Maddy made herself a cup of coffee, and homemade Greek yogurt with fresh berries and granola, and took it to the patio with that morning’s New York Times. She flipped through the Arts section, reading play reviews. There was a rave for a new Off-Broadway play about a deaf bricklayer, and Maddy was surprised to see that Irina was in the cast. They had exchanged a few emails after Maddy’s move, and then they’d slowed down, and eventually, Irina hadn’t written back.

She wasn’t in touch with anyone from New York, not in a sustained way. She had heard through Sharoz that Dan had wrapped The Valentine and moved to Venice Beach. Sharoz said he was dating Rachel Huber, the executive on The Valentine. Maddy wondered if the affair had begun during the shoot but Sharoz said she didn’t know.

She had not yet run into him in L.A. and wondered when she would. Though she wasn’t sorry their relationship was over, she was nostalgic for the nights they had stayed up late hammering out the story beats. Maybe someday she would collaborate with him again. Ananda McCarthy said Hollywood was like a big summer camp in which exes were constantly forced to work together, making the best of it.

The sun was bright. She could hear a house sparrow. She read the paper and did twenty laps in the pool. She never swam in New York, but now that she lived in a home with a pool, she felt an obligation to take advantage. After one of Maddy’s film auditions, Bridget had reported that the casting director had commented she was “healthy.” Maddy had been shocked and wounded; in the theater world, they weren’t as picky about weight. She was aware that in Los Angeles, the trend was super-slim with fake breasts, but she’d hoped that in the eyes of the casting directors, if not the tabloids, her Special Jury Prize would set its own expectations.

“Do you think I need to lose weight?” Maddy had asked Bridget on the phone.

“It might not be a bad thing for Husbandry,” she said. “Especially with what Ellie goes through in the movie.” In response, Maddy began swimming every day, telling herself it was for wellness, not appearance.

After her swim, she headed inside with the vague plan of taking a yoga class in Santa Monica. No auditions today. She preferred the days when she had them. The days when she didn’t feel like a bored housewife, like Ellie in the movie. Alone in the house when Steven was working, she tended to worry, pacing the rooms, leaving him voice mails that said “I love you,” that she was embarrassed to have left, taking walks in the neighborhood, then racing home when a paparazzo caught her. She had discovered the Wilshire branch of the public library, one of the few places where no one seemed to know or care who she was. She had been reading for pleasure, a mix of modern fiction and the classics that she felt Steven would want her to read. After finishing The Portrait of a Lady (a great hook, a slow middle, and a conclusion too ambiguous for her taste), she had decided to check out The Wings of the Dove from the library. But she was making her way through it painstakingly, afraid that Steven’s adoration of James might be something she could never completely share.

In the house she started toward the stairs, but when she passed the door to Steven’s study, she stopped.

She turned the knob, pushed the door open. She flipped the lights, not wanting to open the drapes in case the housekeepers came early. Though he had a burglar alarm, she had once asked him whether there were hidden video cameras and he’d said only outside the house, not in.

The furniture was all 1930s, shiny blond wood tables with silk skirts. There was a crystal bowl filled with yellow apples and an iron vase with fresh pink azaleas.

She ran her hand across one of the shelves. Eliot, Flaubert, Turgenev, Sand, Proust, Wharton, and James. She examined a copy of Middlemarch that appeared unread. She wondered if he kept the books here for show. Clearly, he had read James, whom he quoted often, but she had seldom heard him talk about the others.

She went to the desk and lifted the photo of his mother. She pulled out the key and inserted it in the bottom drawer. Steven would be furious if he found out she was here. She glanced up at the ceiling but saw no camera domes.

The drawer was deep, and when she pulled it open, she found hanging files. Inside them were folders containing receipts, articles on Darfur, Christmas cards from studio executives. Nothing interesting, nothing juicy.

Why would he lock a drawer that had nothing important in it? Maybe he knew she’d seen the open drawer and had moved whatever had been in there. But if that was true, why hadn’t he moved the key? Was he taunting her because he suspected she would snoop?

She closed and relocked the drawer, put the key back behind his mother. Shut the lights. She checked the bookshelf one more time to be sure all the books were even, then darted out.


“It’s time to tack,” Steven was calling. They were aboard Jo, on their way to Catalina for a long weekend. He had proposed the trip spontaneously a couple of days after his two A.M. phone call. He was taking time off from Declarations just to be with her.

She helped him pull the sail and they ducked as the boom moved. Jo was a beauty. White sail. Regal, with two gorgeous cabins and its own showers. Maddy squinted up at the mast, which seemed enormous against the bright sky.

She was sitting across from Steven, her feet propped up next to him. “Okay, your turn,” he said.

She took the tiller. “Where are we going?” she asked.

Steven pointed to a distant mound of brown. “Aim for that,” he said.

“I’ve sailed before,” she said. She had been on friends’ boats on Yarrow Lake in summer, and she’d always enjoyed the thrill of moving fast, as well as the constant work that went with having a boat, the tying and moving and switching sides.

“You haven’t told me enough about where you’re from. Tell me all about your father.”

“People always said we were similar. Whenever he was thinking hard about something, he would run his hands through his hair. Both hands over his head, crossed. I do it, too. It’s eerie. He loved the crossword puzzle. He could do it in, like, five minutes. But he also had a really bad temper. He was a complicated guy. Hair-trigger temper, but he wept at Hallmark commercials. He taught me to play chess. He read me All-of-a-Kind Family.”

“I wish I had met him.”

“He would have loved you. He was an English teacher. But he loved mysteries. Total Anglophile. He watched those BBC shows, which was probably why he wanted me to be an actress.”

Steven was wearing a blue-and-white-striped button-down shirt, and his hair billowed in the wind, his sunglasses shielding his eyes. This was how she wanted it, away from everyone else. It was what she had missed these months in L.A.

He came to her side, put his arm around her, and raised his sunglasses to the top of his head. “Has any woman loved a man as much as I love you?” she asked.

“Many have asked themselves that very question.”

“Shut up,” she said, swatting his arm. She closed her eyes and felt the wind on her face. “I wish we could be like this all the time. I feel selfish about you. It can be hard to be your girlfriend, you know. Intelligent, respectable women make eyes at you like teenagers.”

“It’s the fame. They don’t know me. Don’t read too much into it.”

“Men, too. At these parties, gay men, they look at you and whisper.”

“I’m not the only one they whisper about.”

“I’m sorry I got so upset the other night,” she said.

“I’ve already forgotten it.”

“I shouldn’t be so jealous. I’m just getting used to being with you.”

“I know you are,” he said. “And I don’t envy you. There are times I wish I could go back to being Steven Woyceck.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Just be alone, like this, on the water. With someone I love. Not have to worry about long-lens cameras or tabloids or blogs.”

She felt a surge of love for him and guilt that she had mistrusted him. She had been brazen the other night. Not believing him. A sophisticated girlfriend wouldn’t have harped on him. She wanted to be one of those cool, confident girls who didn’t need to pry. She feared that she had soured things between them that night.

“You can be Steven Woyceck with me,” she said.

“I want to be.”

It had been disingenuous to act like she needed to know everything. He didn’t know everything about her. “There’s something I want to tell you.”

“And what’s that?” he asked, positioning his hand over hers on the tiller, adjusting the angle slightly, his eyes on the distant island.

“I was with a woman once.”

“Oh yes?” he asked with a smile.

She told him what had happened in Kira’s condo at Mile’s End. “I feel really weird about it.”

“Because it was good?”

“Yeah, and because—I never told Dan. He still doesn’t know.”

“If I had a cell phone on this boat, you could call him up right now.” Steven didn’t allow phones on Jo; he liked to be at one with the elements. He said there was a radio for emergencies. “I think it’s good you experimented,” he said. “Sometimes I worry I’m not enough fun for you.”

“But you are!”

“I’m not too old?”

“Stop saying that.”

He kissed her. She felt safe and invincible against the world.

As they approached Catalina, she started to sing “26 Miles,” which she had learned at summer camp. Steven joined in, but their voices were off-key.