12. Raven
— ? —
Raven
The rehearsal dinner started with me paired with Tom, Paige’s friend from college.
Architect, recently divorced, laugh lines around green eyes that suggested he actually used them.
He flirted appropriately, in a way that acknowledged the attraction without demanding a response, and made jokes about wedding traditions that actually landed.
“So you’re an actress,” he said, pulling out my chair with the manners that had probably been drilled into him at prep school. “Anything I’d have seen?”
“HBO series about women in witness protection. Three indie films about various forms of emotional devastation. The usual cheerful stuff.”
“Method acting must be fun at parties.”
“Oh, I’m a delight. Ask anyone.”
“I’m asking you.”
He was watching me while he said it, actually watching, the way nobody had bothered to in a long time.
“Then I’m definitely a delight. Five stars. Would recommend.”
He laughed, and I let myself enjoy being looked at as Raven, not as half of Hollywood’s most public disaster.
Tom didn’t know the details beyond “used to be married to Josh,” which Paige had mentioned with a careful neutrality that suggested she’d been coached.
He didn’t know about the interview, or the place cards that had become internet legend.
He was a clean slate, which should have been perfect.
Should have been. That was becoming the theme of my whole life, the parade of men who should have been perfect.
Tom pulled out chairs and asked follow-up questions and looked at me like I was the most interesting person at the table, and I felt precisely nothing, and I was beginning to understand that nothing was going to be my entire problem, dressed up in progressively nicer suits, until I did something about the situation sitting across the table talking to Arthur about boat engines.
The first course arrived with theatrical precision. Seared scallops for everyone, beautifully plated with microgreens I couldn’t identify and a foam that was probably called “essence” of something. My throat started to itch just looking at them.
I was allergic to shellfish. Not the dramatic, life-threatening kind that makes good television, just the annoying kind that made my mouth itch and my evening miserable. The kind nobody remembered because it wasn’t interesting enough to stick.
Before I could flag a server, a different plate landed in front of me. Lemon pasta with capers and herbs, exactly what I always ordered when everyone else was having seafood. No scallops, no shellfish anywhere near the plate.
I looked up. Josh sat across the table, deep in conversation with Arthur about boat engines, not even glancing my way. His attention was completely focused on his father, gesturing with his fork, animated about whatever mechanical thing they were discussing.
“Excuse me,” I caught our server when she circled back. “Did I request this?”
She checked her notes on the small pad all the wait staff carried. “Mr. Gardner called Tuesday with the guest dietary restrictions. Said seat fourteen gets the pasta, no shellfish anywhere near the plate. Also said not to make a thing of it.”
Tuesday. The word hit me in the chest.
“Tuesday?”
“Yes, ma’am. He was very specific.”
Tuesday. Before he knew I’d speak to him, before the bedroom arrangements, before the coffee run. When he still thought I’d ice him out all weekend, when he had no reason to think I’d even notice the gesture, when there was no credit to be gained.
He’d fixed my dinner on Tuesday.
I’d spent two years building an airtight reason to keep hating him.
Every kindness braced for in advance, every gesture pre-explained to myself as manipulation, the whole wall watertight.
And a single word off a caterer’s notepad put a crack straight down the middle of it.
Tuesday. He’d protected me from a plate of scallops on a day when the entire working theory of my weekend was that I’d freeze him out and never once find out he’d tried.
I turned that word over through the rest of dinner. Tuesday. Such a specific day. Such a thankless gesture. He’d called strangers to protect me from scallops when he thought I’d never know he’d done it.
Tom was telling a story about a building inspection that had gone wrong, involving a family of raccoons and a very angry contractor. Funny, well-told, a story that should have held my complete attention.
“The raccoons had built their own architectural system,” he was saying. “Complete with support beams. They were basically running their own construction company in this woman’s attic.”
“Actually,” Josh interjected from across the table, the MIT brain unable to resist, “raccoons are incredibly intelligent. Their problem-solving abilities rival primates. The structure was probably a response to-” He caught himself. “Sorry. That’s probably not the point.”
“No, you’re right,” Tom said, warming to the topic. “The organization was remarkable. They’d essentially created a blueprint without any formal training.”
And suddenly they were deep in conversation about animal intelligence and building codes, Josh lighting up in a way I hadn’t seen in years.
His hands moved when he talked, sketching invisible diagrams in the air.
His glasses slipped down his nose and he pushed them up absently, completely absorbed in the conversation about raccoon architecture, of all things.
“There was a study at MIT about urban wildlife adaptation,” Josh was saying. “These animals are essentially evolving in real-time to deal with human infrastructure.”
“You went to MIT?” Tom asked.
“Long time ago. Before I decided to waste it on pretending to be other people for money.”
This was the Josh I’d fallen in love with.
The one who read scientific journals for fun and had opinions about everything from coffee extraction methods to the best translation of Anna Karenina.
The one who’d chosen acting on a dare but never lost the part of him that was fundamentally, irrepressibly nerdy.
I’d forgotten this Josh existed. Somewhere under the tailoring and the talking points and the man who’d mocked me on television, the boy who got genuinely, helplessly excited about raccoon load-bearing beams had survived the whole time.
I’d assumed fame had eaten him alive. Watching him light up across a rehearsal dinner, glasses sliding down his nose, and he’d only been in there the entire time, waiting for someone to ask him a real question.
He’d shoved his sleeves up somewhere around the raccoon load-bearing beams, and I watched the muscle in his forearm shift every time he sketched another invisible diagram, and I hated the exact percentage of my attention it was stealing.
His throat worked when he laughed at his own tangent.
I pressed my knees together under the table and stared very hard at my lemon pasta, thinking about how deeply unfair it was that a man explaining pest infrastructure could do this to someone who’d successfully hated him for two years.
Meanwhile, I kept catching him looking at us.
Not at Tom, at us together. Not jealous exactly, but sad in a way that made my chest tight.
He was paired with Callie, one of Paige’s sorority sisters, who kept touching his arm when she laughed and angling her body toward his in a way that suggested she’d googled “how to show interest through body language.”
Josh barely noticed her. Polite but distant, like his body was at the table but his mind was somewhere else entirely. Probably in a raccoon study from 2003.
After dinner, guests drifted to the dock with drinks and the kind of loose laughter that came from good wine and better company.
I’d brought my notebook, the leather one where I kept script notes and character observations and random dialogue I overheard.
A month of work in the margins, ideas for the next project, solutions to scenes that weren’t working.
The wind picked up suddenly, a gust off the water that smelled of storm. My notebook went flying off the railing where I’d set it, pages fanning open as it headed for the water.
“Shit!” I lunged for it, missed, watched it hit the surface.
The splash came before I could even finish cursing. Not the notebook. Josh.
He’d gone in fully clothed. Suit, shoes, phone probably still in his pocket. No hesitation, no preparation, just straight over the railing into the harbor after my notebook, the plunge apparently the most reasonable thing in the world to him.
He surfaced holding it over his head, a trophy, pond weed draped across one shoulder, glasses completely crooked and dripping. The entire dock went silent, everyone staring at the spectacle of Josh Gardner, movie star, treading water in a Tom Ford suit.
“The tide was stealing intellectual property,” he announced, deadpan.
The dock erupted. Paige started cry-laughing, actually holding her stomach.
Arthur applauded. Someone’s elderly aunt shouted “Encore!” Tom was filming it on his phone, narrating in the hushed voice of a nature documentary: “Here we see the male performing increasingly desperate displays for the female’s attention. ”
Josh swam to the dock ladder, still holding my notebook above water one-handed.
I knelt to take it as he climbed up, our fingers touching as he passed it over.
He grinned up at me, hair plastered to his forehead, looking twenty-four and stupid, the exact man who’d convinced me to skinny dip in this same harbor on our wedding night.
“My hero,” I said, trying for sarcastic.
“Always,” he replied, and the sincerity in it made me stand up too fast.
I had to walk away before my face betrayed me and smiled the way it used to when he did ridiculous things just to make me happy.
“Your ex is interesting,” Tom said later, finding me by the dessert table where I was carefully not watching Josh interrogate the catering staff about industrial fans while still dripping harbor water.
“He has his moments.”
“Still hung up on him?”
“No,” I lied, with a conviction that suggested the opposite.
Tom smiled, not unkindly. “I get it. Some people leave marks.”
“Some people leave craters.”
“Need a distraction?” He held up a glass of champagne.
“Thanks, but I should check on my notebook. Make sure the pages are salvageable.”
Most pages had survived, though they’d never be quite the same.
I found them later spread out next to the cake refrigerator in the catering prep area, held down by salt shakers and soup spoons.
Josh had spent the rest of his night in a wet suit carefully separating each page, setting up a rotation system with the fans the caterers used for hot dishes.
I pretended not to know. Pretended not to check four times, or to notice that he’d read none of them, just carefully preserved them, precious documents instead of my scattered thoughts about a character’s motivation.
When the dinner finally ended, I saw Josh walking Callie to her car. Gentlemanly but distant, hands in his pockets, maintaining careful space between their bodies. She leaned in for what might have been a kiss. He stepped back, said something that made her laugh, then waited until she drove away.
Heat flared in my chest, sharp and territorial.
Not jealousy. I didn’t get jealous over ex-husbands who weren’t mine to be jealous about.
Just… awareness. Of his choices, of his boundaries, of the way he’d jumped into a harbor for my notebook but wouldn’t kiss a beautiful woman who clearly wanted him to.
I went to the house early, climbed into bed fully clothed, and pretended to be asleep when he came in an hour later. He moved carefully in the dark, trying not to wake me. Dropped what sounded like his phone, cursed softly, then settled onto his air mattress with its symphony of protests.
At 3 AM, my bladder woke me. I padded to the bathroom and nearly had a heart attack.
Josh sat on the bathroom floor in the dark, laptop open on his knees, the screen casting blue light on his face. Glasses on, hair still slightly damp from his harbor adventure, completely absorbed in whatever was on the screen.
“What the fuck?”
He looked up, sheepish. “Sorry. Didn’t want the typing to wake you.”
“Normal people use the kitchen.”
“Paige and Ben are in the kitchen. Continuing their wedding celebration. Loudly.”
“Oh. Gross.”
“Yeah.”
I noticed what was on his screen. Not a script. Real work, the unglamorous kind you do when no one is watching and there’s no applause anywhere in it.
“Can’t sleep?” I asked, sitting on the edge of the tub because standing felt too formal for a 3 AM bathroom conversation.
“Didn’t mean to wake you.”
“You didn’t. What are you working on?”
“Production stuff. Launching a fund for female filmmakers. Focus on stories about women over forty.”
“That’s… actually wonderful.”
“Don’t sound so surprised.”
“I’m not. I’m just-” I pulled my knees up, wrapping my arms around them. “You’re different.”
“Therapy helps. Losing everything helps more.”
“You didn’t lose everything. You’re still Josh Gardner, movie star.”
He looked at me then, really looked at me, and his voice went quiet. “I lost you. Everything else is just noise.”
The honesty of it knocked the wind out of me. I stood too fast, needing distance from all that raw honesty.
Old Josh had a speech for every occasion, polished lines he could deploy and then check your face to see whether they’d worked.
This wasn’t that. He said it to the floor, to the blue laptop light, to nobody, the way you say a thing you’ve stopped expecting to change anything.
That was what undid me. Not the words. He’d handed me pretty words before.
It was that he didn’t seem to expect them to buy him a single thing.
“I should-”
“Wait.” He closed the laptop, and suddenly the bathroom was darker, more intimate. “I know I have no right to ask, but… how are you? Really?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“Because I spent years caring about you and that doesn’t just stop.”
I snorted at the irony of him caring after the fact, but it was 3 AM and I was tired of performing indifference. Tired of pretending I hadn’t been happy to see my notebook saved, my dinner protected, my sleep preserved.
“I’m good. Great, actually. The work is fulfilling. I have my own place, my own money, my own choices. I remember who I am when I’m not trying to be small enough to fit in someone else’s life.”
“I made you small.” It wasn’t a question.
“You made me feel like I was too much. Too loud, too scattered, too everything.”
“You were never too much. I was just too insecure to handle your brightness.”
“Pretty words, Josh.”
“True words. Ones I should have said three years ago. Ten years ago. Every day in between.”
I shrugged and left before I could do something stupid like believe him. Standing at the door, hand on the knob, I had to face the truth: the problem wasn’t that I didn’t believe him.
The problem was I was starting to, and belief was how he got me the first time.