Her voice cracked, but she pushed on. “You have to fight for your birthright and the future you deserve. You have to do it all, and you have to do it on your terms, and you have to refuse to let anyone else tell you how. You have everything you need inside of you, and I’ll never forgive you for conforming to someone else’s idea of who you were born to be.”

“That’s an awful lot of pressure to put on someone you’re walking out on,” Vic said, more than a small measure of frustration in her voice. “What do you owe me in this deal? What future do you owe yourself?”

Of course, she would make this about Sophia.

Of course, she’d push for them to be equals, even in this moment.

“I’ll survive. It’s what I do. I’ll throw myself into work and turn the torture into creative drive. I’ve shown that kind of resolve for much less compelling reasons. I have no reason to believe I cannot do the same now with the love of my life at stake.”

“The love of your life?” The tears spilled from Vic’s eyes.

Sophia leaned down and gently kissed them away. “Yes. Don’t ever doubt that. No matter what I do between now and then, when I win my Oscar for best director, that’s what I’m going to call you. I’ll hold up my little gold statue and say, ‘I dedicate this to the love of my life. You know who you are.’ And that will send the press into a tizzy.”

Vic sniffed. “You’re a promotional genius. Are you sure I can’t hire you to do my publicity?”

Sophia kissed her forehead. “You can’t afford me.”

“I’m very rich.”

Sophia tilted her head back to look her in the eye. “Yes, you are, in so many ways. And don’t ever forget it.”

She stepped back into her shoes and started painfully toward the door.

“But what if it doesn’t go the way you plan?” Vic’s voice trembled.

Sophia stopped, but she didn’t have the strength to turn around.

“What if I don’t win the case for my title? What if you don’t get the director’s chair? What if we do this and we find out we really did need each other after all?”

Sophia shook her head. She couldn’t even engage those thoughts, not now, not ever. They would break her and haunt her and drag her down. It wasn’t that she didn’t share Vic’s fear. She’d been through too much not to consider failure a possibility, but she couldn’t let herself wonder what that might mean for Vic. Instead, she gathered the frail threads of resolve and cut the remaining cords between them.