17. Raven
— ? —
Raven
Awards season arrived with its usual party favor of dread wrapped in sequins.
My first Golden Globe nomination, for the HBO show, which meant I now had to play the game I’d spent a decade watching Josh play from just off his left shoulder, out of frame.
My team wanted me to walk the carpet with Tom, for the “good story.” I said no.
If I was doing this, I was doing it as myself, not as half of a manufactured moment engineered to trend before the show even started.
I’d spent ten years being the manufactured moment.
The wife-shaped accessory in the corner of somebody else’s carpet, angled just so, present enough to prove he was a family man and quiet enough not to complicate the story.
I’d promised myself, somewhere over Big Sur with a box of drugstore bleach, that if I ever walked a carpet again it would be as the subject of the photograph and not the set dressing.
I meant to keep that promise even if it cost me the good story.
It was going to cost me the good story. I discovered I didn’t care.
The Globe was the television prize, and I was glad of it, but the thing I actually couldn’t breathe around was the film.
Natalie’s film, the one I’d built out of two years of erasure in a ten-minute audition, was moving through the fall festivals collecting praise loud enough to turn into a campaign.
People had started saying the word nomination to me in lowered voices, careful with it, and every time it happened my chest tightened in a way I didn’t have a word for.
It was the first thing in my whole career that was mine outright, no husband in the frame, nobody to hand the credit to, and I wanted it so badly I’d gotten superstitious about admitting so.
The fitting was at a designer showroom in Beverly Hills, the kind with champagne nobody drinks and a lighting scheme that costs more than a house. Which was where I ran into Bradley, Josh’s former stylist, mid-air-kiss before I’d fully registered him.
“You look incredible,” he said, holding me at arm’s length, a painting he was appraising. “That post-divorce glow-up? Chef’s kiss. Genuinely. I’ve dressed people for their weddings who looked worse.”
“Thanks. I think.”
“Josh is nominated too, you know.” He said it lightly, threading a pin into the shoulder of my gown. “Different category. Same ceremony.”
My stomach took the elevator to the parking structure. “Great.”
“He’s going alone. Turned down three models who offered to be his date. One of them cried.” He smoothed the fabric down my arm. “I’m only telling you because you two were the one real thing in this entire counterfeit town, and I think that ought to count for something.”
“It counts for a good story for people who weren’t there for the bad parts.”
“Mm.” Bradley stepped back to check the line of the dress. “Or it counts for a second chance. But who’s counting.”
I decided I was counting, and the number was zero.
The number was not zero. I knew it wasn’t zero even as I said it, the way you know the diet starts tomorrow while you’re ordering the fries.
But I’d learned that declaring a number out loud, firmly, to a stylist holding pins, bought me a few hours of believing it, and a few hours was frequently all I needed to get through a fitting without doing something irreversible.
The night of the awards I dragged Mia as my plus-one, because if I was going to sit through a whole night of my industry congratulating itself I wanted a witness who’d narrate it cruelly under her breath.
I wore silver, liquefied starlight poured into a mold.
Mia wore emerald and could have walked out of a painting people get thrown out of museums for touching.
I’d chosen it myself, which sounds small and wasn’t.
For ten years my carpet looks had been strategy sessions, negotiated between stylists and publicists with an eye toward not upstaging Josh, toward reading as supportive-wife rather than as a woman with her own point of view.
This was the first time I’d stood in a fitting and picked the thing that made me feel most like the version of myself I actually wanted the cameras to catch.
Silver, and sharp, and impossible to file as anyone’s plus-one.
It’s a strange freedom, dressing for your own night.
It took me until my mid-thirties to feel it.
“We’re stunning,” she announced in the limo. “If we don’t win, it’s rigged, and I want a recount.”
On the carpet, the reporters asked about the nomination, the next project, and (inevitably, the way water finds the drain) Josh.
“You’re both nominated tonight. Any chance of a reunion?”
“We’re professionals,” I said, smile bolted on. “I’m sure we’ll be perfectly cordial.”
Further down the rope, one of the nastier outlets abandoned all pretense. “Raven! Is it true you’re only nominated because the divorce made you famous? Does Josh get residuals on your career?”
The pack smelled blood and swung toward me as one organism, cameras swinging toward me all at once, and I felt the old thing start: the shrink, the reflexive apology forming behind my teeth before I’d even decided to speak.
And then Josh was there. Three steps down the rope line, close enough to pull every lens, and I hadn’t even known he’d arrived.
“Hey,” he called out, loud, easy, the voice that fills a room without seeming to try. “If we’re doing the hard questions tonight, I’ve actually got the next slate for the fund locked. Who wants the exclusive?”
The pack pivoted to him instantly, a school of fish turning on a single flick.
He planted himself in front of the cameras and took it: all of it, the divorce questions, the ugly ones that had been meant for me, answering each one with deliberate, weaponized boredom, giving them absolutely nothing worth printing, while Mia hooked my arm and steered me up the carpet.
At the doors I looked back. He was still in the middle of the scrum, being professionally devoured, and over the top of the reporters’ heads his eyes found mine. A small nod. Go. I’ve got this. Then he turned back into the flashes and let them have him.
I had to breathe through the entire security check.
Inside, he was impossible to miss. Devastating in a classic tux that fit him to the millimeter, hair longer than he used to wear it, laughing at something with another nominee.
Our eyes caught across the room. He nodded, small and respectful, no expectation attached.
I nodded back before my team reeled me into a conversation about the show.
I didn’t win. Neither did he.
I’d braced for the loss to gut me, the way losing used to gut Josh in the early years, the way I’d watched a not-my-name announcement collapse him in on himself at a dozen ceremonies while I held his hand under the table.
And it didn’t. It stung, cleanly and briefly, and then it was just information.
I’d spent so long defining myself by the rooms that wouldn’t let me in that I’d half-expected to shatter the first time one of them said no to my face.
Instead I sat in liquid silver with Mia’s shoulder against mine and felt, of all the unglamorous things, fine.
But when they read the winner in my category and it wasn’t my name, I felt him looking.
Not gloating, not pitying. Just checking.
Making sure I was okay. I was, mostly. Losing stung less than I’d braced for, probably because I’d already survived losing much larger things in far more public arenas, and a trophy is a low-stakes practice run at not getting what you want.
The after-party was where Sloane found me.
I’d been tracking the exits all night out of habit, which was how I saw her before she saw me: my sister, in a gown that photographed better than it fit, working the outer edge of the room with the specific hunger of the newly uninvited, angling for a way back in.
Two years ago Sloane would have owned a room like this.
Tonight she was circling it for a way in, and the way in she found was me.
“There she is.” She had her arm around me before I could set my drink down, turning us both a few degrees toward the nearest cluster of phones. “My sister. Nominated. Can you believe this one?”
“Sloane.”
“People keep asking me about you,” she said, bright and a little too fast. “The comeback, the whole redemption story, all of it. I tell them I always knew. I’m basically your origin story.
” She laughed. A journalist a few feet away had already lifted her phone, and Sloane had angled us so the shot would catch us both, sisters reunited, a headline she could stand inside.
The entire machine of her came clear in one clean second, her fingers curled into the silk at my elbow.
Nobody in that room had spent a thought on Sloane Thorne in two years.
Every person in it had spent one on me. I was the door back into a conversation she’d been locked out of, and she’d worked out that the fastest way through it was to stand close enough that my name rubbed off on her.
She didn’t want her sister back. She wanted a headline she could be photographed beside.
I lifted her hand off my arm, gently, in full view of the phone that was still up.
“Get your own origin story,” I said, and left her holding the pose with no one in it.
I slipped out to a balcony for air and the specific silence of being outside a room instead of in it. The city spread out below, all lights and false promises.
I’d stood on a lot of balconies like this one over the years, always off to the side of somebody else’s night, holding a drink I wasn’t enjoying and a smile I’d bolted on for the walk back inside.
This was the first one I’d stepped onto as the reason for the evening rather than the plus-one to it.
The view was identical. Everything else had changed.
Same city, same lights, same false promises glittering all the way to the hills, and a completely different woman looking at them, one who’d finally stopped mistaking the lights for anything but what they were.
“Congratulations on the nomination.”
I didn’t turn. I’d felt him arrive, a change in the weather.
“You too.”
He came to stand beside me, careful to leave a respectful stretch of railing between us, and held out one of the two glasses of champagne he’d carried out. I took it without our fingers touching, which we both noticed and neither mentioned.
“You deserved to win,” he said, after a while.
“The best person won.”
“No.” He said it simply, a fact he was declining to argue about. “You deserved it. Your work this year has been extraordinary.”
“Have you been watching?”
“Every episode. Twice.” A beat, and I could hear the smile arrive in his voice. “Maybe three times on a couple of them. There’s a scene in the fifth one, the hospital hallway, where you don’t say anything for ninety seconds and it’s the best thing I’ve seen all year.”
“That’s a concerning amount of television for one man.”
“You’re worth watching. You always were. I just forgot to look for a while, and it turns out that was entirely my loss and not, as I’d convinced myself, a scheduling issue.”
“Josh.”
“I know. Boundaries. I’m just glad the world gets to see it now.” He looked back out at the city. “That’s all. I’ll stop.”
And he did stop, which was the maddening part.
He said the thing that cracked me open a little, and then he honored the line, no follow-up, no pressing the advantage, no reaching across the foot of railing he’d so deliberately left between us.
He’d learned that my yes couldn’t be argued out of me, that it had to be walked toward slowly and left entirely up to me whether I ever arrived.
I hated how much I respected it. Respect was so much more dangerous than charm ever was.
Before I could figure out what to do with any of it, Mia materialized in the balcony doorway, slightly drunk and fully deputized. “We should go.”
“Of course,” Josh said, and stepped back immediately, no argument, giving me the exit before I had to ask for it. “Goodnight, Raven. Mia.”
He was gone before I could say anything else.
“He looks good,” Mia observed as we walked to the car, in the tone of a woman filing a grievance. “Annoyingly, aggressively good. It’s rude.”
“I didn’t notice.”
“Liar. Also, he is still completely, catastrophically in love with you. The man carried you two glasses of champagne and left a foot of railing between you like a Regency chaperone was watching.”
“I don’t want him in love with me. I want him to leave me alone.”
“Sure.” She patted my arm. “The way you want dessert to leave you alone.”
I didn’t dignify that with a response, mostly because there wasn’t one that would survive contact with how right she was.
I’d spent the entire drive home not thinking about the foot of railing and the two glasses of champagne and the ninety-second hospital scene he’d apparently watched three separate times, and not thinking about them so loudly that they were the only thing in the car with me.
But that night, home, shoes off and defenses filed down, I texted him: You looked good tonight.
The three dots appeared immediately, then vanished, then appeared again, a little semaphore of a grown man rewriting a text.
Finally: You looked perfect. You always do.
I didn’t reply. But I screenshotted it, and saved it in a folder I’d deny under oath, because some things you can only say in a text, where he can’t hear your voice do the thing it does, and you can’t see whether his hands shook typing it back.