the camera needs to see your eyes. That’s where the story is told, in the eyes.”
The assistant comes in. "They're ready for you in HMU."
“Thank you,” I leave.
The fear I'd been carrying about Rebecca Anderson — the one that lived in every Instagram photo, every comment thread, every two a.m. spiral — is just gone. She's a person. A mother.
That's all she ever was.
I just couldn't see it from Montana.
The last night we have dinner with Danny and Jen at one of Morocco's finest restaurants.
It's inside a riad — a courtyard open to the sky, tiled fountain in the center, candles everywhere, the smell of rose water and slow-cooked lamb and something floral I can't name.
The kind of place that exists in a city like this the way certain things exist — quietly, without advertising itself, for people who know to look.
The owner comes out himself. There are small plates that keep arriving without being ordered. The wine is extraordinary and I'm not drinking it, which Jen notes with the sympathy of someone who remembers exactly what that's like.
The four of us fall into it easily.
I watch them across the table. Danny with his arm along the back of Jen's chair the way he always does, like it's just where his arm goes. Luke across from me, relaxed in the way Morocco has made him relaxed — the machinery of LA far enough away that he's just himself tonight.
I think about the dinner in Santa Monica. The cottage. The half-deflated soccer ball. Penelope falling asleep in her pasta. Jen asking if I was going to Morocco and Luke saying nothing.
That was the beginning of everything.
This is something else.
When I have a moment alone with Danny, I tell him I'm glad Luke has him as a model for how to do it right.
He looks at me.
"He's going to be good at this," Danny says. "He just doesn't know it yet."
"How do you know?"
"Because he flew to Montana." He shrugs. "A man who does that figures the rest out."
Luke and Jen are laughing about something at the other end of the table.
Danny watches them.
"You know what the secret is?" he says.
"Tell me."
"Pick the right person. Everything else is just logistics."
I look at Luke.
He looks up and catches me looking.
He doesn't say anything. Neither do I.
The fountain runs in the center of the courtyard. The candles burn down. The night in Morocco goes on around us warm and ancient and completely indifferent to all four of us sitting here.
I wouldn't change a single thing about it.
Back in the hotel room, Luke takes off his jacket and tosses it over the chair.
I open my laptop.
Luke looks over. “What are you doing?”
“Don’t laugh.”
“That sounds like something I’m definitely going to laugh at.”
I pull up the old file before I can lose my nerve.
NYU. Senior showcase. Taming of the Shrew.
The video starts grainy, the sound thin, the stage lights too bright.
And then there we are.
Twenty-two years old.
Luke sits beside me on the bed, and neither of us says anything.
On the screen, he walks out first. Young Luke. All swagger and cheekbones and trouble, like he already knows every woman in the room is watching him. He doesn’t know yet that someday millions of people will.
Then I come onstage.
My breath catches.
That girl doesn’t hesitate. She crosses the stage like she owns it. Like the world is something she can take by the throat if she just wants it badly enough.
Luke glances at me. “There she is.”
I keep my eyes on the screen. “Don’t.”
“I’m serious.”
On the laptop, we start circling each other. Fighting. Flirting. Pretending there’s a difference.
Young me looks at young him like she wants to slap him.
Young him looks at young me like he wants her to try.
Luke laughs under his breath. “God, we were obvious.”
“We were acting.”
“The kiss was so fake,” he says.
“I was scared,” I say.
The blue light from the laptop moves over his face. Older now. Sharper in some ways, softer in others. Not the boy on the screen anymore. Not entirely.
On the video, he catches my wrist.
Beside me, Luke’s hand slides over mine.
The same hand. Different life.
I look back at those two kids on the screen.
They have no idea.
They don’t know about Los Angeles. Or the years between us. They don’t know he’ll become a name everyone recognizes.
They don’t know that one day we’ll sit in a hotel room, close enough to touch, watching the moment before everything started with his child inside me.
“They were good together,” I say.
I lean my head against his shoulder.
He kisses my hair.
We keep watching those two kids fall in love before either of them knows what to call it.
The flight home with Jen and the kids is an education.
Brian is fine for the first forty minutes. He watches something on an iPad with headphones on, eating crackers, completely self-contained.
Then the crackers run out.
I won't reconstruct the full sequence of events.
What I will say is that by the time we reach cruising altitude Brian has decided the seat pocket in front of him is a drum, Penelope has fallen asleep across both mine and Jen's laps in a position that makes it impossible for either of us to move, and there is apple juice on my sleeve from a source I never identified.
Jen handles all of it with the matter-of-fact efficiency of someone who has been doing this for years.
"Does it get easier?" I say at some point.
She thinks about it.
"Different," she says. "Not easier. Different."
Brian falls asleep an hour before landing. Penelope wakes up, looks at both of us, and demands a snack with the calm authority of someone who has never been told no.
Jen produces a snack from somewhere in her bag.
I look at her.
"How did you know you had that?" I say.
"You always have a snack," she says. "That's the first rule."
I put my hand on my stomach.
"I'm going to need to know all the rules," I say.
Jen laughs.
She reaches over and squeezes my hand.
"I'll send you a list," she says.
Nina is at the door when I pull up.
Not waiting outside. Just there when I open it, like she knew what time I'd arrive, which she probably did.
She looks at me.
Then at my stomach.
Her face does the thing it does when she's feeling something she's not going to say out loud.
She steps aside and lets me in.
The house is exactly the same. The city through the glass. The pool catching the afternoon light. Zeke hurtling across the living room before I've fully crossed the threshold, his whole body a single expression of relief and accusation.
I crouch down and let him press against me.
"I know," I tell him. "I know."
Nina has food on the stove already. Something that's been going all day. The particular smell of the house settling around me like something I forgot I missed.
"Hungry?" she says.
"Starving," I say.
She hands me a plate without ceremony and goes back to the stove.
I sit at the counter.
Zeke puts his head in my lap.
I eat everything on the plate.
Nina refills it without being asked.
I eat that too.
After dinner, I take Zeke for a walk and call Chloe in New York.
She answers from rehearsal, breathless and laughing, yelling at someone about a missing prop. She’s producing a play with three friends in a ninety-nine-seat theater, which sounds miserable and exactly like her.
Then we patch in Alex.
“I can’t talk,” he whispers.
“Why are you whispering?” Chloe asks.
“I’m on a date.”
“No, why’d you answer?” I say.
“A third one,” he whispers. “Gotta go.”
“Go,” Chloe says. He hangs up.
Chloe and I continue talking on my walk back to the house.