Chapter Twelve
SIENNA
Rachel dragged me to a small gathering three weeks in, a birthday dinner for a friend of hers I barely knew, on the working theory that I needed to remember, practically and physically, how to exist in a room without being introduced as someone's wife first and a person second, how to answer the question what do you do without immediately deflecting to Grant's career instead of my own.
Nathan was there, unexpectedly, sitting near the far end of the table with a drink he'd barely touched.
I hadn't seen him in almost fifteen years, not since the writers' group that used to meet in the back corner of a coffee shop on Fairfax that had long since closed and become, I'd heard, a juice bar, back when we were both broke and unproduced and convinced, the way only twenty-somethings can be, that our best work was still somewhere ahead of us, waiting to be discovered by the right person at the right moment.
He'd gone on to actually build the career I'd once wanted for myself, three produced features now and a first-look deal with a major studio, and I braced myself internally for the specific awkwardness of being introduced as the woman who'd simply stopped writing somewhere along the way, the cautionary tale version of the story.
"Sienna Mercer," he said instead, when Rachel introduced us, his face lighting with genuine recognition, like the name still meant something specific and separate to him beyond the obvious tabloid association.
"I still think about your pilot. The one about the two sisters running the roadside motel out near the desert, the one with the ending where the younger sister burns the registry book. "
Nobody had thought about that pilot in fourteen years, as far as I knew, not even me most days. I barely had, if I was honest with myself, sitting there with a glass of wine I'd been nursing all evening.
"You remember that?"
"I remember thinking you were the best writer in that entire room," he said, smiling in a way that suggested the memory still cost him a little something, some old competitive sting he hadn't fully outgrown.
"And I remember being genuinely annoyed about it at the time, because I very badly wanted to be the best writer in the room instead, and you kept beating me to it every single week. "
We talked for nearly an hour, easy in a way I hadn't expected walking in that night, about nothing particularly important, about people from the old writers' group and what had eventually happened to each of them, who'd sold out, who'd given up, who'd surprised everyone by actually making it.
He told me about his own long road, three unproduced scripts before his first sale, a divorce somewhere in the middle of it that he mentioned only briefly, without self-pity, as simply a fact of the years that had passed.
Somewhere in the conversation he asked, casually, refilling my glass without asking first, what I was working on these days, and I found myself telling him about North of Anywhere before I'd consciously decided to say anything about it at all, the words coming out easier than I expected.
"Can I read it?" he asked, setting down his drink, his attention fully on me now in a way that felt different from the polite half-attention most people in this town offered.
I almost said no automatically. The reflex was so ingrained, so immediate, that I nearly didn't even notice it happening in real time, the old, deep habit of assuming my own work wasn't worth someone else's professional time, especially someone with three produced credits and a real career to protect, a habit I recognized, suddenly and with some discomfort, as something I'd absorbed over the years rather than something that had ever actually been true.
"Yes," I said instead, deliberately, meeting his eyes. "I'll send it to you tomorrow morning."
I sent it that same night, before bed, before I could talk myself out of it in the quiet hours when doubt always crept in loudest, attaching the file with my thumb hovering over send for a full thirty seconds before I finally pressed it.
Rachel found me still awake an hour later, staring at my phone as though it might do something on its own if I watched it closely enough. "You sent it," she said, not really a question, reading the answer in my face.
"I sent it."
"How does it feel?"
I considered the question honestly. "Terrifying," I said. "And also like the first thing I've done purely for myself in longer than I can remember. Both at once. I didn't know those two feelings could exist together this clearly."
"That's usually what it feels like right before something important," Rachel said, settling onto the edge of the mattress beside me. "The terror and the rightness arriving at exactly the same time, refusing to cancel each other out."
I didn't sleep much that night, replaying the dinner conversation, replaying the specific, unhurried way Nathan had listened when I described the sisters, when I'd forgotten, for the length of that conversation, that I was supposed to be the woman whose marriage was falling apart in every tabloid in the country, and had simply been, instead, a writer talking about her work to someone who understood exactly what that work required.
Nathan called two days later, and I could hear in his voice, in the very first syllable, before he said a single word about the actual script, that the news was going to be good, a lightness in his tone that no amount of professional restraint could fully disguise.
"This is really good, Sienna," he said. "I mean that as someone who reads roughly forty scripts a month professionally and genuinely hates thirty-eight of them without exception, sometimes within the first ten pages.
This has something real in it, something I actually felt reading it, which almost never happens anymore.
I want to help you develop it properly, if you're open to that kind of partnership, because I think this deserves a real shot. "
"What does developing it properly actually look like," I asked, wanting the specifics rather than the enthusiasm, some old instinct telling me the enthusiasm alone wouldn't be enough to carry either of us through what came next.
"Structural notes first," he said. "Probably a full pass on the second act, if I'm honest, though the bones are strong enough to survive it.
Then character work on the younger sister specifically, she reads a little thin compared to how vivid the older one is.
It's not a quick process. I want to be honest about that upfront.
This could take months of real work before it's ready to show anyone else. "
"I have time," I said, and heard the strange, unfamiliar truth of that sentence as I said it, that for the first time in longer than I could remember, my schedule belonged entirely to me, unclaimed by anyone else's premiere calendar or press tour, and the thought of months of difficult, uncertain work ahead of me felt less like a burden than an invitation.
"There's something else I want to say," Nathan added, more careful now.
"I'm not doing this because of who you're married to, or because of anything in the press.
I want that clear between us from the start.
I'm doing this because the pages are good.
If they weren't, I'd have told you kindly and let it go, tabloids or no tabloids. "
"I believe you," I said, and found that I meant it, that something in the plain, unemotional way he'd said it carried more weight than a more effusive reassurance would have.
I cried after we hung up, sitting alone on the lumpy mattress with the phone still warm in my hand, the good kind of crying, the kind that comes from being seen clearly and specifically after a very long stretch of not being seen at all, not for anything that belonged only to me and nobody else.
Rachel found me there twenty minutes later, tears mostly dried, and didn't ask what had happened until I was ready to tell her, and when I finally did, she hugged me hard enough that I nearly spilled the tea she'd brought, and told me she'd known, from the very first night I read those pages again in her guest room, that something like this was coming.
The first real writing day arrived a week later, once Nathan had sent over a short list of structural notes he wanted me to consider before our first proper meeting, and I sat down at Rachel's kitchen table with my laptop and the fourteen-year-old pages and told myself, with more confidence than I actually felt, that this would be simple, that the words would come back the way they had that first midnight in the guest room.
They didn't. I stared at the blinking cursor for the better part of an hour, opening and closing the same paragraph a dozen times, rewriting a single line of dialogue so many times it lost all shape in my head, until I could no longer tell if any version of it had ever actually worked.
My instincts, which had felt so sure that first night, now felt entirely unreliable, secondhand, borrowed from a woman fourteen years younger who I wasn't certain I still had access to.
By early afternoon I'd made almost no real progress, and something in me, tired and frustrated in a way that had nothing to do with the actual writing and everything to do with months of accumulated exhaustion, reached for the delete key and held it down over an entire scene, watching the words disappear line by line, telling myself it was easier to start from nothing than to keep failing to fix something broken.
I stopped before the whole scene vanished, my finger still resting on the key, staring at the half-erased page, and something in the specific violence of what I'd almost done to my own work startled me enough to close the laptop and walk away from it for an hour, standing instead at Rachel's kitchen window watching a delivery truck idle in the lot below, letting my mind go quiet.