Chapter One
August
“Just move out to the ’burbs,” Tess said with a groan. “Fuck, have you eaten at a Chili’s lately? Max ordered us an appetizer feast for dinner, and I forgot how hard their Southwestern eggrolls slap.”
“They slap?” I asked. “Are we saying that now?”
Tess shrugged on the screen of my phone. “My assistant said it the other day and she has her nipples pierced, so I trust her.”
I thought about that for a moment. Admittedly, the owner of two pierced nipples seemed like the exact right person to trust on something like this. “Okay, yeah. That makes sense. How’s the renovation going?”
She rolled her eyes. “I’d rather be living in Brody’s pool house at this point, TBH.”
“I don’t think we’re saying abbreviations like that out loud, FYI.”
“You just said ‘FYI.’” She wiped ranch from the corner of her mouth.
“FYI is evergreen,” I explained to her.
“Whatever. You sneaking any hotties into that pool house while Brody’s out of town? Maybe you should let him see them on the security footage. Make him a little jealous.”
“He’s my boss,” I reminded her, even if I had secretly fantasized about how far a little jealousy would go with Brody.
“Uh, your boss who doubles as your sometimes fuck buddy and who you’ve been infatuated with since college.”
“You know I couldn’t make any commitments when Mom was alive.
There was no point in letting anything get serious enough to where someone would want to take the next step and live together—plus, Brody and I have always been purposefully casual,” I said, as though I were a goddamn adult who knew what she wanted and got it too.
“That’s the only way this works. For both of us.
” That’s what I’d told myself for the last few years.
The convenient arrangement with Brody was as much for his sake as it was for mine.
I flopped back in bed and let the phone fall to my side so that Tess’s view was of the ceiling fan. The very sleek ceiling fan.
Brody’s pool house was nicer than my own home. Well, my former home.
He’d insisted I stay here after he found me crying in his walk-in closet the day of Ruby’s estate sale. Tess had offered too, but she, Max, and their five kids were down to one bathroom and two bedrooms during their renovation.
In the moment, I’d wanted to be a martyr and refuse Brody’s help, but the truth was I had nowhere to go.
It would have been the perfect time for me to tell him that maybe I wouldn’t be so on edge if he paid me enough to have my own place in a twenty-five-mile radius of my job or maybe if he’d just finally give me that long-promised promotion, but a small, pitiful part of me wondered if moving into his backyard would be the start of something more for us. Finally.
What it had turned out to mean was that I never actually went home from work.
Some nights were good. We’d stay up late in his media room and watch movies we had always tried to convince each other to like.
(The fact that he didn’t see the cinematic value in the 1991 classic horse-jumping movie Wild Hearts Can’t Be Broken had and always would be Brody’s number one red flag.) And then there were nights when he was getting home late and needed someone to run lines with him and sometimes that ended with us in bed and me tiptoeing back over to the pool house in the morning before the rest of the staff arrived.
Brody had left for a research trip to Scotland for his next feature three days ago, and I was nearly certain he planned on surprising me with a ticket to join him.
It was my fortieth birthday today, and he had witnessed both of my Outlander phases.
(When I discovered the first book in college and then again when the TV series began airing a few years ago.
Brody was hooked too, though, and even watched a few episodes with me.
I never told him I was actually rewatching each episode with him, because Mom and I always watched together when they dropped at midnight.)
So up until the moment Ruben, his driver, pulled out of the front gates with Brody in tow for the airport, I thought I was for sure about to Eat, Pray, Love my way through Scotland.
But instead, I was here in the Hollywood Hills, signing for packages and fielding maintenance people on my fortieth birthday.
“I’m sorry we couldn’t go out for your birthday tonight,” Tess said. “Next week, though.”
I picked the phone back up so she could see me again. “We’re forty,” I said, unable to hide the creeping dread in my voice.
“Babe, I’ve been forty. Don’t make it a thing. Don’t be one of those people who gets hung up on it. Graceful aging, et cetera, et cetera.” She turned her head from the screen. “Did you put the kids down?”
Max said something I couldn’t decipher in the background and then Tess said, “I’ll talk to Chloe.” She shoved a chip in her mouth and turned back to me. “Okay, I gotta run. But did you get the succulent I sent?”
“Yes,” I said. “I look forward to killing it.”
“Give it a name. That will make it harder to kill.”
“Or worse when it finally does die. Love you. I’ll talk to you later.
Tell Chloe I support whatever form of civil disobedience she’s currently participating in.
” I loved Tess’s kids, but after years of caretaking for Mom and assisting for Brody, I had no desire to be a mother.
Of all the things in my life that made me second-guess myself, the decision to stay childless was not one of them.
“Then you can come and deal with her tantrum tomorrow, when she hasn’t slept in twenty-four hours,” Max called off-screen.
“Love you, Max!” I said.
“Happy birthday, V!” he responded.
“Wait, wait,” Tess said. “Did you finish your read-through of The Wunderkind for that agent with the Nelson Group?”
Ah, yes. Two months ago, just after Ruby’s big announcement, I’d accidentally gotten tipsy at an after-party Brody was hosting and pitched the two-decade-old script I’d been nursing since college to some rando who turned out to be Simon Shah, a budding junior agent who’d just been featured in The Hollywood Reporter.
I woke up to a text that he wanted to see my screenplay as soon as it was ready.
(Spoiler: The damn thing would never be ready.)
Since then, I’d barely been able to bring myself to crack open my laptop. The thought that someone could say no to something I’d worked on for so long was suddenly very real.
“Yes!” I lied. “Totally. Just one last read for typos.”
“Perfect. Okay, good. I’m here if you need eyes.” Tess blew me a kiss and the screen went dark.
God, she and Max were fucking perfect. They were good friends to me and they made pretty babies.
Tess was a fierce entertainment lawyer while Max was her ideal match and completely happy in his role as a stay-at-home dad.
Sometimes they were too much to look at because they just complemented each other so well.
And I was forty. All of a sudden. Out of nowhere.
Forty didn’t sound old. But I was feeling it.
It was like I’d suddenly become the human form of the “over the hill” aisle at a party store.
I was used to being a certain degree of invisible.
All the body positivity in the world couldn’t penetrate what it felt like to be a fat woman in this industry.
But forty was a level up on the scale of insignificance.
On the bright side, with this level of obscurity, I could probably commit a heinous crime and get away with it.
As much it seemed like it, though, tonight wasn’t a pity party. A party required attendees. (Ba-dum-tss!)
This, however, was a cozy night with a bottle and a half of cheap rosé and a rewatch of the final season of Boy Meets World.
And then maybe the last episode of Six Feet Under if I felt like I still needed to exorcise some emotional demons.
I was a chronic rewatcher. It was comforting. The stakes were low.
In a way, it felt like unraveling a puzzle and doing a deep dive on why my favorites were my favorites.
My Intro to Creative Writing professor, a romance author who refused to share her pen name, always said that the best writers were natural observers, but sometimes I felt like I observed more than I experienced.
If I couldn’t bring experience to the table, at least I could consume.
That was something I could do while I took care of Mom or reorganized Brody’s pantry.
As the credits on the final episode rolled, I began scrolling through channels until I stumbled upon a Brody classic, Forever Yours.
Brody didn’t do many rom-coms anymore, but this one had really resonated and became a bit of a moment.
He played a widower who matched on a dating app with the woman who happened to be the funeral director for his late wife’s funeral years before.
I’d studied the script back and forth and liked it quite a bit.
I always read scripts before he signed on, and this one had felt solid.
It was funny, yet weighty. But then after some rewrites and with only a week left on set, I found a gaping plot hole everyone else had seemingly missed.
I pitched Brody a fix and he got the studio to extend production by a few days for a reshoot.
People still quoted lines back to him in the streets.
Lines from the reshot scenes—many that I wrote word for word.
That wasn’t the first time and it certainly wasn’t the last time I’d helped Brody out on set. So even though this movie would never have my name in the credits, I couldn’t help but feel a little proud whenever I saw it replaying on TV for the millionth time.
As Brody made his big gesture at the end of the movie, showing up to a national funeral director convention to win his lady back, my vision began to blur as my eyes grew heavier and heavier.
Marlon, my thirteen-year-old Pomeranian, curled up on the pillow next to my head.
God, this bedding was elite. Money really could buy happiness.
And good sleep. I needed to check the label on this pillow.
Then I could google it and calculate how many hours’ worth of work Brody would have to pay me so I could afford a set for myself.
Just as sleep was within reach, my phone chirped from where it dangled in my fingers. With a groan, I fumbled through my alerts until I noticed one from my bank.
ACCOUNT BALANCE: -$274.22
“Fuck,” I whispered, as I sat up, the blood rushing to my head.