Anna parked her car and studied the view of the Laurel Canyon hills. She knew what to do, and she wasn’t scared anymore.

She’d been so flattered by Tom’s attention when they first met. He’d been everything she’d thought she wanted, someone who always knew what to say and what to wear, someone who fit in. The morning after her premiere at the festival, she’d run into him at the hotel, hungover and tired. Tom had given her a few points of negotiation for the sale of The Castro. She’d gone into the meeting more self-assured than she expected. When the negotiations played out the way he said, and when she assured him that she didn’t want to sign with him, he’d taken her to brunch and regaled her with stories of his climb from the mailroom. To this day, she didn’t know if that was a scam or sincere, plying her with waffles and stories that showed how hard he’d worked, how hard he’d wanted to make it. It was smart. On that morning, they could’ve been on the same side.

They had been in the beginning, before Tom could no longer live with the vision he had of them.

It had been comforting at first, to let someone else make decisions for her. But growing up, growing into herself personally and professionally, meant that she was ready to make her own decisions—about her clothing, her projects, her... life. And then his so-called guidance had begun to chafe, and the more time passed, with his unyielding opinions about everything from her shoes to her friends to her film work, the more he suffocated the person she was becoming—herself. By the end, she’d traded her feeling of insecurity for confinement.

She got out of the car. The sprawling Italianate mansion where she’d lived with Tom loomed in front of her. The colonnades had been shipped from Rome, the stones from a quarry outside Paris, and the arched promenade around the second floor from a crumbling castle in Wales. It looked like a house designed by a child from cut-up pieces of Architectural Digest.

She walked up the steps of Tom’s house—it had never been their house, always his. She’d envisioned a small house on the beach. A place where she could shout upstairs to tell someone the coffee was ready or the movie was starting. This monstrosity had an intercom.

John hadn’t laughed when she told him about the home she wanted. He’d looked at her like he usually did, like he didn’t understand why she didn’t seize her dreams, as if to say, “Well, what are you waiting for?” She’d been that person once, and she would be again. She hoped John would be with her, but she had a few things to take care of first.