I'm the cautionary tale they teach in PR seminars now.
Booked my first speaking role at nineteen. Got dropped at twenty-four. Died on the floor of a studio apartment off Western Ave with a half-empty pill bottle and a phone that wouldn't stop buzzing.
I open my eyes and I'm a cat.
My new owner is the man who let Lumen Talent Group bury me on his mother's signature and stayed quiet while the internet skinned me alive. Asher Kane. Lumen's golden boy. The COO whose silence was the only verdict that mattered.
He lifts me out of a Petco cardboard carrier and holds me against his chest. His voice has gone hoarse in a way I've never heard it.
Hey. I'm going to call you Birdie.
Birdie.
That was my mother's word for me. She died of an OD when I was four. Nobody in this city knows that word.
He doesn't know.
The kitten he's holding against his sternum is the dead girl whose final text he never opened.
I rake my claws down his jaw.
He doesn't flinch. He carries me past the foyer, past the staff, up the stairs, into a study on the second floor of a house on Mulholland that I have seen exactly once in my life, and I see the wall.
It is covered in me.
Glossy 8x10s. Press shots. Stills from the indie. Stills from the audition tape that was supposed to be my second act. A whole grid of a dead woman.
I jump down. I creep close enough to read.
Every photograph has the same sentence written on its back in black marker.
She didn't kill herself.
I die on a Tuesday in the middle of a March atmospheric river.
The phone won't stop. Notifications stack like a slot machine that's losing. Every trending tab refresh is my name in a new context.
Sloane Ashby — escort allegations.
Sloane Ashby — set bullying.
Sloane Ashby — exit the industry.
The last one is a press release. Lumen Talent Group, posted to Deadline fourteen minutes ago.
After careful consideration, Lumen Talent Group has decided not to renew its representation agreement with Sloane Ashby, effective immediately. We thank Ms. Ashby for her time with the agency and wish her the best in her future endeavors.
I read it three times. He couldn't even call.
The pills are already burning through my stomach lining. My fingers are clumsy on the screen. I open Favorites. The top of the list is the only number I have on speed dial.
Asher Kane.
I tap.
It rings out.
I tap again.
It rings out.
The third time it picks up on the second ring and a woman's voice comes through, cotton-soft, the kind of voice rehearsed for the moment a microphone might be on.
Asher's in the shower. Can I take a message?
Lacey Monroe. Lumen's it-girl. The perpetual victim in every headline that ends with my name.
I laugh. My mouth tastes like a copper penny.
Tell him I don't owe him anymore.
The line is quiet for two seconds. Then her voice drops the cotton.
Sloane, she says. You should've taken your exit cue.
I don't have breath to answer. The rain hits the window like somebody throwing handfuls of nails. The room tilts.
The world goes black.
I open my eyes and there's a face above me. Cold mouth, straight nose, eyes the color of wet asphalt. Asher Kane, six inches from my whiskers.
Every hair on my body lifts.
I try to call him a name with seven letters in it.
What comes out: Mrrp.
His hand stops.
His eyes are red-rimmed. He hasn't slept in days. He reaches into the Petco carrier and lifts me out.
I claw his jaw.
A thin red line opens up across his stubble. The assistant behind him sucks in a breath.
Mr. Kane, the cat's feral, do you want to look at a different —
This one.
He wipes the blood with the side of his thumb. He doesn't put me down. The car door closes. The driver pulls out. He settles me on his thigh and his fingertip brushes the back of my ear, the gentlest contact I have ever received from him.
Hey.
I'm going to call you Birdie.
I go rigid.
The assistant looks up from his iPad.
Mr. Kane, that name —
Asher's eyes lift once. The assistant shuts his mouth.
I stare at the face six inches from mine. The name is sitting on the floor of the car like a body.
Birdie.
He doesn't get to say that word.
I lunge and rake him again. This time I catch the corner of his lip.
Blood beads. He turns his head a fraction. He watches it run.
He laughs. It is a terrible laugh. There is no muscle for it left in his face.
She had a temper like this too.
Asher Kane carries me into a house I have stood outside of exactly once.
Three years ago. His birthday. I baked something stupid — a salted caramel layer cake, a recipe off a YouTube video — and drove to Mulholland in the kind of rain that fogs the windshield faster than the defroster can clear it. I stood on the gravel for two hours. The cake collapsed inside its box.
His assistant came out. Same one in the car now.
Ms. Ashby. Mr. Kane doesn't take meetings with talent at the house.
I drove back down the canyon. The next morning Deuxmoi ran a blind item — which Lumen up-and-comer tried a midnight ambush on which exec, got turned away at the gate? — and the comments solved it in under an hour. The internet ate me for a week.
Now I'm coming in through the front door with my claws dug into a cashmere shoulder.
The house is empty in a way that has been engineered. Concrete floors. Slate-gray everything. Curtains drawn against a view that cost eight figures. The housekeeper meets us in the foyer.
Sir, the cat room upstairs is prepped.
She sleeps with me.
I look at him. Mrr?
In your dreams.
He sets me on the leather couch and crosses the room for a first-aid kit. The second his back is turned I'm off the cushion and skidding across the concrete. Cat physics are different than I remembered. I clear the foyer in a streak and hit the front door at full speed, scrabbling at the brass pull, and then I stop.
There's a console table to the left of the door. Photograph in a frame.
It's me.
White dress. Independent Spirit Awards green room, three years ago. Holding the trophy and grinning like someone who didn't know what was coming.
I won Best Supporting that night. After the ceremony I'd found Asher at the Lumen after-party and shoved the statue toward him.
He'd said, Don't mistake a lucky pick for a career, Sloane.
I'd gone pink to my ears and said, Then next year I'll get one I earned.
There was no next year. The next year every project Lumen had in development went to Lacey Monroe and I went to ad-supported streamers and a hidden-cam reality pilot for a show that never aired.
I thought he hated me.
But this photo is on his console. The glass is dustless. Somebody wipes it.
He kneels in front of me. The cut on his jaw is dry and there's a fresh one at the corner of his mouth. With the kit open on the floor he reaches for my paw with a cotton swab.
I swat the swab. I swat the kit. The kit goes over. Cotton balls roll across concrete.
The housekeeper's face changes.
Sir, you can't let a cat —
Out.
She doesn't argue. The door closes.
He doesn't try again. He puts a tube of antibiotic ointment on the floor in front of me.
If you don't want me to touch you, clean yourself.
I stare at him. I am laughing on the inside. Look at this performance.
When I died he was with Lacey.
When the mob found my address he was silent.
When the contract was terminated his signature was on the document.
These aren't misunderstandings. These are receipts.
That night he showers. I case the bedroom. The window is locked. The handle on the patio door is six feet off the floor. The balcony opens onto a twenty-seven-floor drop into the canyon.
I kick the glass on his nightstand over.
Water runs into a drawer seam. The drawer isn't latched. A corner of paper shows.
I hook it out.
It's a medical intake form. Cedars-Sinai outpatient psychiatry. Patient: Kane, Asher D. Diagnosis line: Adjustment disorder with depressed mood; PTSD, chronic, secondary to childhood traumatic event (2009). Insomnia, refractory.
Under the form, folded once, is a Post-it.
The handwriting is mine.
Asher — happy birthday. Be okay every day. — Birdie
The bathroom door opens.
He's standing there with water in his hair, towel around his neck, and his color goes out of his face the second he sees what's under my paw.
I think he'll grab it.
He doesn't.
He crosses to me slowly. He pushes his wet hair back. When he speaks his voice has dropped a register.
Don't tear it.
I take the Post-it in my teeth and bolt.
He follows. His knee hits the bedframe and he doesn't stop. I'm on the desk in a flash, dragging the note across the leather inlay. He reaches.
I bite down on the corner. I hold his eyes.
His breath stops.
Birdie.
The word lands wrong in him. Too rough. He hears it himself, I can see him hear it.
I freeze for half a second.
That half-second is enough. He has the note out of my mouth, smoothing it across his palm like he's pressing a wound. I throw myself at his hand. My claws come away red. He tucks the note into his closed fist and keeps it covered as if the air will damage it.
I want to throw up.
You don't get to be tender with the dead. You had her alive. You watched her go.
I jump off the desk and crawl under the bed.
He doesn't follow. He sinks down with his back against the bedframe and sits on the floor. The lamp stays on. Light slants under the bedskirt.
After a long time, he speaks. Not to me. To the air.
Sloane. I found the editor.
My ear twitches.
Backlot pilot. Hidden-camera reality show Lumen produced two years ago. Six actors competing for the same prestige role, locked in a house, filmed twenty hours a day with the talent's consent buried in page forty of a NDA most of them didn't read.
In the cut they released as a sizzle reel, Lacey Monroe trips on a cable in the kitchen and I shove her into the counter. Voiceover: some of these girls are willing to do anything.
What actually happened: Lacey low-blood-sugar fakery, the second time she'd staged it in a week. I'd caught her under the arms when she went down. The third time she went down she grabbed my forearms and pulled me with her so we both hit the floor in frame. My one good line on the dailies — Stop performing, please — was cut.
The unedited footage disappeared. The post-production house played dumb. Lumen demanded a public apology video from me, scripted.
I refused.
Asher's only sentence on the matter, in his Lumen office at 2 a.m. with the contract on the desk between us: Sloane. Don't make this harder.
I crawl my head out from under the bedframe.
He's looking at nothing. The Post-it is still in his fist.
You didn't push her.
My whole body shocks awake.
He knows? How long?
It's too late.
I'm out from under the bed and across the floor and on his face before I make the decision. My back paws push off his collarbone. My right paw rakes across his eyebrow.
He doesn't defend.
I open his brow and he doesn't blink.
Don't.
Don't sit there with your verified late truth.
A late truth is uglier than a lie.
There's a knock at the bedroom door. Quinn's voice, low and urgent.
Mr. Kane. Lacey Monroe is at the gate. She's saying the cat was hers first.
I freeze on his sternum.
Lacey?
Through the intercom in the foyer her voice piped in, that soft TMZ-tear pitch, like she's already on camera.
Asher, I know you miss her. But you can't just pick up a stray and call it Sloane.
The fur on my back lifts.
Stray.
Stand-in.
Fine.
Old debt and new debt. We can settle both tonight.