2. Raven
— ? —
Raven
My brain did this. It grabbed a number in a crisis and refused to put it down, the same way it grabbed the wrong detail at every wrong moment.
Not his face, and not the note I’d left propped against the coffee maker in my own careful handwriting.
The dashboard clock. One forty-seven, holding steady and green while the rest of me came apart, because a specific number felt survivable in a way the rest of the night absolutely did not.
My hands were still shaking on the steering wheel. I’d driven the whole way from our house in the Hills to Mia’s place in Silver Lake on muscle memory alone, my conscious mind replaying Josh’s voice saying “little acting hobby” until the words turned into meaningless sounds.
She was waiting in flannel pajamas and pure rage, standing in her doorway with her laptop balanced on one arm and murder in her eyes.
Her hair was in a lopsided bun that had clearly started the evening with better intentions, and she had exactly one sock on.
The bare foot tapped against the concrete, impatient and furious.
“I watched it live,” she said instead of hello. “I’ve been texting you for two hours. I almost drove to your house and committed murder.”
“Which one would you have killed?”
“Dealer’s choice. Maybe both, definitely both.”
She pulled me inside, and the normalcy of her apartment almost broke me.
Mia’s place always smelled the same, vanilla candles and takeout from the restaurant downstairs, laundry detergent and the particular staleness of Los Angeles air conditioning.
Her couch still had the wine stain from two years ago.
Her walls still held the same crooked frames.
Evidence that the world hadn’t actually ended, just my corner of it.
I collapsed on her couch, still in the stupid dress, the zipper digging into my spine with each breath. The dress I’d picked to make him forget how to breathe. Instead, he’d forgotten I existed.
The first time I’d dressed up for him, a cheap red thing from a sample sale our first year, he’d stopped in the doorway and lost the entire sentence he’d walked in to say. He used to lose his words over me. Tonight he’d found a whole televised paragraph to lose me in.
I should have taken the dress off in the car.
My hands wouldn’t do it, so now the boning pressed a slow bruise into my ribs every time I breathed, a punishment I hadn’t ordered and couldn’t seem to refuse.
Six hours of cooking still lived under my nails, garlic and butter and the lemon I’d zested by hand, for a man who’d spent those same six hours on a soundstage turning me into a punchline while the sauce reduced on a stove nobody came home to.
“Talk,” Mia commanded, curling into the chair across from me. “Start from the beginning. Not tonight. The real beginning.”
The story poured out of me, raw and unfiltered. Not just tonight, but the last two years of slow disappearance. My voice sounded strange in the quiet apartment, hoarse and unfamiliar, the voice of someone finally saying things out loud that had only lived in her head.
“Josh started scheduling meetings during my callbacks,” I said, pulling my knees to my chest. The dress protested, seams straining. “Important meetings, he’d say. Studio executives who could greenlight his next project. Producers with money. People who mattered.”
“Your callbacks mattered.”
“Not the way his meetings did. Mine were for two-line parts in indie films that might not even get distribution. His were for franchise movies and Oscar campaigns.”
I told her about the premieres where he’d introduce me as “my wife” without my name, two years of standing next to him while photographers shouted for him to turn this way, look that way, give them the smile that sells magazines. Two years of moving out of frame without being asked.
I’d gotten good at it. That was the part I couldn’t say out loud, even to Mia, even now, even with the wine coming.
Nobody taught me to disappear. I taught myself, one red carpet at a time, learning to read the exact half-second when a photographer’s eyes slid off me and back to him, learning to be already gone before anyone had to make me go.
I’d called it being supportive. Turns out I’d called a lot of things being supportive.
“Remember the Director’s Guild dinner?” I said, my throat tight. “That director, Julian Webb, the one who did the war movie everyone pretended to understand?”
“The pretentious asshole with the scarves?”
“That’s him. We were at the bar, and I was telling that story about getting lost in Venice Beach, you know how I tell stories-”
“With enthusiasm and perfect comedic timing?”
“With tangents and too many details. Julian looked at Josh and said, ‘Your wife’s too much, Gardner.’ Just that. Like I was a volume control that needed adjusting.”
Mia’s face darkened. “Please tell me Josh defended you.”
“He laughed. He laughed with everyone else, and in the car afterward, he suggested I might want to be more mindful of my audience. Mindful. Like I was giving a presentation instead of existing.”
The apartment fell quiet except for the hum of ancient appliances and someone’s music filtering through the walls. Bass thumping a rhythm through the floor, low and steady.
“When did he stop coming to bed?” Mia asked.
“Gradually. Then suddenly. Started with staying up to read scripts. Then emails that couldn’t wait. Then calls with Tokyo or London or whatever time zone justified avoiding me. He’d slip in at three, four in the morning, careful not to wake me. Except I was always awake, pretending not to be.”
I got good at the pretending, too. Slowing my breath, keeping my face slack and open, performing sleep for an audience of one who wasn’t even looking.
I told myself it was a kindness, letting him believe he hadn’t woken me.
It was not a kindness. It was practice. I was rehearsing not needing him, night after night in the dark, and I didn’t even know that was what I was doing until I was already good enough at it to leave.
“Jesus.”
“Then he stopped kissing me goodbye. I’d wake up and he’d already be gone. Sometimes there’d be a note on the coffee maker. Usually not. Then he stopped saying my name when he introduced me. Just ‘my wife,’ like I was a position that could be filled by anyone.”
“The interview’s already viral,” Mia said gently, turning her laptop toward me. “Hashtag Joshloane is trending.”
Of course it was. Hollywood loved nothing more than beautiful people behaving badly. The internet was already choosing sides, crafting narratives, deciding who deserved sympathy and who deserved destruction.
“Someone found your anniversary post,” she continued, and my stomach dropped through the floor.
There it was, screenshot and preserved forever. My 6 PM optimism, the beautiful table I’d spent hours arranging, the caption “Ten years with my whole heart” time-stamped for posterity. Right next to clips of Josh mocking me at 8:47. The split screen of my hope and his cruelty.
The comments were brutal but divided. Half thought I was a saint for lasting this long, called me Queen Raven, said I deserved better.
The other half thought I must have done something to deserve it.
Because women always did something, didn’t we?
We were too much or not enough, too ambitious or too comfortable, too everything or too nothing.
My phone lit up on Mia’s coffee table. Josh’s face on the screen, the wedding photo I’d never changed because changing it would mean admitting we were in trouble. We looked so young in that picture. So certain that love was enough.
The phone rang. And rang. And rang.
“Are you going to answer?” Mia asked as the phone kept ringing.
“No.”
But he kept calling. The phone buzzing against the wood, insistent and angry. I counted each one, the number climbing until it stopped meaning anything except that he’d finally noticed I was gone.
I watched them stack up with a detachment that scared me a little, some far-off part of me almost curious how high the number would climb before it broke.
Every buzz was him realizing, a fraction more and in real time, that the thing he’d stopped looking at had stood up and walked out of the frame for good.
At fifty-three calls, I answered. Some numbers demanded attention through sheer specificity.
“What is this note?” His voice was drunk, confused, that particular combination of angry and desperate that meant he’d just realized consequences existed.
Background noise suggested he was still at the after-party.
Music and laughter and the clink of glasses.
Of course he was still there. “Please come back, love. I’m not divorcing you. ”
“Love? Really?” My voice came out steadier than I felt. “You humiliated me on national television while I sat in a dress I put on just to look beautiful for you, at a dinner I cooked for six hours. Also for you.”
“It was a bit! Grant wanted something funny and told me to-”
“I don’t care.” The words came out and left me lighter. “You said it. Those words came out of your mouth. I’m done being your punchline.”
“But I - Come home and we’ll talk.”
“I left you a note.”
“I read it. Really? Ten years and you leave a note?”
The genuine confusion in his voice, the audacity of it, made me laugh. Sharp and bitter, but still a laugh.
“Ten years and you forgot I even existed. Seemed fair. Don’t call me anymore. We’re done.”
I hung up. The silence afterward felt enormous.
My fingers shook as I blocked his number. The little “blocked” notification seemed too small for what it represented. A decade reduced to a setting toggle.
Twenty minutes later, I unblocked him. Not because I wanted to talk, but because I wanted to watch the messages pile up. Wanted evidence of him caring, even if it was too late to matter.
They came immediately:
“Raven please”
“I fucked up”
“Come home”
“We can fix this”
“I love you”
“Please answer”
“I’m sorry”
“PLEASE”
Each text lit up my screen, a catalog of regret in real time, confusion sliding toward the first real panic. Good. Let him panic. Let him feel the sensation of someone essential slipping away.
“You need wine,” Mia announced, already moving toward her kitchen.
“I need witness protection.”
“Wine’s easier to arrange.”
She poured two glasses of something red that definitely came from a gas station. It tasted of disappointment, with notes of oak.
“It has legs,” Mia said, holding hers up to the lamp with the grave authority of a gas-station sommelier. “Bold. Confident. Notes of regret and a long, humiliating finish.”
“Pairs well with divorce,” I said.
“Everything pairs well with divorce. That is the great tragedy of it.”
We drank in silence for a while, sitting in the half-dark of her living room. The neighbor’s music had shifted from hip-hop to what might have been Broadway. Even the building couldn’t maintain a consistent mood.
At 4 AM, Mia found me in her bathroom with her kitchen scissors, chunks of blonde hair already scattered in the sink.
“What are you doing?” She stood in the doorway, horror and understanding fighting for dominance on her face.
“I can’t look like someone he made small anymore.”
The scissors were dull, meant for opening Amazon packages and cutting tags off clothes. But I kept sawing at sections of hair, determined to remove every part of me he’d touched, styled, claimed.
“Okay, stop,” Mia said, gently taking the scissors. “You’re giving yourself a tragedy, not a haircut.”
She turned me away from the mirror, sectioning what remained with the confidence of someone who’d cut her own bangs during every breakup since high school.
“This is fixable,” she muttered, snipping carefully. “Mostly. You’re getting a bob whether you planned on it or not.”
“I want to look nothing like her. The woman who waited with place cards. The woman who made herself smaller every day for two years.”
“She’s not gone, babe. She’s just evolving.”
The scissors made soft sounds as Mia worked. Blonde pieces fell onto the bathroom tile, covering the floor with evidence of transformation. All that hair Josh used to wrap around his fingers. All that hair I’d kept long because he’d mentioned once, years ago, that he loved it.
It undid me, standing in Mia’s bathroom watching it fall.
Not the big cruelties. The small accommodations.
A hundred tiny edits I’d made to myself over the years, each one so minor I’d barely noticed signing off on it, until I looked up one ordinary evening and couldn’t locate whoever I’d been before the compromises started.
The hair was just the piece I could reach with a pair of dull scissors.
“The worst part is I knew,” I said, my voice barely a whisper. “I knew he was pulling away and I kept trying harder, thinking if I made myself quieter and easier, he’d love me again.”
Mia’s hands stilled in my hair. She met my eyes in the mirror, her face soft with the particular grief of watching your best friend arrive at a terrible truth in real time.
“That’s not love, babe.”
“I know.” The words came out clear and certain. “That’s why I left.”