The Comeback(38)

Nathan stands in front of the window with his arms folded across his chest. The winter sun spills in behind him, lighting him up like an angel. “You know that people very nearly forgot about you. I don’t know if that surprises you, but it shouldn’t.”

“Did you call this meeting to tell me that I’m expendable?” I ask, more surprised than anything.

“Not entirely. But yeah, everyone is expendable. What? I’m being honest,” he says when Kit frowns at him.

“I think what Nathan is really trying to say is that what you do next is very important. Have you . . . heard from Able?” Kit asks delicately.

I shake my head as my heart rate speeds up. I don’t think I realized it at the time, but Able chose them too. They were nowhere near as successful as he was, so when Able suggested they team up, they probably jizzed in their Calvins at the mere thought. Maybe they don’t know who they are without him either.

“Gracie sweetheart?” Kit prompts.

Gracie sweetheart. Said as if I’m still thirteen, fresh in LA in a Minnie Mouse T-shirt and a pair of cream Converse signed by all my friends back home.

“I still don’t understand what happened,” Nathan says, looking up at the ceiling as if summoning all of God’s strength just to deal with me.

I move in my seat, staring past them and out the window, at the city sprawled beneath us. I’ve seen this view at least five hundred times, from the highest peak of Runyon Canyon to the rooftop of Soho House, and I have never understood what people like so much about this city. Dylan used to try to explain how much energy he found in the twinkling lights of the valleys and the pastel houses sprouting up in the hills, how much beauty he saw in even the darkest corners of Hollywood and the dusty Topanga Canyon trails concealing rattlesnakes and mountain lions. The problem was, I could never see any of it through the smog.

“Like you said, everyone’s expendable,” I say coldly.

“Are you sure there’s nothing you can do to fix it? You didn’t do anything to upset him?” Nathan asks, still desperate to understand just how the well dried up so suddenly.

“Nathan, we’ve been through all of this. It’s over.”

Nathan shakes his head, glancing at Kit for support. “Let’s see how you feel about that after a year of making holiday movies for Hallmark.”

“Okay, there’s no need to be mean,” I say, frowning as Dusty lets out a piercing yelp.

“He made you what you are, Grace. I don’t know if you can come back from that,” Nathan says snidely.

And that’s when it hits me that Able still controls it all. He set it up from the start so that he is at the core of every choice I make and every choice made for me, and the best part is, he never even has to think about me. My career, my relationships, even where I live: Able is still at the crux of it all. Maybe he knew all along that without him I would become untethered, floating all alone in the ether of Hollywood. He always knew that nobody else would want to touch me.

“Isn’t it your job to figure that out? It seems like a flawed business model to only have one available avenue for your client,” I say bitingly.

“Grace. Your last movie came out over a year ago. If you found a project tomorrow, the movie could take up to three years to be released. In that time, even the microscopic percentage of moviegoers who still care about you will have forgotten you. You were one fucking movie away from being a household name. One movie.” Nathan slides into the chair behind his desk and places both of his palms in two tiny sandpits on either side of his Mac. He traces his fingers lightly through the sand and then gently rubs them together until his hands are clean again. I raise my eyebrows at Kit, but he just shrugs. I figure that Nathan’s feng shui guy has instructed him to do this to calm down in moments of high pressure, and he seems to have nearly achieved it when he catches sight of me. A deep red flush climbs up his baby-smooth neck, and his lips tighten.

“Are you fucking laughing, Grace?” Nathan turns to Kit and points at me, as if he can’t deal with me anymore. “Is she laughing?”

“I really am sorry. I know you have families and, like, billion-dollar houses to pay off and stuff. I do understand that. It’s hard. It’s just, you kind of convinced me I already was a household name?”

“Do you think anyone in Wallace, Idaho, wonders where Grace Turner went?” Nathan asks. “Do you know how hard everyone worked to get that movie out in time to be eligible for awards season because of you? Do you know how much groundwork we laid to try to get you that Oscar nomination? We rented a fucking billboard on Sunset Boulevard, Grace, but you’d already left by the time it went up. We played the entire thing perfectly from the start, and you fuck it up at the last minute by disappearing. Who blows off the Golden Globes?”

Nathan looks at Kit, who shakes his head sadly, and I wonder how many times they’ve had this conversation.

“You know, actually, let’s talk about the Globes for a moment. We flew sixty-five members of the Hollywood Foreign Press out to Berlin for the wildest party they’ve ever been to. Most of these guys didn’t sleep for the entire trip. Two guys missed their flights home. Our For Your Consideration campaign was so fucking flawless that kids would have studied it in film school for years to come. If you hadn’t disappeared six weeks out.”

“I didn’t know you were doing all that,” I say defensively. “Nobody told me.”