7. Raven
— ? —
Raven
Two years passed slowly at first, then all at once.
I’d tried my best not to see anything about him.
His name blocked on every platform, every Google alert, every possible digital avenue where Josh Gardner might accidentally appear and ruin my day.
My assistant had strict instructions to decline any event where he’d be present.
My publicist pre-screened every interview question.
I’d built a wall between us made of algorithms and human intervention.
Nobody warns you that not thinking about a person is a full-time job.
It isn’t a direction you walk in. It’s a wall you maintain, brick by brick, every single day, against a tide that never once stops coming.
Some days I was proud of the wall. Some days the wall was only proof of how much water it was holding back.
My heart kept hurting each time I remembered him, so I tried not to think of him at all.
Healthier? Definitely not. But functional, which was all I could manage some days.
I’d catch myself humming our song in the shower and have to start over with different music.
I’d see someone in an MIT hoodie and have to leave the coffee shop.
Once, I heard his laugh in a restaurant and hid in the bathroom a long while, trying to remember how to breathe, only to emerge and find a stranger with similar vocal cords and completely different everything else.
The shoebox of letters had moved apartments with me twice.
From the temporary rental in West Hollywood to the bigger place in Los Feliz when the HBO money started coming in regularly.
Then to the house in Silver Lake I’d bought myself, with my own money, without asking anyone’s opinion about neighborhoods or square footage or whether the kitchen was too small.
The letters lived in my closet now, behind winter coats I never wore because Los Angeles didn’t believe in seasons.
Still unopened. Over a hundred now, though I’d stopped counting after the first year.
I didn’t examine what it meant that I kept them. Examination would mean admitting a truth I wasn’t ready to name.
The first time he told me I was going to be somebody, we were twenty-two and twenty-four and splitting one order of fries because that was the entire budget, and he said it plainly, a fact he seemed faintly annoyed I didn’t already know.
Nobody had ever been bored by their own faith in me before.
I’d loved it and then let him teach me to distrust it: the flat, unbothered certainty he carried, having decided what I was before I did.
So I didn’t examine it. I’d gotten very good at not examining things.
It was a portable skill, one I’d built to survive the marriage and then simply never put down, and I’d started to suspect it was the reason I could win a room full of strangers to tears on camera and still not quite feel my own life while I was standing inside it.
Now I was back in LA for meetings, unavoidable now that I was in demand.
The city looked different when you were wanted.
Same palm trees, same traffic, but now I had lunch reservations at places with unlisted numbers and water sommeliers.
Now I was Raven Thorne, HBO series lead and indie film darling, not Josh Gardner’s discarded wife.
The city hadn’t changed. I had. The same valets who used to look straight through me now remembered it, pronounced it correctly, held the door a beat longer.
Walking past all of it, I could see none of them had ever disliked me.
They’d simply been reading the room, and for years the room had told them I didn’t count.
Now the room said otherwise, and they adjusted, seamless and shameless, the way this entire town adjusts.
The transformation was deliberate and complete.
Platinum bob sharp enough to cut, maintained every three weeks by someone who charged more than most people’s rent.
Designer clothes that actually fit because I’d hired a stylist who understood that looking powerful was a kind of armor.
New muscle from training for an action role, visible in my arms and shoulders, proof that I took up space now instead of shrinking into it.
Confidence that came from surviving public humiliation and coming out the other side with the best reviews of my life and offers for movies that would actually get distributed.
I could have been someone who’d never waited at an anniversary table. Someone who’d never been called a hobby on national television. Someone who belonged in the rooms I was walking into instead of apologizing for existing in them.
Leaving CAA after signing with them six months ago, riding the high of a three-picture deal we’d just negotiated, I ran straight into Josh’s former team. Agent, manager, publicist, all clustered by the valet stand, the past showing up for a reunion it hadn’t warned me about.
My body recognized them before my brain did, muscle memory of feeling small kicking in before I could stop it.
These were the people who’d managed Josh’s career while mine evaporated.
Who’d scheduled his meetings during my callbacks.
Who’d treated me as an accessory that had unfortunately come with the ability to speak.
“Raven.” The publicist, Cheryl, called out before I could pretend not to see them.
I stopped, turned, arranged my face into professional neutrality. “Cheryl.”
She looked older, or maybe just tired. The tired that comes from losing your biggest client and trying to rebuild in a town that loved winners and forgot everyone else.
“You look incredible,” she said, and for once it didn’t sound like surprise that the former Mrs. Gardner had managed to dress herself properly.
“Thanks.”
An awkward pause. Josh’s former agent, David, studied his phone with the intensity of someone defusing a bomb. The manager whose name I’d never bothered to learn examined the valet stand, searching it for the secrets of the universe.
“We should have protected you,” Cheryl said suddenly, the words tumbling out, held back for two years. “Both of you. We fed the narrative that you were holding him back.”
“Excuse me?”
“We told him you weren’t good for his image. That Sloane tested better with audiences. We arranged the interviews, the photo ops, suggested he play up the chemistry.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because he fired us. All of us, two years ago. Right after… everything.”
The shock must have shown on my face because David looked up from his phone.
“Said we were part of the problem,” he added quietly. “Said we’d spent years encouraging him to see his marriage as a brand instead of a relationship.”
“He was right,” Cheryl said. “We did. We made you competition instead of a partner. Made him think choosing you meant choosing less.”
It’s a strange thing, being handed the receipts for your own erasure by the people who wrote them.
For two years part of me had quietly believed I’d invented the whole slow campaign, that I was oversensitive, too much, exactly what they’d all said I was.
And here was Cheryl in a valet line confirming it had been a strategy.
A deliberate one. With a budget. I should have felt vindicated.
Mostly I felt tired, and a little sick, and aware that being right had never once kept me warm at night.
I didn’t know what to say. Part of me wanted to rage at them, to list every moment they’d made me feel invisible and unwelcome and less than. Part of me was just tired of carrying anger for people who didn’t matter anymore.
“He’s teaching now,” David said carefully. “Acting classes for underprivileged kids. Turned down the franchise sequel to do it.”
“Good for him,” I said, meaning it and not meaning it in equal measure.
“We fucked up,” Cheryl said. “All of us. You deserved better.”
I walked to my car without responding, because what was there to say?
That their apology was two years too late?
That they’d helped destroy a marriage that might have survived without their interference?
That I was fine now, successful now, but some nights I still woke up reaching for someone who wasn’t there?
Driving away, I felt a flicker of sympathy I didn’t want. Josh had fired them all. Had burned his professional bridges for personal accountability. The Josh I’d divorced would never have done that. He’d have found a way to make it their fault, or my fault, or anyone’s fault but his.
That was the detail I kept tripping over on the drive down Sunset.
It wasn’t the teaching or the letters. The firing.
The old Josh handled blame one way only: he found the nearest available hand and pressed the hot coal of it into that.
A man who instead fires the entire apparatus that protected his career, who closes his own fist around the thing, is either running the most elaborate penance in Hollywood or he has actually changed.
I didn’t like either option. Both of them required me to keep thinking about him.
Then I remembered the anniversary table and drove faster.
My phone rang as I sat in traffic on Sunset. Meg Gardner’s name on the screen made my chest tight.
“Hello, darling,” she said, warm as always, like the divorce hadn’t changed how she saw me.
“Hi, Meg.”
“How are you? I’ve been following your career. That HBO series is incredible.”
“Thank you. How’s Arthur?”
“Stubborn as ever. Bought another boat we don’t need. Says it’s an investment.”
We talked about safe things for a few minutes. Her garden, the new restaurant in Nantucket that was trying too hard, the way tourists got worse every summer. The easy family conversation that made what came next worse.
“Paige is getting married.”
“Oh my god, congratulations! When?”
“Six months. Small ceremony in Nantucket. Just family and close friends.”
I could hear what was coming before she said it, the careful way she was building to the ask.
“You’re family,” she continued. “Divorce or not, you’re family. Please come.”
“Meg-”
“He won’t be there.”
The words landed heavy between us.
“Already confirmed he can’t make it,” she added, and we both knew that meant he was choosing to miss his sister’s wedding to make this easier for me.
I shouldn’t go. Every rational part of my brain knew that.
But the Gardners had been more family than my own blood.
Sunday dinners when Josh was filming, Meg teaching me about wine and sailing and how to argue with Arthur about politics without making it personal.
Arthur sending me first editions of books he thought I’d love, with notes in his careful handwriting about why they mattered.
Paige being the sister Sloane never was, the one who actually called to check in, who celebrated my wins and commiserated over my losses.
They’d loved me when I was nobody. They’d continued loving me when I became nobody again.
“I’ll think about it.”
“That’s all I ask, darling.”