“So do you think that … the Meg who lives here. Do you think she should go try to become an actress then?”

“I think she should do what she wants. I only hope she lets me be a part of it.”

I think about the proposal. I had asked myself how it was possible that the other version of me didn’t know how good this life is.

But now I see it, or at least I’m starting to.

She went from life with her parents in a small town in Florida, to college in a small village, and nothing more. There was no great tragedy that taught her, for better or worse, about the unpredictability of life. She is restless with the unlived life rattling around inside, never having given it a shot.

When I showed up for my Brilliance audition, I was in a terrible mood. I’d been dumped by some guy who thought he was the next Quentin Tarantino, I’d found a rat eating a cockroach in the laundry room of my shitty apartment building, and I’d bartended for a particularly bad crowd until two a.m. before making my nine a.m. audition. I was mad at myself for not running the lines enough, for not coming up with something creative to go in the room with. I showed up raw, real, and unprepared. And what do you know? That worked better than the overthought approach I’d been trying for years.

It’s not Which life is right? It’s that I need all of it. I needed to try to be big in LA; I could never have appreciated a smaller life without it. But it doesn’t mean that that life is right forever either. And that’s okay. I can lead a hundred lives in my lifetime.

I remember what Kiera was saying about celebrities, and how they often pour their whole souls into success, only to wind up hiding. I thought it sounded tragic. Maybe it isn’t.

I’m not supposed to be in LA with Grayson and Lisa Michele buzzing around me. I have to change my life. Maybe the universe will be kind enough to forget me here, in this other life, but maybe it won’t. The glitch could end in an instant. Life, as I know too well, can do the same.

My mind whirs, but instead of being confused and conflicted and overwhelmed, like midnight epiphanies sometimes can make me, I know the pieces are drifting into place, settling in.

I fall asleep on Cillian’s chest, wrapped in a deep feeling of contentedness that I’ve never had in my life.

In any life.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Cillian and I fall asleep in a tangle, and I only wake in the morning when I hear him quietly shutting the front door. I curl up in the scent of our extremely hot sex, and sleep for another few hours.