Zanne faced the driveway and waited. She wasn’t ready to go home to her empty apartment. She’d started over so many times in her life—when her mother died, the first time she came back to LA to make it big, at college, after her father died, when she got clean, when she got the job with Ted. She didn’t know if she could do it again. She didn’t even know where to start. At least with NA, there had been the meetings and her sponsor to talk to, the steps to follow, the days to count and amends to make. The other rebirths were messier, more improvised. There were no authorities, no teachers. When awful things happened, there was no one to go to. There was just the car door shutting, the feel of the cool windowpane on your cheek, the starlight smudged like crystals; next thing you knew, it was midafternoon and you were in a strange apartment in Los Feliz and something was wrong. You could feel it in your body. But there was no one you could go to with heroin still in your system, and tell them you felt wrong in your body, that you were pretty sure you had been violated, and have it mean anything except that you were worthless.

Zanne had buried that truth with whatever was available—benzos when she had her shit halfway together, more heroin when she didn’t—and then by replacing that truth with another truth: that she was stupid. That truth was more manageable. Because if she was stupid, then there was a chance she could wise up. There was a chance that these things that kept happening to her could stop.

And she did wise up eventually. She left LA. After many, many tries she got clean, too. It wasn’t justice. It was turning a page, moving on.

She wanted Phoebe to have justice, if she could. It seemed so unlikely, but maybe the emails would help.

Phoebe was sure her cheeks were going to crumble off her face. In the past hour, she’d talked to three of the VPs she’d met this morning, two marketing directors, and even the head of development at Stabler, and through it all she smiled nonstop, broadcasting her happiest, most approachable self. Walking down the driveway now, she was exhausted and exhilarated and sick to her stomach. No one had seen the movie yet, but suddenly she had meetings in the works with four different distributors. What if they hated it? What if they came back to her with every reason she’d already heard for why it wouldn’t sell? What if they watched it and thought to themselves, Dear God, where are all the white people?