Asher opens the door with me on his shoulder.
Lacey is in a white linen dress that pretends to have been pulled off a chair on her way out. Her eyes are red exactly enough. Her hair has been touched.
She sees me. Her face stalls for a beat. The TMZ pivot smooths back in.
Asher, she says, that kitten was hanging around the Backlot lot. I was feeding her. She comes to me.
I almost laugh. It comes out a strangled mrrp.
Comes to her?
I came back to consciousness in a Petco parking lot next to a dumpster a coyote was sniffing. The man who lifted me out wasn't her.
She reaches for me.
Come here, baby —
I drop my paw with surgical aim.
Three lines open across the back of her hand.
She screams. The tears arrive on cue.
Asher, she scratched me!
In the old timeline every TMZ camera in the canyon would have re-cut around that one second. By Monday morning People would have run with Sloane Ashby Allegedly Encouraged Beloved Pet to Attack Lacey Monroe. By Tuesday a Lumen-friendly columnist at The Cut would have published On The Quiet Cruelty Of Sloane Ashby.
But Asher isn't looking at her.
He's looking at me.
Paw okay?
Lacey's crying actually stops.
I stop too.
He has lost his mind.
She bites her lip. Asher, I know you still blame me. But the stuff with Sloane, I had nothing to do with —
Which stuff?
A pause.
The — you know. Online.
If you had nothing to do with it, why do you know which parts I'm talking about?
Her face goes through three expressions inside one breath.
Quinn is behind us on the threshold, face arranged into the perfectly opaque mask of a man who is taking very detailed notes.
I sit on Asher's shoulder and watch her work.
She's good. Not as good as she thinks.
She rallies. Tears double.
You're going after me over a cat? Sloane is dead. I'm hurting too. We can't all live inside her ghost.
Asher's hand tightens on the doorframe.
I feel it through the shoulder I'm sitting on.
She steps closer. Voice slips lower.
Tomorrow is the Carthage table read. Wren has press waiting. You promised me Calla was my make-good.
Carthage.
My chest takes a hit I cannot show.
Last Light Over Carthage. Wren Ford's prestige period drama. The first female lead in a Wren Ford film. I'd auditioned three times. He pinned the role on me after the third tape. Hand on my shoulder at the callback: You're my Calla.
Two weeks before principal photography, my management got the notice. Calla had been recast. The press release said Sloane Ashby had requested a salary renegotiation that the production could not accommodate.
I went to Asher's office and asked him why.
He said, Sloane. You're not right for it.
I thought he had nailed every door shut behind me. Now Lacey is calling it a make-good.
A make-good for what.
Asher's voice cools.
The production isn't happening.
Her face fractures for real.
What?
He looks at Quinn. Quinn produces a manila folder.
Ms. Monroe, Quinn says, Lumen audited the Last Light paper trail this morning. You have a side letter with a former associate producer that constitutes self-dealing. Production is suspended pending review. Your hold is suspended with it.
Lacey's mouth opens. The tears go off-pattern.
I let my tail go slack on Asher's shoulder.
So he didn't take it from me to give to her.
She looks up at me. The mask drops one millimeter.
Because of a cat?
I jump from his shoulder onto her face.
Lacey Monroe's scream is the kind they cast for.
I don't open her cheek. I could. I have the body for it now and the leverage of falling weight.
It isn't mercy.
It's that I'm a cat and any blood I leave on her face turns into a Page Six headline that buries me again, ghost-version. So I'm precise. I hook one magnetic lash off her left lid with a single claw and ride it down to the floor.
She comes up smeared. Mascara in two black tracks. The white dress is under her own heel, twisted. She staggers back into the hallway.
Quinn's shoulder is shaking. He hasn't quite reined it in.
She turns on Asher. You're letting it do this to me?
He picks me up off the foyer rug. His voice is level.
She's only a cat.
I know that line.
When Lacey's fans were doxxing me, when they mailed razor blades to my apartment, when one of them showed up outside my dermatologist's office on Roxbury with a kitchen knife, Lumen's statement was, Lumen Talent Group does not condone harassment of any party. Fans speak for themselves, not for our roster.
Fan behavior is not artist behavior. Turns out that one cuts both ways.
I feel better.
Lacey clutches the side of her face and stares at him.
You'll be sorry.
She wheels around. On her way out she body-checks Quinn.
Something hits the rug.
A voice recorder.
Quinn bends. Lacey is faster. She snatches it back and shoves it into her clutch and laughs a brittle laugh.
For interviews.
Asher doesn't say anything.
When the gate's chime confirms her car has cleared the property, Quinn speaks quietly into the side of Asher's shoulder.
Sir. She came tonight to fish you for quotes about Ms. Ashby.
Ms. Ashby.
It has been a long time since I heard those two words from anyone but a process server.
Asher's hand on me is steady.
Watch her.
Quinn nods. Then he hesitates. Sir. One other thing. The LASD released Ms. Ashby's effects this afternoon. They're downstairs.
My ribs squeeze.
Effects.
Such a cold word.
I thought I had died completely. But when the cardboard banker's box comes up from the garage and lands on the desk in the library I shake so hard I have to sit down.
The box is small.
Two T-shirts. A printed shooting script from my one good indie. A trophy with its base broken. My phone with a fractured screen.
Asher stands in front of the box and doesn't move.
I jump down from him and bat at the phone with my paw.
Screen is dark.
Forensics recovered partial data, Quinn says. On a clone drive.
Asher's voice goes tight. Open it.
The drive plugs into a MacBook on the desk. Folders unfold across the screen.
Photos. Voice memos. A Notes app last edited at 12:47 a.m. on the night I died.
Then call logs.
Three calls from my number to his, the night of.
12:03 a.m. — missed.
12:14 a.m. — missed.
12:31 a.m. — answered. Duration: 42 seconds.
Asher's face does something I have never seen on it. He goes the color of new paper.
I didn't answer the third one.
I look at him.
I know.
Lacey did.
A voice memo file unfolds itself onto the desktop. Quinn double-clicks. The library fills with the sound of my breathing — wet, labored, the way it sounded that night with twelve milligrams of zolpidem and two Klonopin already in me.
Then Lacey's voice.
Sloane. You should've taken your exit cue.
Silence in the library.
Asher's knuckles whiten on the edge of the desk.
I'm staring at the timeline at the bottom of the audio.
There's another sentence after hers. So quiet the rain on the recording almost covers it.
He's been done with you for months anyway.
Asher Kane breaks a glass.
He sweeps it off the edge of the desk with the back of his hand and it shatters across the slate. Quinn's whole body changes posture.
Sir.
Asher doesn't hear him. He picks up the cracked phone like the thing is a coal he can't let cool. He cradles it in his palm.
I sit on the desk and watch the executive lose composure.
Too late.
The night I needed you the most you didn't pick up. Even if the third call wasn't you, the first two weren't intercepted. The first two were just unanswered.
Where was I, he says, quiet. That night.
Quinn doesn't speak for two beats.
You were at Cresthaven, sir. Mr. Kane Sr. had been admitted to the longevity wing the previous evening. Crisis level. Your phone — your personal phone — was given to Ms. Monroe to manage at the wellness center's request. The compound enforces a no-device policy in the residential floors.
Asher closes his eyes.
I'm rigid on the desk.
Cresthaven Wellness. Topanga compound. The whole tabloid cycle the week I died was paparazzi long-lens shots of Asher and Lacey going into and out of the same private property. Page Six called them a soft launch.
Was that property the rehab.
Was every photo of them together actually a photo of him visiting his father.
Why didn't anyone correct it.
Why did the first thing he did, when he came back down the mountain, why was the first thing the termination notice.
He watches me like he can read the question.
His voice is hoarse.
The termination was meant to get you out of Lumen.
I don't move.
Quinn picks it up.
Ms. Ashby was being actively surveilled by someone inside the agency. Your itinerary kept leaking to TMZ. Your address had appeared three times on private forums. Mr. Kane's intention was to terminate your representation as a way to detach you legally from Lumen, then place you on a one-year out-of-country residency under a holding company in Lisbon. New representation. New project pipeline. Until we identified the leak.
I stand up. I am vibrating.
You were sending me to Lisbon?
Quinn's voice goes flatter.
The amendment Mr. Kane DocuSigned at the compound was supposed to attach Ms. Ashby to a project rider with a 12-month exclusivity hold to Last Light Over Carthage. It would have insulated her contractually while we cleaned the agency. Somewhere between the signature and the Deadline posting, the document was substituted. The DocuSign cert is the same. The body of the document is different.
Asher turns his head a fraction.
Who has admin authority to swap a document under my cert?
Quinn doesn't want to say it.
Mrs. Kane.
Asher's mother. Margot Kane.
I've met her exactly once.
She came down off the riser at a Lumen gala two years ago in a camel coat and made eye contact across the floor for the duration of one tea sandwich. When I excused myself to the bathroom she was waiting outside it. She didn't even pretend to wash her hands.
Sloane, she said. Girls from group homes do not marry into this family. They audition for the made-for-TV version of it.
I was twenty-two and I hadn't yet learned the rule about not answering people who outrank you. I said, I'm not trying to marry your son, Mrs. Kane. I'm trying to win an Oscar.
She laughed. It was small.
The next day my first lead role got pulled. The project went into turnaround. Two weeks after that Backlot started its slow leak.
Quinn's phone hums. He glances. His face changes.
Sir. Ms. Monroe just posted.
He turns the screen toward us. A single Instagram caption. Posted nine minutes ago. Already trending on X.
All I wanted was to bring back the kitten I was feeding. Instead I'm being painted as a villain because a grieving man can't move on. Sloane is gone. The living shouldn't be held hostage to her ghost.
Photo: the back of her hand, three red lines. Top comment, eight thousand likes: That cat probably has rabies. Just like its predecessor.
I read just like its predecessor and I go very still.
A cat can be canceled too.
Good.
I'll stop hiding then.