Chapter Fifteen
SIENNA
Iwatched the statement the morning it went out, standing at Rachel's kitchen counter with coffee going cold in my hands, in almost the exact posture I'd once stood at my own kitchen counter watching a fan video quietly destroy something I hadn't yet learned how to protect, the symmetry of it not lost on me even as I read.
It affected me. I won't pretend otherwise, not even to myself, not in the privacy of my own head where honesty costs nothing.
There was something in the specific, unguarded honesty of it, the total and noticeable absence of the careful, hedge-everything PR language I'd learned over the years to recognize instantly and instinctively distrust, that told me plainly this had come from Grant himself and not from a team of people paid to manage Grant's image, that these were his actual words in his actual voice, however carefully he'd phrased them.
Rachel read it over my shoulder, quiet for a long moment afterward. "That's a real statement," she said finally. "That's not a PR document. I've read enough of those in my line of work to know the difference."
"I know," I said.
"Does it change anything?"
I thought about the question longer than either of us expected me to. "Not yet," I said. "But it's the first time in months I've believed something he said without immediately looking for the part he left out."
I saw the second statement two days later, the one defending me from the backlash that had formed around the first, and something in the specific, fierce protectiveness of it, the fact that he'd done it without asking my permission or checking whether I wanted the attention, unsettled me slightly even as it moved me.
I called Rachel over to read it, needing a second opinion on what I was feeling.
"He's not wrong to do it," Rachel said, carefully. "But he did it without asking you first, again. Same instinct as before, just pointed in a better direction this time."
She was right, and I understood, sitting with that observation, that even Grant's better instincts still needed refining, that protecting me publicly without consulting me first was still, in its own way, a version of deciding for me what I needed, even when what he decided happened to be correct.
But I didn't call him. Not that morning, not that week, not even when Rachel gently asked if I was going to.
An apology, even a genuinely real one, even one that had visibly cost him a fortune in future studio goodwill and industry standing, one that made him look weak to exactly the people who valued strength above all else in this business, was the beginning of real accountability and not, on its own, the end of it.
I had learned that particular lesson the hard way, watching him tell me for months that he'd fix it while the actual fixing never quite arrived on schedule, always delayed by some more pressing concern.
Words were relatively easy to write on a legal pad at a kitchen table in one difficult, cathartic evening, however genuinely felt they were in the moment of writing them.
What I needed to see now, if I ever saw it at all, was something considerably harder to fake convincingly, sustained over time, and it would take much longer than a single well-written statement to prove out.
That same week, I signed the contract for North of Anywhere, the terms exactly as I'd fought for them, my name as sole writer, and sat alone in Rachel's guest room afterward, the ink still fresh in places, feeling something fuller and considerably harder to name precisely than simple happiness, something that felt like the slow, careful mending of a bone that had been broken for a very long time.
The first instinct I had, sitting there with the signed contract spread out on the lumpy mattress in front of me, was to reach for my phone and call Grant.
Seventeen years of sharing every single piece of good news with him first, before anyone else, before even Rachel, had built a reflex in me I couldn't simply undo in a few months of separation, no matter how justified that separation was, no matter how much distance I'd otherwise managed to build.
I didn't call him.
I sat with the reflex instead, letting the impulse move through me and pass without acting on it, watching it rise and recede the way you watch a wave from a safe distance on the shore, and understood, in that quiet, private moment, that some essential part of healing was going to involve learning to hold my own good news without needing him to witness it first in order for it to feel entirely real, entirely mine.
I called Rachel into the room instead, and she read the signed pages over my shoulder twice before whooping loudly enough that a neighbor knocked to check whether everything was all right, and we spent the rest of that evening on her kitchen floor with a bottle of wine neither of us finished, toasting a future I'd spent fourteen years assuming had already closed itself off to me for good.
It wasn't the celebration I would once have imagined, no red carpet, no premiere, no husband's arm around my waist for the cameras.
It was better, in its own way, smaller and entirely mine, witnessed only by the one person who had never once needed me to be anyone other than exactly who I was.