New Beginnings

 

POV: Vivian Ashford

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Los Angeles is exactly what I needed it to be, which is to say it is enormous and loud and full of people who are too busy becoming something to spend much time asking you what you left behind.

My apartment is in Silver Lake, third floor, west-facing windows that catch the late afternoon light in a way that makes everything look more golden than it actually is. I have a bed, a secondhand couch, three boxes of clothes I haven't fully unpacked yet, and a view of the hills that I stand in front of every morning with my coffee and remind myself counts as a win. It is smaller than my dorm room was. I don't care. It is mine, and no one I grew up with knows the address, and that feels, for now, like exactly the right amount of freedom.

I have been here eleven days.

I have a meeting in two hours with Marcus Webb.

---

Marcus Webb's production company occupies the top two floors of a building in West Hollywood that someone spent a great deal of money making look like it cost even more money than it did, all raw concrete and reclaimed wood and art that is interesting enough to signal taste without being challenging enough to alienate anyone. His assistant, a young woman named Priya who moves with the practiced efficiency of someone managing a small country, meets me in the lobby and takes me up in an elevator with mirrored walls.

I look at myself in the mirror the whole way up. Ivory blouse, tailored trousers, heels that add three inches and cost me two weeks of my savings account. Hair down. Minimal jewelry. I look like someone who belongs in this building. I have been practicing looking like I belong in buildings like this since I was eleven years old, and I am very good at it by now.

The elevator opens onto a space flooded with light.

Marcus Webb is standing at his desk with his back to the door, phone to his ear, looking out over the city with the posture of a man who has decided that the view belongs to him. He's in his mid-forties, broad-shouldered, with silver threading through his dark hair in a way that's clearly been cultivated. He turns when Priya announces me, and his smile is the practiced, warm kind that powerful men in this industry have perfected: interested without being eager, approving without being obvious about assessing.

"Vivian Ashford," he says, in a tone that suggests he has been saying my name favorably in rooms I wasn't in.

"Mr. Webb."

"Marcus. Sit down."

I sit. He doesn't, which is intentional, which I notice, which I file away.

---

He talks for twenty minutes about the projects he has in development, the talent he represents, the trajectory he envisions for certain kinds of stories. He is charming and specific and does his research, which is the thing that separates the real players from the people pretending to be real players, and I find myself leaning forward despite myself, because this is the conversation I have been building toward since I was eleven years old, and it is happening, and it is real.

"You're going to be someone people talk about," he says, in the direct way that could be flattery but sounds like observation. "Not because you're beautiful, though you are. Because you're hungry. I can always tell."

"Is that a compliment?"

"In this business, it's the only one that matters."

He slides the contract across the desk. It is thick, professionally prepared, the kind of document that represents the serious version of things. Priya brings coffee, sets it down without making eye contact, and disappears.

I read the contract. I read the whole thing, which I can tell surprises him slightly. He covers it well.

There are things in it I would have negotiated differently if I had more leverage. I don't have more leverage. Not yet.

I pick up the pen.

"One thing," I say.

"Name it."

"I choose my own auditions. You can advise, you can open doors, but I make the final call on every role I take."

He looks at me for a moment. The practiced smile doesn't move. "You know most of my clients don't ask for that."

"I'm not most of your clients."

Something shifts in his expression, something pleased and assessing at the same time, and he leans back in his chair. "Fair enough," he says. "We'll add a clause."

Priya is called back in. The clause is added. I sign.

Marcus Webb leans across the desk and shakes my hand, and his grip is firm and his smile is warm, and something in the back of my mind files away the fact that he looked at the signed contract the way people look at something they've acquired.

I dismiss it. I'm being paranoid. This is what I came here for.

I pick up my bag and walk back to the elevator, and the city spreads out below me through the glass, enormous and golden and full of possibility, and I think: this is the beginning.

---

POV: Chase Sterling

---

The Sterling Industries boardroom is on the forty-fourth floor, two floors above Legal, with a view that Dominic had the building redesigned to optimize because he believed the physical elevation of a meeting space communicated something about the people conducting business within it. I used to think this was pretentious. I have been in this room for forty minutes and I'm starting to understand the psychology.

The men across the table from me are all between forty-five and sixty, all in suits that announce their net worth without naming a figure, all wearing the careful expressions of people who are trying to determine exactly how much of a problem I am going to be.

They watched me grow up. They knew me as Dominic's inconvenient secret, then as the college kid Dominic was "testing," then as the heir who kissed a girl at graduation and ended up on every gossip site for a week. None of them believe I'm ready for this room.

They are going to need to revise that assessment.

"The Hartley acquisition," I say, setting down the portfolio I've been reviewing since five this morning. "The offer on the table is undervalued by seventeen percent. I want a revised number by end of business Friday or we walk."

The CFO, a man named Bernard who has been at Sterling Industries for twenty years and clearly expected to be the one steering this meeting, clears his throat. "The Hartley board has been resistant to—"

"I understand the Hartley board's position. I want our number, not their comfort level."

Bernard looks at me for a moment with the expression of a man recalibrating.

"End of business Friday," he says.

"Good." I close the portfolio. "What's next."

---

I do not feel like myself in this room. I have been in this room before, as an observer, as Dominic's quiet shadow during school breaks when he wanted me to "learn the business." But I have never been the one at the head of the table, and the person who is at the head of the table feels like someone I put on this morning with the suit.

The cold is still there. It has been there since the morning of the will reading, ambient and constant, like a second skin I've developed that no one else can see. The migraine comes and goes. I have learned to work through it.

I make three decisions in the meeting that Dominic would have made differently. I don't know yet if mine are better. I know they are faster, which is something, and I know the men across the table are paying a different kind of attention than they were forty-five minutes ago.

That will do for now.

---

POV: Vivian Ashford

---

The first social media post about the signing goes up before I've even made it back to Silver Lake.

Marcus's publicist is very good. The photo is from the lobby of his building, taken by someone I didn't notice, and it shows me walking toward the elevator with my bag over my shoulder and my head up, and the caption reads: Vivian Ashford joins the Webb Entertainment family. Watch this space. It gets three thousand likes in the first hour.

My phone starts vibrating with messages from people I haven't spoken to since graduation, which is how I know the post has reached the East Coast.

I sit on my secondhand couch in my Silver Lake apartment and scroll through the comments with my feet pulled up under me, and I feel the particular satisfaction of a person who has been told they're nobody watching the record correct itself in real time.

By nine that evening, a gossip account has run a side-by-side: me in the lobby of Marcus's building, professional and composed, and Chase at some shareholder event two days ago in a suit that probably cost more than my car, looking at the camera with the expression of a man who has decided the entire room is beneath his attention.

The caption: Graduated Same Day. Chose Different Paths.

The comments are split along predictable lines. Half think I made a catastrophic error rejecting the Sterling heir. Half think he's clearly a monster. Both halves are arguing with each other in the replies, which means the post will keep circulating, which means my name will keep circulating, which is the only math that matters right now.

I put my phone down and pour myself a glass of wine and try to feel nothing about the photograph of Chase.

I feel several things about the photograph of Chase.

I pour a second glass.

---

My phone buzzes at 10:43 p.m.

I don't recognize the number but I recognize the cadence of it, the clean absence of preamble, the way it arrives like a statement rather than a question.

Congratulations on the signing. Marcus Webb is known for developing talent. Among other things.

I stare at it.

I know his number. I deleted it three days after graduation, which means he has a new one, which means he specifically obtained a new number and used it to text me at 10:43 at night, which is a choice that contains several layers I don't have the energy to fully excavate right now.

I type: Thank you for the warning I didn't ask for.

The response comes in forty seconds: Not a warning. Just an observation. Enjoy LA.

I type: I intend to.

He doesn't respond for four minutes. Then: I'm sure you will. You always land on your feet. It's one of your better qualities.

The "better" is doing a great deal of work in that sentence.

I type: And your worst quality is the assumption that your opinion of my qualities is something I require.

Another pause. Then: Good night, Vivian.

I put my phone face-down on the coffee table.

My heart is doing something I refuse to give a name to, something that has nothing to do with the wine and everything to do with the fact that Chase Sterling has my new number, and texted me at 10:43 at night, and signed off with "good night" in a way that managed to sound both dismissive and intimate in a combination that should not be possible in two words.

I pick up my wine.

I don't pick up my phone.

---

I fall asleep on the couch with the television on low, which is a habit I've developed in the eleven days since I got here, because the apartment is quiet in a way that takes getting used to. No dorm sounds. No city noise that I recognize yet. Just the particular silence of a place that isn't yours quite yet.

I'm almost asleep when the lights flicker.

Once, twice, the lamp on the end table going dim and then bright again in a way that has nothing to do with any draft because the windows are closed. I sit up slightly, the way you do when something pulls you back from the edge of sleep, and look around the room.

Everything is exactly as it was.

Except the air is different. I notice it the way you notice a smell you can't identify, something in the quality of the room that wasn't there a moment ago. The particular kind of cool that feels less like temperature and more like presence, like the space beside you on an empty subway car has been occupied by someone you didn't see sit down.

The lights are steady now.

I look around the apartment, which is small enough that I can see every corner from the couch.

There is nothing there.

I sit for a moment in the stillness, waiting for my heart rate to come down from wherever it went, and I tell myself it's the building's wiring, which is old, which is a Silver Lake thing, which is perfectly normal, and I am a practical and intelligent person who does not attribute things to causes they don't have.

I pull my blanket up anyway.

I don't fall back asleep for a very long time.

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