19. Raven
— ? —
Raven
I avoided him for three weeks with the discipline of a woman entering witness protection.
I changed my coffee shop, which was a genuine sacrifice because the new one over-roasted everything into a fine bitter dust. I moved my gym slot to the ungodly pre-dawn window where the only other attendees were men who grunted at their barbells over some private grudge.
Two industry events got declined on the grounds that Josh might materialize, and I revived the elaborate avoidance routine that had gotten us through the worst of the divorce.
None of it worked, because the problem wasn’t geographic.
The problem was that he’d taken up residence behind my eyes: the wall, the way he’d said made for me, a fact he refused to debate, the flex of his forearm caging me in, the scrape of his jaw down my neck, the low wrecked sound he’d made into my hair, the whole reel playing on a loop I couldn’t for the life of me get to buffer.
My thighs pressed together of their own accord in the middle of a grocery aisle, and I set a jar of capers down on the wrong shelf and walked out without the rest of my list.
The avoidance died, fittingly, in public. I was three bites into a burrata at a birthday dinner for Zara, one of my castmates, when I spotted him across the restaurant. Two women I recognized as fund directors, a bottle of something between them, Josh mid-laugh at whatever one of them had said.
My whole body locked.
He saw me see him. I watched the recognition move across his face, watched him clock my panic, watched him do the arithmetic.
And then, quietly, no drama, no long meaningful look, he signaled the waiter, said something to his table, and barely twenty minutes into his own dinner he paid the check and left, so that I wouldn’t have to spend the evening with my back to a wall and my radar pinging his exact coordinates.
On his way past the host stand he didn’t glance at me. Just gone.
“Wasn’t that your ex?” Zara asked, tracking the exit. “Weird. He barely touched his food.”
I spent the rest of the dinner furious at him for being considerate, which I was aware wasn’t a sane emotion to have, and which didn’t stop me from having it with my whole chest. He’d given up his own night to protect mine, and somehow that landed as an imposition, because there’s apparently no gesture so kind that my brain can’t file it under unfair.
Mia staged the intervention two days later, arriving with wine and her whole afternoon visibly cleared.
“You’re miserable,” she announced, folding herself into my armchair.
“I’m fine.”
“You’ve watched The Apartment seventeen times this month.”
“It’s research.”
“For what? A depression biopic?” She pointed her wine glass at me, a gavel. “Babe. You need to either forgive him, or fuck him, or both. Ideally in that order but I’m not your mother. This purgatory in the middle is what’s killing you.”
“We already fucked.”
Her wine went sideways. A quantity of it landed on my rug, which I’d be finding for weeks. “I’m sorry - WHAT?”
“Three weeks ago. Against a wall. It was-”
“Amazing? Life-altering? Do NOT leave me on a hyphen-”
“All of the above. That’s the problem.”
“Oh my god, you absolute criminal, when were you going to tell me?” She mopped at her shirt without looking at it, eyes locked on me. “Okay. Okay. So what’s the actual problem?”
“The problem is he destroyed me, Mia. Publicly. On a stage, for laughs. How am I supposed to trust a man who was capable of that?”
“People change.”
“Do they? Or do they just get better at hiding who they’ve always been?”
It was the question underneath every other question I’d been circling for months, the one I couldn’t put down and couldn’t answer.
Because a man who acts for a living can make reformation and performance look identical from the outside; both involve becoming someone new and making it convincing.
I had no instrument sensitive enough to tell the difference, and I’d already been wrong about him once, catastrophically, on national television.
A woman doesn’t hurry to trust her own judgment again after that.
She triple-checks. She keeps the receipts.
She waits for the tell that may or may not ever come.
She was quiet for a second, which she rarely is, and then she shrugged. “Only one way to find out.”
“What’s that.”
“Make him work for it. Properly. Don’t you dare make it easy on him. Make him prove it over and over until you feel it in your bones, or until he shows you he hasn’t changed at all.” She took a fortifying sip. “You’re already doing it in your head. Do it out loud where the rest of us can enjoy it.”
“I’ve been waiting for him to slip for months,” I admitted. “That’s the whole problem. He keeps winning.”
Every reason I lined up to keep hating him turned, when I looked closer, into a reason to stop.
I’d wanted the fund to be vanity, and it was anonymous.
The letters were supposed to be pressure, and they’d stopped asking for anything at all.
The cottage was supposed to be a bribe, and he’d handed it over with no lever attached, no signature required from me, nothing owed back.
I was working as hard as I’ve ever worked at anything to stay furious at a man who kept, infuriatingly, refusing to hand me one fresh reason, guilty of nothing anymore except the one thing I still needed him to be, which was unchanged.
I was still sitting with that when my phone rang. Josh. I stared at his name long enough that Mia made grabby hands, and I answered before she could steal it.
“I’m going to be at the Variety party tonight,” he said, no preamble. “If you’d rather I didn’t, I won’t. Say the word and I’m home with a script and bad noodles and that Estonian film you made me watch once that I still don’t understand.”
I gripped the phone. He was handing me an exit: his networking traded for my comfort, no strings, no sigh, no making me feel like the ask was an inconvenience. Old Josh would have gone and expected me to manage my own feelings about it.
“It’s fine,” I said. “We’re adults.”
A beat. “Are we? Because I haven’t been able to think about anything but that wall for three weeks. Haven’t been able to think about anything but you for two years, if we’re being honest, which apparently we’re not, so - forget I said that.”
“Josh.”
“I know. Sorry. I’ll keep my distance tonight. Scout’s honor.”
Keeping distance proved structurally impossible when we ended up trapped in the same conversation circle two hours later, both of us performing polite disinterest while a producer held forth about streaming economics.
Someone brought up the fund. Josh deflected the credit, the way he did now, and named three directors instead who deserved the attention.
One of them was a woman I’d flagged to him years ago at our own dinner table, back when he’d called her work “too niche” without lifting his eyes from his phone.
He remembered the dinner. I could see it land on him when he said her name, the small flinch of a man reciting his own worst evidence against himself.
He’d taken the thing I’d loved and ignored, and years later he’d gone back and found it and funded it and put her name in rooms she’d never otherwise have gotten into, and he’d done all of it without once telling me, because telling me would have made it a gift with my name on the card.
I only knew because I happened to be standing there when it surfaced.
How many others were there? How many of my discarded enthusiasms had he quietly gone back and rescued while I wasn’t looking?
“You remembered her,” I said, before I could stop my mouth.
“I remember everything you ever told me that I was too stupid to listen to at the time.” He said it lightly, but the circle went quiet, sensing weather, and one by one people discovered urgent business elsewhere until it was just the two of us marooned in the middle of a party.
“You can’t say things like that,” I said.
“Why?”
“Because it makes me hope.”
“Hope for what?”
“That you’re different. That I’m allowed to want things I know better than to want.”
I heard how much I’d just handed him, and wanted it back the second it left my mouth, and couldn’t have it, because it was true.
“Things are different, though. I’m different.” He held my eyes. “And what if I want them too?”
“Then we’re both idiots.”
“I can live with that.” And he smiled, the crooked one, the one that had undone me at twenty-two and had the audacity to still be operational at thirty-four.
Someone called his name from across the room.
He held up a finger, one minute, and turned back to me.
“I’m going to keep showing up, Raven. Not to corner you.
Not to force anything. Just to be better.
To be here. To be the man I should’ve been the whole time.
You don’t have to do a single thing with that.
I just wanted you to know it’s the plan. ”
He walked off before I could answer, which left me standing alone in a sea of networking with a champagne glass and a heart doing gymnastics and the truly unwelcome realization that I wanted him to keep showing up.
God help me. I wanted him to try.
I heard it three days later, at Priya’s wrap party, from six feet away, and it wasn’t meant for me.
I’d gone to the bar for a refill and stopped there, half-hidden by a column, when I caught my own name behind me in the wrong register.
Two voices I half-knew, a producer and someone from a streamer, pitched low and comfortable, the way people talk when they’ve never once had to say the cruel thing to a face.
“…good for her, obviously,” one of them was saying. “But you know it’s Josh, right? The whole comeback. The fund, the rooms. He’s been buying her back into every one of them for two years and letting her think she did it herself. It’s actually kind of tragic. She has no idea.”
“Does he tell her?”
“God, no. That’s the whole guilty-conscience genius of it. You don’t sign the apology. You pay for it and let her keep the dignity of not knowing.”
I stood there with my empty glass and didn’t turn around.
I’ve played a lot of scenes where a woman takes terrible news and keeps her face, and I called on every one of them, and I held it, and I carried my drink back to the table on legs I couldn’t feel and laughed at something Priya said and didn’t taste a single bite of the cake.
The worst of it was the true thread running through the middle.
He had gone into rooms for me. He’d admitted it once, in a harbor, with a note that came close to pride, and let me wonder how many others there were.
The director he’d quietly funded on my old recommendation was real, and by tomorrow she’d be evidence.
Just enough truth to weave a lie I couldn’t pull loose.
Because here was the part I couldn’t get around, lying awake with it at three in the morning: I couldn’t prove it wrong.
Not to the town, and not, in the dark, entirely to myself.
Two years I’d spent building the one thing that was unarguably mine, the single thing with no one’s name in front of it, and a whisper at a bar had turned it into the most expensive apology in the history of Hollywood.
I hated Josh for a thing he hadn’t done, and I hated myself worse for the small traitor part that lay there wondering whether the whisper was right.