Chapter Seven
SIENNA
The dinner was an industry thing, the kind Grant and I had been going to for a decade, held in a private room at a restaurant with low lighting and a menu that never listed prices, full of people who called each other darling and meant nothing specific by it, who air-kissed cheeks and complimented outfits and forgot your name within the hour unless you happened to matter to their next project.
I wore the green dress he liked, the one from the premiere, freshly steamed, and for the first two hours it was almost normal, almost like every other dinner we'd survived together over the years, easy in the way only long familiarity makes possible.
A producer told a long, meandering story about a set disaster in Prague that had cost the studio a small fortune and made for excellent gossip, a story that got funnier with each retelling regardless of how much of it was true.
Grant laughed at the right places, refilled my wine without being asked, kept his hand resting warm on the back of my chair the entire time in a way that felt, in the moment, like reassurance, like the old, easy affection that had carried us through worse dinners than this one.
Early in the evening, before the mood shifted, an older director I'd always liked leaned across the table and asked me, genuinely, what I'd been working on lately, one of the only people all night to direct the question at me rather than through me toward Grant.
I found myself telling him, briefly, about a screenplay I was quietly revising, careful not to overstate it, and he listened with real attention, asking a specific, informed question about structure that told me he'd actually heard what I said rather than simply making conversation.
It was a small moment, over almost as soon as it began, but I held onto it through the rest of the evening the way you hold onto a single warm coal on a cold night.
A woman across the table, someone's wife I vaguely recognized from a charity board Grant and I had both once sat on briefly, leaned over at one point and asked how filming had gone, whether it had been strange watching Grant fall in love with someone else on screen so convincingly.
"It's his job," I said, the answer arriving smooth and automatic, the way it always did by now. "I'd be more worried if he was bad at it."
She laughed, satisfied with the answer, and the conversation moved on, and I thought, not for the first time, about how many versions of that exact exchange I'd had over the past several weeks, how practiced the whole routine had become, how little effort it took anymore to produce the right words in the right order.
Someone at the far end of the table made a joke about Lila being his work wife, a phrase that had apparently entered the general vocabulary of everyone in this room without my noticing exactly when, and the table laughed, and I laughed too, because that was the choreography I'd learned over the years, because objecting to a joke in a room like that cost you more socially than it saved you emotionally, because everyone at that table would remember you as humorless long after they'd forgotten the joke itself.
Then the photographer found us near the bar, camera already raised, moving with the confident efficiency of someone who'd been given a specific shot list before the evening even began.
"Grant, can we get you and Lila together for a quick one? Sienna, would you mind stepping back for just a second, out of frame?"
It was such a small request, phrased so casually, delivered with an easy smile that assumed compliance before I'd even had a chance to respond.
Step back. Give us the frame. I'd done it a hundred times before at a hundred other events over the years, understanding without being told explicitly that certain photos were for the film's marketing and certain photos were for us, for our own life, and that the two categories didn't overlap and had never needed to overlap before this particular campaign began.
But something in me hesitated this time, a half second of not moving, my feet staying planted on the floor, waiting for Grant to say something, to say something as simple as she's my wife, get a shot with both of us, or even just a joke to soften the request, some small gesture that would have cost him absolutely nothing and meant, to me, standing there in that moment, everything.
He hesitated too. I saw it, clear as anything, a flicker crossing his face in the space of a breath, his eyes finding mine for just a fraction of a second before sliding away, and for one half of one second I thought he might actually say it, might turn the moment back toward me instead of away.
Then he stepped toward Lila and let the photographer arrange them, his arm settling loose around her waist in the exact way the film's poster had already trained every camera in the country to expect, muscle memory from months of promotional shoots, a pose he could probably hold without thinking now.
I stood three feet away holding a glass of wine I didn't want anymore, watching my husband get photographed like a man who didn't have a wife standing three feet away from him in the same room, in the same green dress he'd told me that very evening he loved, that he'd specifically asked me to wear tonight.
Lila caught my eye once during the shoot, over Grant's shoulder, and something in her expression looked almost apologetic, a flicker of discomfort quickly smoothed back into practiced ease before the next flash went off, and I thought of our conversation backstage at the gala, of her honest fear about replaceability, and felt something more complicated than anger settle over the moment, though the anger was still there too, waiting underneath it.
The photo went up within the hour, before we'd even finished dessert, before the plates had been cleared.
HOLLYWOOD'S REAL LOVE STORY? the caption read, a question mark doing absolutely nothing to soften the accusation sitting underneath it, functioning less like genuine uncertainty and more like a wink shared between the publication and its readers.
In the published version, the frame was cropped tight around the two of them, gold light catching the sequins on Lila's dress, Grant's hand resting easy and familiar at the small of her back, both of them caught mid-laugh at something that had apparently been genuinely funny.
I wasn't visible anywhere in it. Not even at the edge. Not even a shoulder, a sliver of green fabric, a blur that might have suggested another person had been standing nearby when the shutter clicked.
I'd been standing three feet away, in full view of every camera in that room, in a dress my husband had picked for me, and the internet would never know it, because someone had made a decision, quietly, deliberately, that the story worked better without me in it at all.
I finished the rest of the dinner smiling.
I even laughed at the second joke about Lila being Grant's work wife, when it came later from someone else at the table who clearly hadn't heard the first one and thought he was being original.
I don't know now, looking back on it, whether that was strength or a very old habit refusing to break on command, a performance so deeply grooved into me that I could produce it without conscious thought while I quietly, steadily cracked beneath it.
I only know that I got through it, made it to the valet without incident, thanked the host at the door with what I hoped looked like genuine warmth, and that I'd started keeping count in a way I hadn't before, tallying small moments I couldn't yet name but was beginning, slowly, to understand.
The awards show ran long, the way they always did, three and a half hours of categories nobody outside the industry cared about stretched between the ones that mattered, technical achievement awards presented to polite, scattered applause while half the room checked their phones under the table, and I sat in the fourth row in a borrowed necklace worth more than our first car, Grant's hand warm over mine, watching the ceremony crawl toward the two categories we'd both been holding our breath for since we walked in that afternoon.
Backstage, hours earlier, during the brief window when nominees and their families were herded through a photo line before the show started, I'd watched Lila's publicist adjust her dress for the fourth time while a stylist fussed with her hair, the whole operation running with a precision that suggested tonight mattered more to that particular camp than the ceremony's own producers seemed to think it mattered to anyone.
Grant had squeezed my hand once, quietly, before we took our seats, a small private gesture that belonged only to us, and for a moment, before the lights dimmed and the cameras found their marks, it had felt like any other awards night we'd survived together over the years.
A publicist I didn't recognize, moving along the row checking names against a clipboard, paused at our seats and asked, politely but firmly, whether I'd mind moving one seat down for the broadcast, explaining that the network wanted a clean sightline to Grant for the reaction shots and my position was partially blocking the angle.
I moved without argument, the request small enough on its own that objecting would have looked petty, though something in the specific mechanics of it, an actual adjustment made to physically reposition me out of the camera's easiest reach, stayed with me through the rest of the ceremony in a way the request itself hadn't seemed to warrant.