“You still doing this?” her husband Malcolm asked every time they reviewed their budget with the line item for her PGA dues—$425 a year ever since The Starfighter 2, when she’d qualified for membership—and she would nod. She paid double that to the teachers union, and all it got her was crappy health insurance, 3 percent cash back on her Visa card, and collective bargaining rights, the abstract weight of which felt more tangible at least after the strike this spring. Malcolm didn’t force her to explain what exactly this $425 entitled her to, other than a seat at a breakfast she had no reason to attend because she didn’t make movies anymore. For years after she left LA, she wrote only for The River, a theater collective in the East Bay that operated so far beneath the towering shadow of Berkeley Rep that it had guaranteed Phoebe both creative freedom and near anonymity. From September to June she was an English teacher, and in the summers, she taught precocious children how to become Brad Bird or Hayao Miyazaki in just eight weeks. Paying her PGA dues every year was like reading her horoscope on her birthday, an act of superstition more than faith in the outcome.

Malcolm had offered to come with her to LA, but she’d told him not to worry. It would be a quick trip, twenty-four hours, all work. The last time she’d left, more than a decade ago with another failed pitch behind her, she’d sat in seat 9c with her headphones on, waiting for the ocean sounds blasting in her ears to soothe the panic in her gut, to displace the irrational feeling that she’d dodged a bullet, and she’d promised herself: “You’re done. You never have to come to this fucking town again.” And yet here she was. The producing conference was this morning, there were dozens of networking parties tonight, and if she was very, very lucky, she’d be home tomorrow with a line on a distribution deal.

She checked the time. Apa would be driving Umma to the hospital now for her monthly appointment in the infusion chair. Phoebe had loaded a meditation app and all twelve episodes of The Light in Your Eyes onto the iPad her brother bought for Umma. Their mother had always been terrible at sitting still; now chemo forced her to do it for six-hour stretches, plus the weeks afterward when she felt too ill to move. At least for today, she could lose herself in the latest K-drama all the ajummas were watching. Phoebe chose to hold on to that image of her mother in the chair watching her stories, content for now, getting better. She had to get better.