How To Be Nowhere

Prologue

ANNIE

Most people tell you that life-changing moments sneak up on you. They say you only recognize the shift in hindsight, once the dust has settled and the “after” has already become your new normal.

But I don’t think that’s entirely true.

If you’re paying attention, there are these rare, shimmering beats of time where you can actually feel your life shifting beneath your feet.

It’s a sudden awareness—a realization that you are standing exactly on the edge of a cliff.

You know, with a terrifying clarity, that once you take the next step, there is no going back.

The person you were ten seconds ago is about to become a stranger.

Sometimes, these moments catch you in the middle of the mundane.

You’re scraping dried oatmeal from a bowl or folding the laundry or sitting in traffic.

Other times, it isn’t a surprise at all.

You see the line in the sand from a mile away.

You have weeks, sometimes even months, to stare at it before you make the deliberate, agonizing choice to cross it.

Either way, the outcome is the same. Your life is split, cleanly and forever, into two distinct halves that will never quite fit back together again.

Before.

After.

It’s that mid-July afternoon when you look at your childhood best friend and realize, with a crestfallen grief, that you’re no longer interested in the same version of the future.

The silence between you becomes a canyon, and you’re both standing on opposite sides, waving at a ghost. It’s the weight of a landline receiver in your hand as you wait for a boy to pick up, knowing that if he does, your entire trajectory changes—and if he doesn’t, you’ll have to find a way to live with the quiet.

It’s the first time you see your parents look at each other and you realize they aren’t just “Mom and Dad”—they are two people who might not actually like each other very much.

The pedestal they were on crumbles, and you’re left standing on the floor of the real world.

It’s the Tuesday morning you’re standing in a too-long line for coffee when you realize the “dream job” you bled and fought for reveals itself to be nothing more than a beautifully appointed cage.

It’s the ritual of taking off a ring you thought you’d wear forever and how your finger feels too light, too naked, and the indentation in your skin is a map of a person you aren’t anymore.

I’ve had six of those moments so far. Six seismic shifts that left fault lines so deep I’ll be tracing the scars with my fingertips for the rest of my life.

This is number seven.

I’m in the bridal suite at the Bel-Air Bay Club, and my Vera Wang is currently performing a heist of my oxygen, sucking my ribs into submission.

It’s either the boning in the bodice or the fact that my life has become a runaway train and I’m the only one who forgot to check the brakes.

My hands are shaking—not a dainty, “I’m a blushing bride” flutter, but a horrific, quivering tremor.

I press them against the heavy silk, but that’s a mistake, because now I can feel my heart hammering against the seams; a frantic bird trying to escape an ivory cage.

The room is tiny and perfect in an expensive, pristine way: a velvet settee in the corner that looks like it’s never met a human butt, white roses exploding from crystal vases, windows framing the lawn where three hundred people are fanning themselves with programs and pretending the August heat isn’t trying to kill them.

Three hundred people who flew in from somewhere important, who rearranged their lives, who bought gifts wrapped in matte paper and silk ribbons that cost more than my first car.

They’re all out there expecting to watch me marry Daniel Golightly in—God—twenty-seven minutes.

Twenty-seven minutes. In the time it takes to watch a sitcom without the commercials, I will be a “Mrs.”

I can hear the string quartet outside playing something classical.

Canon in D, I think. Daniel’s mother, Margaret, picked it.

I would have chosen something else that had a little more joy in it but I can’t remember now what that something else was, and that probably tells you everything you need to know about the last two years of my life.

My opinions were sandcastles, and the tides of Golightly-Colllier expectations were relentless.

Somewhere between the engagement party and the second tasting of the sea bass, I stopped having opinions about my own wedding.

Or maybe I still had them, but I just learned to swallow them down because it was easier than fighting about seating charts or whether the invitations should be ecru or cream.

This dress cost forty-two thousand dollars.

I know because I overheard my mother on the phone with someone from Town his brothers with their identical, razor-sharp parts in their hair; aunts draped in silent, expensive judgment; a flock of young cousins chasing each other, their shrieks the only genuinely unchecked sound in the whole production.

And then, the other side of the aisle: my father’s world.

His entire production company has turned out, a who’s-who of powerful agents, A-list actors pretending humility, directors with their signature scarves, all performing a delicate ballet of networking disguised as celebration.

Half of Hollywood, easily. They aren’t just guests; they are shareholders in the spectacle.

They’ve come to witness the merger, to be seen, to file away the details for tomorrow’s power lunches.

They’re all waiting. Not for a ceremony, but for the event.

For the photos that will be strategically placed in People and Vanity Fair.

For the framed, eight-by-ten glossies that will hang in the marble foyers of our parents’ mansions—tangible proof of a deal well struck.

And eventually, for the portrait that will dominate the entryway of whatever cold, perfect museum Daniel and I will pretend is a home.

The sun is dipping lower, flooding the coast in that syrupy, cinematic gold. “Golden Hour,” my mother had said during the planning meetings. I sat through those meetings like a ghost haunting my own life, watching a play about a wedding I wasn’t sure I invited myself to.

The photos. They will outlive this feeling.

They’ll hang in hallways I walk through like a stranger, in houses that have never heard my real laugh.

I’ll be fifty, pouring a glass of wine in some silent kitchen, and I’ll glance at one and wonder: Where did she go?

The girl with the hopeful eyes? What did you do with her?

They’ll immortalize not a fresh beginning, but this exact, paralyzing moment of cognition—the copper-taste certainty that I am being expertly, beautifully marched toward a precipice, and everyone will call the freefall “happily ever after.”

Beyond the meticulously manicured hedges and the heavy iron gates—ones designed to keep the riffraff out and the secrets in—I know the vultures are circling.