Caroline nodded. “I know you did.”

“When I was working on that script, Caroline—it was as if I had no choice.”

“Exactly.” Caroline nodded. “That is what I’m saying. That’s how it read, even then, when it was so raw.”

“I still can’t believe I showed it to you. It was a mess.”

Caroline nodded. “It was.”

Sarah shrugged. “Even though it was a mess, I thought that script had a beginning, middle, and end. I didn’t realize that the story I was telling—that was just the beginning.”

“So, this is what I’m trying to tell you: You have perspective now. You know where it can go.”

“I know where it went. But I can’t write about it. I’m sorry, but I don’t want to. Not with this ending.”

When their salads arrived, Sarah made sure to take a few bites. The beets were too vinegary, the greens too spicy; she took several sips of wine.

Caroline shrugged. “You don’t need to commit to reality. The story can be whatever you want it to be. And maybe making a film about it—”

The wine suddenly tasted cloying; heat flushed Sarah’s arms, her face. She nearly spat it out.

Caroline touched the napkin to her mouth and held it there for a moment.

Then this woman of unshakable nerve, this person who had believed in Sarah when no one else could see her talent, her agent of over twenty years, her one remaining connection to a professional reality, closed her eyes before placing the napkin gently on the table. “I shouldn’t have brought it up.”

ON THE TRAIN BACK TO BROOKLYN, Sarah bit her nails down to the quick, after a summer of successfully growing them out. Never would she have imagined ending up as someone who rarely wrote more than an occasional fragment, or for whom the shame of not working was so familiar. She tried reminding herself that she still taught a class (Film Aesthetics 1 & 2) each semester at New York Film Academy and she sometimes returned to the screenplay idea she’d sent Caroline, but Sarah knew what working felt like and what it took out of her, and this was not it.