Chapter 2

Ava woke up in a mood that matched the weather. The rain had been intermittent throughout the night, and the morning gave way to dull, muted sunshine.

She was restless and fidgety as she pulled up to the studio lot and made her way to the café. It was an early call morning, and Ava was still yawning when she almost walked into Daniel Cho—Gwen’s long-suffering publicist.

“Watch it, Sunshine.” Daniel hopped back to avoid a collision. He was perfectly dressed, as usual, in a grey suit, with slicked back hair. Ava had no idea how old Daniel actually was. She knew he’d been working with Gwen since forever, so he couldn’t be as young as he looked. “You’re here early.”

Ava yawned at him. “So are you.”

They had, over the years, developed the sort of grudging bond that comes from being together in the trenches. At the same time, they both tended to vie for Gwen’s attention, and she guessed that they were both surprised the other had lasted so long. Ava knew that Daniel put up with almost as much crap as she did.

“What are you doing here anyway?” Daniel usually worked out of the Third Planet Production offices across town.

Daniel shrugged. “I’m meeting with another client while Gwen’s playing hooky. What’s your excuse?”

“Wait,” Ava frowned. “I thought they were shooting the courtroom interiors today.”

“Change of schedule.” Daniel adjusted his satchel and managed to look superior. “You didn’t get the alert?”

Ava shook her head and pulled out her phone. “I guess I missed it.”

Daniel pointed at Ava’s phone. “Oh my God. Is that you?”

Ava had forgotten she’d set her lock screen for the sole purpose of annoying Nic. The picture was one of herself and Nic at twelve, with Rachel in the background. It was one of Ava’s favorites. It was also the year that Nic decided to get braids, and the ends of her dark hair were tied with little rainbow hair ties. In the picture, they had their arms around each other, and Ava was grinning. Her honey-blonde hair was pushed under a Six Flags baseball cap, and she was all sun-kissed and freckled. Rachel was making a face in the background. Although already fully gray in the picture, she must have been only about forty-something.

“Early 2000s chic.” She shoved her phone pack in her pocket and asked begrudgingly, “Do you know why the schedule changed?”

He offered her a pained expression. “Gwen’s licking her wounds after last night’s incident. God, if I had a dollar for every time I had to do damage control for—”

“What incident?” Ava asked with some frustration.

“You don’t know? Gwendolyn and Ronald had a rather public tiff last night before the BETs. Witnesses overheard Ron going on about how things were different now and yada yada yada. The rest is all rumors clogging up my inbox.”

Ava’s mind raced. Well, that was clearly why Gwen had skipped the awards. “You know about Gooding?”

Daniel gave her a look suggesting it was a stupid question, but Ava brushed it off.

“What’s the deal with them?”

“What has she told you?” Daniel asked cautiously.

“That they’re like, engaged?” Ava managed to sound even more appalled by the notion than she had the day before.

“Yeeeah.” Daniel looked skeptical. “I’m not buying it. I have spent too many drunken evenings with that woman to believe that she’s into that dimwitted beefcake.”

“Have you spoken to her?”

“She was less than charming on the phone last night, so…” Daniel grimaced. “Better you than me.”

Ava stared at her phone for about twenty seconds after Daniel walked away. She was usually the first to know if anything changed in Gwen’s schedule. It was her job to know. The fact that she had no idea where Gwen was, coupled with the weird phone call the night before, had her feeling uneasy and a little bit hurt.

Leaning back against the wall of the fake post office, she called Gwen’s number. It rang for so long that Ava was about to hang up, when Gwen answered with an impatient, “Yes?”

“I—” Ava realized, rather belatedly, that she wasn’t exactly sure what she wanted to say.

“I’m going to assume you’re calling me for a valid reason and not just to waste my time.”

“Yes,” Ava said quickly. “I guess I wanted to check in. Apparently, the call schedule changed, and I wasn’t sure—”

“I had some things to take care of,” Gwen interrupted with no further explanation. “But since I have you, call Georgia and tell her I’m on my way. I want to see her immediately.”

The last time Gwen had had Ava call her lawyer so early in the day had been almost a year ago, after a lengthy telephone conversation with her ex-husband.

Ava swallowed, waited a beat, and finally asked, “Is everything all right, Miss Knight?”

Gwen was silent for a long moment, and Ava waited, suddenly wishing she could see Gwen’s face so she could assess the damage. She was good at that—just looking at Gwen and knowing. She knew every frown, every smile. She knew whether a laugh was born out of humor or spite, whether Gwen was sighing because she was exasperated or because she was just tired. Gwen was made up of expressions, tones, movement—a body of language and code in which Ava had become fluent.

“That will be all, Eisenberg.”

Gwen hung up and Ava slumped against the wall. Something was definitely wrong.

The rest of the afternoon played out fairly typically. After Ava called Gwen’s lawyer, she decided to get a few errands done before she was summoned again—although she couldn’t help but wonder if she was going to be summoned at all. She hated days that went off schedule. They always made her feel a little lost.

Ava was coming out of the drugstore after picking up Gwen’s prescriptions when news of a hold-up nearby broke over the police scanner.

Ava hated petty crime. Most criminals were kids trying their luck, or desperate people trying to pay gambling debts or fund a drug habit. Ava hated that she couldn’t save them all, that the best she could do was talk them down, or worst-case scenario, stop the bullet they would have regretted firing for the rest of their lives. These usually weren’t bad people, just people making bad decisions.

The kid in the little Italian deli couldn’t have been older than sixteen. His hand was shaking as he pointed a gun at the young woman behind the counter. Ava could hear the terrified thump of her heart before she even entered the building.

It was over in a second. Ava had the young woman out of the deli and safe on the sidewalk before she went back in and disarmed the boy. He was cursing at her as she walked him out to the police car outside. He called her an alien freak, a fucking abomination, a plague on America. She was impressed with his vocabulary. She hoped they’d let him get his GED in juvie.

The rest of the day was slow. Ava couldn’t stop thinking about the kid in the deli. He’d been so angry. Something about the way he’d looked before the cop shoved his head into the back of the car—all surly and scared—reminded Ava of her brother. She didn’t think about her brother much. He was fifteen when he died. Fifteen and mad at the world. He had never wanted to be on the ship, he’d made that much clear. She remembered an argument in which her mother had told him that one day he’d feel differently. One day, he’d be proud that he was part of something so important. That day never came.

Around lunch time, she went to visit Nic at work, but her friend was buried in new tech, and distracted by all of the shiny.

“Here.” Nic shoved a bag of marshmallows at her, before readjusting her goggles and turning back to her soldering iron. “Stop sulking. It’s unhealthy how co-dependent you are with her.”

“I am not sulking,” Ava retorted, shoving two marshmallows into her mouth so that her cheeks bulged. “And I’m not co-dependent. She’s my job.” Ava chewed and swallowed.

“You could quit,” Nic offered without looking up.

Ava said nothing. She’d never considered quitting. Not even when Gwen had called her two hours after Ava had left work and asked her to go to Beverly Hills and feed Garbo, Gwen’s ancient tabby cat, because the housekeeper had gone home early and Gwen was across town getting a facial.

And to an outsider, yeah, she could see how Gwen might be considered a little…mean. But they didn’t know her the way Ava did. They didn’t see her tackle-hug Luke after he did well on a test, or watch how she cooed over an ill-tempered Garbo. They didn’t hear how grateful she’d sounded when Ava flew to Massachusetts to get a box of Gwen’s favorite cider donuts (she’d told Gwen that they were from a store in the Arts District) after US Weekly had published the gory details of her last divorce.

So by six, after a day of not-sulking, Ava was a little worried when she still hadn’t heard from her boss. Of course, it was really none of her business. Gwen could be doing a hundred things which Ava was not entitled to know or care about. And yet she couldn’t quite rid herself of the nagging worry.

Ava was still feeling vaguely anxious that night as she and Nic were debating what to watch. It was a toss-up between Game of Thrones and The Great British Bake Off. She was weighing up the options when she happened to glance at her phone.

Meet me at the house. Don’t dawdle.

She practically sprang off the couch, phone in hand. “I, um…I need to…”

“Get Little Tommy out of the well?” Nic finished for her, immediately assuming it was a Swiftwing emergency.

“Yeah.” The lie was easier than it should have been. “Something like that.”

Nic sighed dramatically. “Fine, go be a hero. Leave me here to eat this ginormous pizza all by myself.”

“Don’t you dare!” Ava called out as she left the apartment.

If Nic wondered why Ava was leaving through the front door in her normal clothing and not out of the window as Swiftwing, she didn’t ask.

Ava pulled up at Gwen’s gate ten minutes later—one of the benefits of living in Studio City was how close it was to Gwen’s house in the Hills.

She punched in the code and drove up the path to the mansion. Gwen liked things pretty and she liked things expensive, and the house was both. In the years that she’d worked for Gwen, Ava had seen multiple extensions and renovations to the house. She liked the way it looked now, the way it felt both spacious and lived in. It had little touches of personality—photographs on the walls, Luke’s comic books scattered on coffee tables, Gwen’s soft gray cardigan draped over the back of a chair. It felt like a home.

The door was opened by a small, round Hispanic woman in her late fifties. Ava didn’t recognize her. Gwen was notorious for hiring and firing housekeepers.

“I’m here for—”

“Yes, yes,” the woman nodded, ushering Ava in. “Señora Knight is in the back.”

“Thank you.” Ava smiled at the woman, who seemed surprised and offered one in return.

Ava made her way through the entrance hall, past the living room, into the kitchen, and out through the patio doors.

She loved the garden. It was slightly overgrown, green, and lush—filled with fairy lights and a little chipped fountain. There was a hammock where Luke would read for hours, and a little table where she would sometimes run lines with Gwen.

It was where Swiftwing had first visited Gwen, all those months ago, and where she returned over and over again as the masked superhero, inexplicably reluctant to abandon the strange sort of relationship they had formed while Ava was wearing the suit.

Ava wasn’t sure why she’d started visiting Gwen as Swiftwing. At first, it might have been to thank her for the kind words Gwen had said about her during an interview. Later, it was to ask for advice on how to deal with negative backlash from the police department. And then, it became a sort of ritual. Gwen would spend evenings in her garden, and Swiftwing would fly down and visit.

Gwen would offer Swiftwing a drink, and she’d politely decline. They would sit in the wicker chairs where Ava the assistant ran lines with her boss.

When the light was just right and the air smelled of lemon trees, Ava was sometimes reminded of Zrix’dhor, where the humid, tropical weather made everything smell sweet and fruity.

In the late evening, the trees made it dark, but the lights around the pool were on, as well as the little lights strung up between branches. As Ava approached, Gwen looked up and blinked, as if she’d forgotten her summons.

Ava’s eyes flickered to the martini glass on the little table in front of Gwen. It was half empty. And by the number of olives missing from the jar on the bar counter, Ava guessed that Gwen was at least on her third drink.

She was strangely nervous as she took those last few steps forward.

One glass and Gwen was wittier, sharper, and a little meaner. Two and she was argumentative and impatient; she’d pick a fight and win after two. Three and she was honest. Three made Ava nervous.

“Miss Knight.”

Gwen sat up straight and stared at Ava for the longest time. Her eyeliner was smudged, her face all flushed, and she looked…sad. Garbo, who had been sleeping in the chair beside Gwen, yawned and stretched before hopping off and walking to the house, likely annoyed that they were bothering her sleep.

Ava smiled brightly, as if some of her shine could rub off on Gwen. “Can I get you anything, Miss Knight?”

“Cancel it.” Gwen reached for her glass, took a too-big gulp of her martini, and pulled a face of distaste. “All of it.”

“I–” Ava took a tentative step forward. “Cancel…?”

“The plans. The party, the cake, whatever.”

“Everything?”

“Yes.” Gwen sighed, seemingly too exasperated to come up with a sarcastic retort. “Everything.”

Ava stood there for a second too long, feeling helpless. She was caught between running off to complete her task (which she imagined would be particularly satisfying) and stepping forward. But then what? How on earth was she supposed to comfort Gwen? A few placating words? A hand on her shoulder?

Swiftwing would have been confident. She would have echoed some wise Zrix’dhorian proverb and offered comfort. But as Ava, the idea made her stomach twist up with a strange kind of anticipation. It was the same feeling she got when she held eye contact with Gwen for just a moment too long, or when their fingers brushed as Ava handed over her coffee. It was a feeling she held close and tried her hardest not to analyze. She liked her job. She didn’t want to complicate it with…things that were complicated.

She was saved from having to make the choice when Gwen stood, glass in hand, and sauntered over to the little bar area.

“You know he said that I was fooling myself?”

Ava swallowed, grounding herself. “He?”

“Ronald.” Gwen poured clear liquid into her glass from the shaker, frowning in concentration as it filled up. She liked her martini cold and dirty. A splash of olive juice and she was all set. “Apparently he had a crisis of conscience.” Gwen scoffed and whirled around; some of the drink escaped the glass.

“Maybe you should sit down,” Ava suggested, only to be met with Gwen’s most condescending glare.

Gwen sat anyway. “He said,” she pointed her finger at Ava, “and—and this is the real kicker. He said that he didn’t want to compromise his integrity. His integrity.” She looked at Ava, as if waiting for a response. “This from a man who, up until two years ago, was doing shaving cream commercials. Who cares if it was staged? A relationship with me would have made his career.”

Ava frowned and sat on the wicker chair opposite Gwen, not trusting herself to sit next to her. She might have done something stupid, like reached out and put her hand on Gwen’s shoulder, or her arm, or her knee, right where her skirt was riding up. Ava narrowed her focus back to the issue at hand. One confusing revelation at a time.

“It was staged?”

Gwen hummed in confirmation and sipped her drink as if this wasn’t the biggest entertainment scoop of the year.

“But, you were…” Ava started awkwardly. “You could have anyone you want. Why him?”

“Custody.”

“Custody?” Ava repeated slowly, as if the word was foreign.

“My odious ex-husband is suing me for full custody.”

“Of…of Luke?”

“No, of our pet Chihuahua.” Gwen rolled her eyes and chugged the rest of her drink. “Apparently, getting married to someone half his age also robbed Alfonso of half his brain cells. He thinks that because wife two-point-oh has the luxury of spending her hours arranging fruit baskets and getting manicures that they’d make a better primary household. Apparently, all the traveling I do for work is disrupting my son’s routine, which by the way, is ridiculous. He has…consistency. He knows I’m always here for him.”

“Miss Knight.” Ava wished now that she was sitting next to Gwen. She wished that she could reach out and steady her. “I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t be,” Gwen said quickly. “They won’t…I won’t let it happen.”

“Of course,” Ava was equally quick to mollify her. “Of course not.”

“The thing with Ronald was…” Gwen sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose. Ava made a mental note to greet her with ibuprofen in the morning. “Well, my lawyer thought that it would be a good idea to try and equalize the playing field. Alfonso’s got his walking midlife crisis. I would have—”

“Ron,” Ava finished for her.

“Two-parent households are still preferred by the courts.” Gwen shrugged. “It wasn’t going to be a permanent arrangement. An engagement announcement, a few weeks of cohabitation, cutting back on set hours, and by the time the deposition rolled around, Alfonso wouldn’t have a leg to stand on.”

Gwen ran her thumb along the side of the empty glass. “It’s come to this. For six years, I’ve dressed my son for school, made sure he had his lunch, read him bedtime stories. Six years, while Alfonso was off winning Palme d’Ors and sailing yachts in the Greek Isles, making cameos as Luke’s father. Now he marries a Sports Illustrated centerfold and I’m the one who has to prove competence. Can you imagine?”

As silence extended between them, Ava found she had nothing comforting to say. She felt a bit like a child, peeking through a door into a world where grown-ups had lawyers and custody battles, and the monsters didn’t have horns or sharp teeth, and you couldn’t just punch them to make them go away.

She stood and took Gwen’s glass from her, then walked to the bar and traded it for a can of LaCroix.

Gwen accepted it wordlessly and took a sip. She didn’t bat an eye when Ava sat in the chair beside her.

“You want to hear the worst part?” Gwen lowered her voice and leaned forward like she was about to divulge something awful. “My son—my smart, discerning, shy boy—actually likes living with Alfonso and her. He likes that she bakes him gluten-free brownies and that they go horseback riding while Alfonso is on set. He likes her and it…kills me.”

It wasn’t the first time Ava had seen Gwen drunk. But at this point, she was usually dispensing advice, or bemoaning the general idiocy of men. To see Gwen so vulnerable was jarring. She was almost too real. Raw nerves underneath layers of Chanel and expensive perfume.

Ava’s first urge was to fix it, to stop the hurt. But the supersuit under her shirt wasn’t going to solve this problem, and her urge to use jujitsu on Gwen’s ex-husband wouldn’t help anyone.

“Is there anyone else who could step in? I’m sure there are a hundred people—”

“Who I could trust to be discreet about this?” Gwen cut her off. “Don’t be so naïve, Eisenberg. Ronald worked because we had something to offer each other. People know we occasionally move in the same social circles. The whole on-set romance would have sold like artisanal soap at a farmers’ market. He needed a career boost; I needed a convenient relationship. It was perfect.”

Gwen lowered her glass onto the table and it clattered against the metal coaster tray. “Maybe he’s right,” she muttered, her eyes focused on the rim of the glass. “I spend more time behind a camera than anywhere else. More time around these hair stylists and make-up artists than around actual people.”

Ava wasn’t about to mention the fact that they were very much actual people.

Gwen looked up then, as if sensing exactly what Ava was not saying. She narrowed her eyes in annoyance.

“God knows I see your pretty little face more often than—” The shift in Gwen’s expression was slow and deliberate.

Ava was still too distracted by the fact that Gwen had just called her pretty to really notice it until Gwen straightened and looked at her with terrifying focus that seemed to push through the haze of gin and vermouth.

“Eisenberg.”

Fidgeting under the intensity of Gwen’s stare, she asked, “Miss Knight?”

“It’s ludicrous,” Gwen murmured, more to herself than to Ava. “It wouldn’t be any better than what he’s doing. You’re so…young. It would likely do more harm than good.” Gwen scowled at Ava as though she was somehow at fault here.

The first inkling of Gwen’s idea became clear, and Ava’s eyes widened. It was the alcohol talking. Gwen wasn’t thinking straight. She couldn’t possibly be implying what Ava thought she was implying.

“But,” Gwen emitted a contemplative little noise, “it would cause a riot. It would make unfair discrimination a conceivable argument. We both know my last biography made the New York Times bestseller list because of the chapter about my flirtation with Portia back in the nineties. And besides…” Gwen sighed. “Luke likes you.”

“It’s late.” Ava attempted a smile and stood on shaky legs, hoping to escape before Gwen pursued this any further. “I should go.”

“Sit.”

Ava sat.

Gwen studied her with careful consideration and bit at the edge of her thumbnail—a habit she adopted when particularly tense. “I should probably preface this by saying that your job with me is in no way at stake. Whatever you decide will have no bearing on your employment.”

Ava shifted nervously. “Miss Knight, you’re upset and—and not thinking clearly. You can’t, you don’t want…me.”

“Oh, Ava.” Gwen’s smile was slow and calculated. “I think you’re exactly who I want.”