We step apart, and I take the opportunity to put a respectable amount of table between us.
Dad gestures toward the chairs. “Why don’t we all sit?” he says. “Natalie, come here next to me. Victoria, Jake, wherever you like.”
I sink into the seat beside my dad, my legs suddenly made of gelatin. The room feels both too big and too small now. Too much glass. Too many reflective surfaces where I might accidentally catch Jake looking at me or he might catch me looking at him.
Jake takes the chair directly across from me, which feels personal even though I know it’s not. It gives him a perfect view of my face and me a perfect view of his.
This is fine. Everything is fine. I am a grown woman who can handle sitting across from the man she slept with while her father explains the fine print.
“So,” Dad says, flipping open the folder. “Let’s walk through this. Natalie, the contract is straightforward. Victoria and I have gone through it, but I wanted another set of eyes today.”
“Sounds good,” I say, even though my heart is poundingso loudly I am pretty sure everyone on the fifteenth floor can hear it.
Jake leans forward slightly, pen poised over his pad, the picture of attentiveness. “Everything looks solid from what I have seen,” he says to my dad, then glances at me. “Terms are fair, language is clear.”
Dad nods and starts talking, his voice slipping into that rhythm I know so well, the one that has soothed nervous actors and terrified studio execs alike. He goes clause by clause. Credit. Fees. Writers’ room guarantees. He walked me through all this on the phone, but hearing it out loud, with this view and this table and this pen in front of me, makes it feel like the universe has slid into some new position.
Victoria jumps in every so often to clarify a point in plain English or to remind me where this matches our wish list from the first round. Jake makes small notes in the margins, his handwriting neat and each stroke deliberate.
I try to stay anchored in the conversation and focus on the pages in front of me. This is my show. My name is on the title page, these are my weird witches with supernatural powers, and my chance to prove I am not just a girl in a yoga studio promising people that stretching their hamstrings can change their lives.
But there is an annoying, insistent part of my brain that will not stop narrating.
Jake is three feet away from you. Jake has seen you naked. Jake has heard the sounds you make when you are falling apart and now he is saying “morals clause” with a straight face like none of that happened.
I drag my focus back to the page as Dad reaches one of the big sections we fought hardest for.
“As we discussed, the created by credit is locked,” he says, tapping the paragraph. “Your name appears on screen with that language and cannot be removed. You are guaranteed a producer role for season one with an option to continue, and they are committed to a writers’ room where you are present and participating, not just handing in drafts from the outside.”
I rest my fingers on the edge of the contract. This is it. The thing I have wanted since I sat on my mom’s couch as a kid and watched TV like it was religion.
I take a slow breath and let it out. I’m not going to let anything distract me from that.
Not even him.
four
. . .
Jake
“My daughter.”Ryan’s words land like a punch to the sternum.
Natalie.
In our conference room. Sitting right there. Looking at me with the same perfect, unmistakable shock I’m definitely failing to hide. I school my face into professional neutrality—or at least the closest approximation I can manage when my nervous system is busy staging a coup.
I slept with Ryan’s daughter.Fuck me.
The air in the room shifts. It’s thinner, tighter, like someone dialed the oxygen down without warning. I try to breathe normally, but every inhale scratches against the memory of her. The soft, warm slide of her body under my hands.
Shaking her hand just now. Jesus. Touching her again felt like plugging myself back into a current I never wanted to walk away from. She’s still soft. Still warm. Still verymuch the woman my brain keeps replaying in dark, inconvenient hours. And now she’s three feet away pretending none of that ever happened. Because what else can we do?
“If everything looks good,” her father says, “we just need your signature here, here, and here.”
Natalie picks up the pen, her hand steady. Her signature is deliberate, neat, and confident. Everything about her is confident, except for that half-second when our eyes met and she went still, like she couldn’t decide whether to bolt or throw the table at me.
“Congratulations,” Ryan says, pulling her up into a hug that makes something in my chest twist. Pride looks good on him.
