Chapter 14
Iwrite the email at five in the morning, before the light, before the cicadas, before the compound family starts the day and the smell of coffee and frying shallots rises through the building.
The balcony is dark and the jungle is a wall of sound — frogs, insects, the river at the bottom of the ravine — and I sit in the glow of the laptop screen and I write.
Ms. DuBois — my name is Lucy Vidal. I'm Silas Ryland's wife.
Or estranged wife. Or almost-ex-wife. The legal language keeps shifting and I can't keep up.
I'm writing because I think you and I are owed a conversation that neither of us has had, and I'd rather have it directly than through the men who connect us.
If you're willing, I'd like to talk. Not about Silas. About the pattern. — Lucy
I read it three times. I delete "about the pattern" and write "about what happened.
" I delete "about what happened" and write "about the pattern" again.
The pattern is the point. The pattern is the thing I need to see from every angle before I can decide whether it's been broken or is just dormant, and Leandra DuBois is the only other person who has seen the pattern from the inside.
I send the email. I close the laptop. I go back to bed and lie under the mosquito net and listen to the jungle and wait for the sun, which comes slowly in Ubud — the canopy filters it, softens it, turns the dawn into a gradient rather than an event.
She responds at noon. I'm at the village site when the notification pops up — I'm crouching over a pipe junction with a wrench in one hand and my phone vibrates in my pocket and I know, before I look, that it's her.
Lucy — I've been half-expecting this email for months. Yes. I'm willing. Video call works better than text for what I think we need to say. I'm in LA — suggest a time and I'll make it work. — Leandra
The directness of it — no hesitation, no preamble, no I'll need to think about it — tells me everything about who this woman is. She has been waiting for this conversation the way I have been waiting for the proof: patiently, without drama, with the quiet certainty that it was coming.
I suggest nine PM Bali time, which is six AM in Los Angeles. Early enough that neither of us will have accumulated the day's defenses. She agrees.
The rest of the day passes. I work. I eat.
I sit on the balcony and eat mangosteen and watch the ravine and I do not think about what I'm going to say to Leandra DuBois because thinking about it will produce a script, and a script is the opposite of what this conversation needs.
This conversation needs to be what it is — two women who were damaged by the same pattern, talking to each other without the man between them.
At nine, I open the laptop. I click the link she sent. The screen loads and there she is.
Leandra DuBois is exactly what I expected and nothing like what I expected.
She is tall even sitting down — I can tell by the way she fills the frame, the set of her shoulders, the length of her neck.
Her skin is deep brown and her hair is close-cropped, natural, and she has the angular face of someone whose bone structure does the work that other people need makeup for.
She is wearing a black T-shirt and no jewelry and she is sitting in what looks like a home office — bookshelves, a desk lamp, a window with early LA light coming through the blinds.
She looks at me the way I look at a building I'm about to assess — carefully, structurally, with attention to what's visible and what might be hidden.
"Lucy," she says. Her voice is lower than I expected, steadier, the voice of a woman who has spent years in rooms where steadiness is a survival strategy.
"Leandra."
We look at each other. The silence is not awkward. It is the silence of two people who have a great deal to say and are deciding where to start — the way you stand at the entrance to a building and assess the foundation line before you step inside.
"I need to say something before we start," she says.
"I did not know about your call. The night of the earthquake.
I didn't know you were trying to reach him.
I didn't know you were under a building.
I was in that room because he owed me a meeting he'd canceled three times, and I was done waiting. That's all."
"I know. Silas told me."
"Good. Because the tabloid version — Leandra DuBois, ambitious producer, stole a billionaire's attention while his wife was dying — that version has been following me for months, and it's a lie, and I need you to know it's a lie before we talk about anything else."
"It's a lie. I know it's a lie. That's not why I'm calling."
She nods. The nod has weight — the release of something she's been carrying, a stone set down. "OK. Then why are you calling?"
"Because I need to hear it from you. Not from Silas, not from his version of events, not from the cleaned-up apology he gave me over dinner. Your version. What happened."
Leandra leans back in her chair. The desk lamp casts half her face in warm light and half in shadow, and the contrast makes her look like two people — the professional version and the private one, divided by a line of light.
"Four years ago," she says, "I walked into Ryland Media Group with a pitch for a documentary series called Unseen Frames.
Media representation — who gets to tell which stories, whose faces are on screen, whose perspectives are treated as default and whose are treated as niche.
It was the best work I'd ever developed.
Twelve months of research. Twenty interviews.
A pilot script that three other studios had passed on because the subject matter was 'too internal' and 'not commercial enough. '"
"And Silas said yes."
"Silas said yes in the room. In the meeting. He listened to the pitch — really listened, not the performance-listening that most executives do — and he said, 'This is the most important project anyone has brought me in three years.' Those are his exact words. I wrote them down."
"He meant it."
"He meant it. That's the thing about Silas that makes him so difficult to be angry at.
He always means it. In the moment, he is the most present, the most attentive, the most genuinely excited person in the room.
The problem is not the moment. The problem is the hour after the moment, when the next thing arrives and the first thing gets filed under 'will get to later. '"
The recognition hits me like a physical thing — a pressure in my chest, a tightening.
She is describing my marriage. Not the surface — the mechanism.
The way Silas could look at you and make you feel like the only person in the world, and then the phone would ring and the only person in the world would become the person on the phone, and you would sit in the residue of his attention and wonder when it would come back.
"What happened after the pitch?" I ask.
"He put Unseen Frames on the development slate.
Assigned a budget. Gave me a producer credit and a timeline — twelve months to production, eighteen to premiere.
" She pauses. "The first six months were good.
I had meetings. I had access. I had a budget line that looked real.
And then a streaming deal landed — a partnership with one of the big platforms, the kind of deal that moves stock prices — and Unseen Frames went from the top of the slate to the bottom.
Not killed. Just pushed. Next quarter. Next quarter. Next quarter."
"For two years."
"For two years. And every time I came in — and I kept coming in, because I am not a woman who gives up on a project that deserves to exist — he would sit me down and look me in the eye and say, 'This is still a priority, Leandra.
The timing just isn't right.' And I would believe him.
Because he meant it. In the moment, in the room, looking at me, he meant it.
And then I would leave and the moment would end and the meaning would evaporate. "
I watch her face. She is not performing grief or anger. She is describing a structural failure the way an engineer describes a structural failure — with precision, with specificity, with the detached attention of someone who has already processed the emotion and is now left with the data.
"And then the earthquake night," I say.
"I flew from New York. First class, because by that point I was spending my own money to have meetings he'd already agreed to.
The first trip, he canceled thirty minutes before I landed.
His assistant — Marcus — met me at the gate and told me Mr. Ryland sends his apologies and offered me a car.
I took the car and I sat in a hotel room and I told myself it was a scheduling conflict.
The second time, he sent Marcus to his own office to tell me he was on a call.
I sat in reception for forty minutes and then I left.
The third time — the earthquake night — I didn't make an appointment.
I walked into the building at eight PM and I sat down in the conference room and I told Marcus I wasn't leaving. "
"And Silas came."
"Silas came. He walked in and he looked — not annoyed.
Tired. Resigned. Like a man who knew he'd run out of excuses and was too exhausted to manufacture new ones.
He sat down and I said, 'I need a straight answer.
Is this project happening or not?' And he opened his mouth to answer and his phone lit up on the table. "
The air between us thickens. I know what happened next. I was the phone.
"I didn't see the name," Leandra says. "I was across the table. All I saw was him look at the screen and press decline. One motion. Fast. The way you swipe away a notification you've already read. And then he looked back at me and said, 'Sorry — where were we?'"