Henry raises his hand and I cower, though he’s only reaching for my phone, not winding up to backhand me. There is the smallest sliver of disappointment on my face, and Henry raises his eyebrows and then bunches them together in a broad performance of pity. “I have no interest in smacking you around anymore, though you may want to see someone about yours.” He picks up my phone and punches in my new passcode. “I’ve changed the passwords to all your social media accounts. I’d hate to see you post about the wrong side of it.”
“The wrong side of what?”
“The war, the election, Taylor Swift.”
I laugh, suddenly elated. “Henry, I’ve made it abundantly clear where I stand on those issues. It’s part of the job of appeasing the public, and I’m very good at appeasement, as you well know. If I suddenly go full Karen instead of my usual carousel of vanilla press photos thanking my hair and makeup teams, you’re going to draw attention to me in a way you can’t even begin to comprehend. It will be a shitstorm. My husband, my representation, will be all over me, demanding an explanation, crafting a crisis response. And when I don’t answer them, they are going to realize something is wrong.”
Henry regards me with supreme boredom. “Do you think yourrepresentationwill be so keen to help when they learn you are thinking of leaving them for their direct competition?”
A cold tremor pulses through me. Henry has found the conversation between me and the agent who is trying to poach me.I enjoyed our meeting, she wrote to me, just a few days ago, and I have yet to respond. Agents are always trying to poach. But you should never engage unless you are prepared for it to make its way back to your current representation, for them to drop you before you drop them. A few weeks ago, I not only engaged—I met my rival recruiter for lunch in her sun-drenched living room in the flats of Beverly Hills.
“Faye,” Henry sighs contentedly, like a lucky man who wants for nothing. “I’ve gone through every last one of your conversations while you slumbered your roofie slumber. You told everyone to leave you alone this week. You canceled all your meetings. You have an out of office set until May. Your husband is in London in another time zone, and honestly? Not that many people are checking on you, sweetheart.”Sweetheart. I feel like I’ve been tased between my legs. “I know because I’ve been going to shore in the morning to keep up with your correspondence. My thumbs have barely moved a muscle, I’m afraid. Though I’m sure that’s by design. You always were a bit of a lone wolf.”
I used to ask Henry to humiliate me in all sorts of ways that at the time felt arbitrary. But now I know they were not. I wanted him to tell me things I did not necessarily believe about myself. That I was a whore, a piece of white trash, that I looked better with a cock in my mouth than without. Never in a million years would I ask him to remind me of the first birthday party I had for myself in Los Angeles. My husband, who was still my boyfriend at the time, had looked at the guest list and mentioned that I seemed to have only invited his friends.Don’t you want to invite any of your own?he had asked, innocently enough. I pointed out that my best friend was on the list, to which he pointed out that she was my agent and I should be careful about conflating the two. I had been in Los Angeles enough years by then that I did nothave the excuse of saying that I had just moved there and was still in the process of finding my people. I don’t remember what I mumbled in response, but I do remember feeling like I had been slashed across the throat. Slowly, I bring my hand to my neck and squeeze, hold my head in place. It is my oldest wound that Henry has unstitched at the seams.
“What do you want?” I say, feebly. “What the fuckisall this, Henry?”
“I want you to understand the consequences.”
There is a sudden tightness to the air, the pressurized feeling before a storm. It’s that word.Consequences. Christ. My body aches. “The consequences to what?”
“Not doing what I tell you to do.” Henry has a way of saying things like this, with an offhand ease that belies the sting of his certain follow-through. He may sound unserious, but he means what he says. You will be sorry. You will be scared. But you will also feel elated. There is no word for this feeling, but you will miss it, mourn it, stress-dream about it when it’s gone.
Henry revives my phone with a pat of his finger. “This is an Instagram post that I have scheduled to release on your account later today.” He begins to read. There is no context. No point. It is just a curated collection of catty things I’ve said in private conversations over the years, about friends to other friends, about executives to writers, about writers to executives, about actors to writers, about writers to other writers. It is no worse than what any of these people have undoubtedly said about me, but it is bad, and even if I get out of here and explain I’ve been drugged, kidnapped, starved, forced to wash my hair with Pert Plus, I will be ruined.
“So this is about revenge,” I deduce. Ascribing a motive feels good. It calms me. My brain is doing the thing it does when I miss even one day of my medication, bouncing around my skull like a rubber ball. Dizzying me, dulling me. “I broke your heart. I wrote aboutyou and got famous. And you’ve been lying in wait all this time, and finally you got the chance to grab me by the balls.”
“Some mouth on you,” Henry says, tsking. He goes over to the bookshelf outside his parents’ bedroom. From the middle shelf, he removes a Scott Turow novel, revealing a safe I’d forgotten was there. He slides my phone inside. “This is going in here, for now. Don’t be a hero, Faye. If you stab me in the neck with a fork and I bleed out and die, yeah, sure, you might get away if you remember how to drive the boat, or if you want to risk your life in the woods—there’s high black bear activity at the moment—but that thing will post, and I imagine you will lose everything.” He slams the door to the safe and covers the keypad with one hand while he enters the code with the other. “Now.” He turns to me, slides a hand through his sandy hair in a boyish manner that inflames me painfully. “If you listen to me, if you behave, I will open the safe at the same time every day and delay it another twenty-four hours. And we will continue like that until we are done here.”
“Done withwhat?”
“This conversation is over now,” Henry informs me. “You need to eat.” He goes over to the kitchen counter and begins to crack eggs into a silver mixing bowl. Using something he thinks is healthy but is probably full of GMOs, he sprays a pan and waits for it to heat while he whisks the eggs with a fork. In the sink is a bowl of frozen berries, thawing in lukewarm water. No bread. No butter. Henry has kept himself lean, something I know takes womanly effort for him, and he has obviously retained those early aughts ideas about what makes a person fat. He brings me my breakfast on a silicone kid’s plate, the kind that sticks to the tabletop, and as much as I want to throw it in his face, it’s really stuck on there and I am ravenous. I finish everything and Henry goes back into the kitchen and makes me more, and when I finish that, he tells me to go sit on the couch.
“Why?”
“Because I know the code to the safe and you don’t.”
I go over and sit down on the couch. Henry perches on the edge of the coffee table, across from me, and though the table is lower than the couch, I still have to tilt my chin up to meet his eye. “Hold out your hands.”
Instinctively, I curl my fingers into fists and hold them tightly to my chest.
“I’m not going to hurt you.”
“Why stop now?”
Henry stares at me with heavy brows, liquid eyes. He speaks to me in an impossibly kind voice. “I always hated hurting you.”
My throat is gnarled with something like grief. “Then you’ve lost your edge.”
Henry looks away from me a moment, shakes his head slightly. When he turns back to me, he’s wiped clean of any unnecessary nostalgia. “Hands, Faye.”
One at a time, I float my hands, palms down, fingers soft, like a dancer. It only looks like I’m shaking because there is so much tension from my elbows, pressed tightly into my sides.
“What’s this?”
I turn my right wrist over in confusion. “A bracelet?”
“What kind?”