Chapter Seventeen
SIENNA
Preproduction took me north eventually, to a small coastal town three hours from anything resembling a city, scouting locations for scenes that needed real fog and real physical distance from Los Angeles to work the way the script honestly demanded of them, the way Nathan and I had agreed the material needed if it was going to feel true rather than staged.
Grant didn't follow me north, and I noticed the absence with something close to relief, standing on a windswept bluff overlooking gray water with a location scout pointing out sight lines, and then noticed my own relief with a kind of quiet, uncomfortable recognition of how low my expectations of him had sunk over the past difficult year, that simply not intruding on my work now registered, in my mind, as an actual meaningful gesture worth noting rather than the bare minimum any reasonable person would offer.
He sent exactly one message during the three weeks I was away scouting, a message I read four times before setting my phone face down on the hotel nightstand. I'm proud of you. I won't make this about me.
That was the entirety of it. No follow-up text an hour later fishing for a response, no bid for a longer conversation disguised as concern, no subtle test of whether the short message might open a door he could then walk through uninvited.
He'd said space and he had genuinely meant it, and something in me softened slightly at the visible discipline of that restraint, even as I reminded myself firmly that discipline sustained over three weeks wasn't remotely the same thing as real change sustained over an entire lifetime together, that three weeks was nothing against seventeen years of the opposite habit.
The location scout, a woman named Priya who'd worked with Nathan on two previous films, mentioned one afternoon over sandwiches that she'd read a piece about my situation months earlier, before she knew she'd end up working with me, and had assumed at the time that the coverage was probably exaggerated the way tabloid coverage usually was.
"I don't think that anymore," she said, simply, not pushing further, and something in the plain, unembellished honesty of the comment landed harder than any of the more elaborate sympathy I'd received from people who knew the full story.
Priya and I spent a full afternoon walking the length of a fog-heavy beach the script called for in its final act, discussing camera angles and tide charts, and somewhere in the middle of that practical, unglamorous work I understood, with some surprise, that I hadn't thought about Grant, or the campaign, or any of it, for nearly three hours straight, the longest uninterrupted stretch of forgetting I'd managed since the whole ordeal began.
In the evenings, alone in the small rented room above the town's only decent restaurant, I worked through revisions Nathan had flagged before I left, the isolation of the place turning out to be exactly what the material needed, no distractions competing for the specific, total attention good revision work demanded.
I ate dinner most nights at the bar downstairs, alone, unbothered, recognized by absolutely no one, and found something unexpectedly restorative in the total anonymity of it, in being, for the first time in years, simply a woman eating alone at a bar rather than somebody's wife being watched for signs of how she was holding up.
One evening, the bartender, an older man who'd clearly worked that same bar for decades, asked what brought me to town, and I told him, truthfully, that I was scouting locations for a film.
He asked whether I was the director. I told him I'd written it.
He seemed genuinely impressed, refilled my water without being asked, and told me, unprompted, that his daughter wanted to write for a living and he never knew what to tell her about whether it was a realistic thing to want.
"Tell her it's realistic," I said, "as long as she doesn't let anyone else decide how long she's allowed to keep trying."
He nodded slowly, turning that over, and I sat with my own advice for the rest of that evening, recognizing, days later, on the drive home, exactly how much of it I'd needed to hear myself say out loud before I'd fully believed it.
I learned the rest of the story almost by accident, scrolling through industry news one morning over breakfast at the location scout's temporary office, a converted garage with bad coffee and excellent wifi and a corkboard covered in location photographs.
Grant had quietly withdrawn from a major franchise film, a project reportedly worth eight figures to him personally over the life of the deal, after learning that the studio intended to continue marketing him publicly alongside Lila for an already-planned sequel campaign, a campaign that would have run for years if the franchise performed as expected.
He hadn't told me any of this himself. I read about it the same way the rest of the industry did, buried in a two-paragraph item in the trades, with only a terse, non-committal confirmation from his camp that he'd exited the project over vague creative differences that nobody bothered to specify further, the kind designed to close the subject rather than open it.
It mattered more, somehow, that he hadn't told me directly, that I'd had to learn it from a trade publication like any other industry observer.
A grand gesture made specifically for an audience was easy, cheap even, something publicists dreamed up constantly to generate exactly the right kind of sympathetic coverage.
A quiet gesture made in near-total silence, costing him millions of real dollars, telling almost no one the actual reason, asking for absolutely nothing in return, not even my knowledge of it, was considerably harder for me to simply dismiss as another performance staged for my benefit.
I sat with that trade item open on my phone for a long time before finally going back to work that morning, the location scout waiting patiently by the door, pretending not to notice how long I'd been staring at my screen.