I am a D-list working actress the internet has decided to hate.
Three years in SAG-AFTRA. Three years of corpses on Law & Order, nameless waitresses on NCIS, the back of someone else's head in a Hallmark Christmas movie. I have a reel of jobs you can't see my face in.
On the dirtiest rainy night Los Angeles has had in a decade, Adrian Halloran holds an umbrella over my head.
After that, every blog that's been running smear pieces about me goes dark by morning. The line producer who tried to bargain a part out of me retires inside the week. The actress who poured an iced macchiato on my dress on Stage 14 falls down a staircase the same afternoon and her role gets handed to me before the cast hits the lobby.
Everyone says I'm lucky.
He says, "Sloane Marchetti. I can put you at the top of every ballot in this town, and I can shut up every single person who's ever stepped on you."
I climb. Scandal by scandal, I climb. I get the cover of Vanity Fair. I get the lead in a Halloran-Vance prestige picture. I get the Globe nomination the trades said was impossible.
On Best Actress night, he drives me up into Holmby Hills and the gate shuts behind the Bentley and the cell signal flatlines at the property line and he locks the bedroom door.
"Game's over, little bird. From here on you sing for me."
He doesn't know.
I have been waiting five years for this night.
The first time I met Adrian Halloran was in a bungalow at the Bel-Air Hotel.
Hal Brenner had laid the script sides face-up on the glass coffee table. Next to the sides, a neat white line. Next to the line, a rolled hundred. He pushed the rolled hundred toward me with two fingers, the way you'd slide a tip across a bar.
"Couple bumps and the part's yours. Third lead. Eight episodes."
I didn't move.
Under the table Cass kicked me in the shin and dropped her voice. "Sloane. Do you want to work this year or not?"
I did.
I wanted to work so badly it had been hollowing me out for three years.
I'd been told I was a resource hog since the day I got my SAG card. I had never been inside a private trailer. The blogs called me a couch-climber. Directors called me difficult. Craft services on every set I'd been on had been short one boxed lunch.
I picked up the rolled bill. I brought it to my face.
The bungalow door opened.
Everyone in the room stood up at once, like the National Anthem had started.
The man who walked in wore a black overcoat that the rain hadn't dared touch. His face was the kind of cold that doesn't read as cold until later, when you replay it. He didn't belong in a room with a coffee table full of cocaine.
Hal Brenner went the color of skim milk. "Adrian. We weren't — I didn't expect —"
Adrian Halloran did not look at him. He looked at the rolled bill in my hand.
"Who told her to do that."
Nobody answered.
Hal Brenner tried a smile. "Just a little welcome conversation, Sloane's new in town, I was walking her through how things —"
Adrian walked past him to the coffee table. He picked up the rolled hundred. He tipped the line onto the carpet with the side of his hand and ground it into the pile with the toe of his shoe.
He said, without raising his voice, "Whatever was in that. You do it. Tonight. In front of me."
Hal's knees went.
Cass had hold of my wrist and her fingers were shaking.
That night, eleven p.m., Hal Brenner walked into the Bel-Air Hotel lobby and rang the brass bell at the front desk twenty-eight times before the night manager pulled him off. Three people filmed it. By morning the clip was on Page Six.
Inside seventy-two hours, his Halloran-Vance picture lost its financing.
Inside a week, he announced he was "stepping back from production indefinitely for family reasons."
The trades said it was a tax thing. Only I know what Adrian said to him in the doorway of that bungalow before he walked me out to the Bentley.
"Touch her again. You don't get to live in this city."
After that, Adrian Halloran started turning up everywhere I was.
Night shoots, his Bentley at the curb outside the lot gate. A Substack post insinuating I'd slept with a network executive — pulled from the internet by three a.m., the account suspended, the writer's other clients evaporating before lunch. A morning-show segment recut and the segment producer "no longer with the network" by the time the edit aired.
On Stage 14 of a Halloran-Vance picture, an actress named Rhi Vance walked up to me between takes and dumped an iced macchiato down the front of my dress. She said, "Oops." She smiled like she was being filmed.
That same afternoon, she fell down the back staircase off Stage 14 and snapped her left tibia in two places.
Her publicist put out a statement about an "unfortunate accident on set" and asked fans not to harass the crew.
I was at Cedars-Sinai picking up a prescription when I heard her, four doors down the corridor, sobbing into her phone.
"It was him. It was Adrian. It was Adrian, you don't understand —"
Her manager's voice, low, fast: "You want to die in this town? Then keep saying that. Otherwise shut up."
I stood in the corridor with my refill in my hand and felt the air-conditioning on the back of my neck.
A coat dropped over my shoulders. Adrian's overcoat. I hadn't heard him come up.
"Spooked?"
I turned to look at him.
Whatever was behind his eyes wasn't anything. Like he'd just handled a piece of mail.
I said, "She poured an iced coffee on me."
He looked down at the coffee stain on my cuff and brushed it with his thumb.
"That's not allowed either."
That was the moment I should have walked.
I didn't.
Because that night the part went to me. Rhi Vance's part. A character with a name, with a full arc, with a costume designer doing her own fittings. The first real role I'd ever auditioned for and not been runner-up on.
Cass walked the contract into my Koreatown apartment and her eyes were red.
"Sloane. You're out."
I signed.
When the pen touched the page my hand paused for a second.
Through the window I could see the Bentley at the curb with Adrian in the back seat watching me sign. He held his phone up against the glass and the screen lit.
A text, two lines:
Don't look back. Just walk.
I turned the phone face down and signed my name.
After that night my career split open like someone had taken a box cutter to it.
The morning light came in.
So did the blood on the carpet.
The show aired and I caught.
Not small. Not slow build. Variety had me on the cover inside three weeks. The supercut on TikTok cleared a hundred million views in nine days. Brands that had told Cass last year they didn't see me as "aspirational" were emailing her at midnight asking what my fitting schedule looked like.
The women who'd called me a fame-hungry climber for three years were now calling me queen under my Instagram comments.
The first time I got mobbed at LAX I cried in the back of the SUV after.
Girls with light-up sticks. Girls screaming my name with their whole chest.
"Sloane! You deserve it!"
I waved through the tinted glass and felt my throat close.
Cass pushed her iPad into my lap as soon as we pulled out of the cell-phone lot.
"NBC wants you for the new Sunday-night unscripted. S-tier. Anchor seat."
Then her face changed.
The push notification at the top of the iPad:
Hollywood Reporter — Tabloid blogger Liam Spence killed in single-car crash on Mulholland early Tuesday.
Liam Spence.
The guy who'd been running Page Six items and Substack "industry source" pieces on me for three years. The guy who'd published a still from a security cam at a club I'd never been in and captioned it with my name. The guy who'd DM'd me, last spring: want the footage to stay private? have dinner with me.
He'd been teasing his next piece on me for two weeks. "Sloane Marchetti — what they don't want you to know."
He was dead by morning.
The replies under the Hollywood Reporter push were a parade.
Karma's a bitch.
Couldn't have happened to a worse human.
How many women did he wreck? Good riddance.
Cass pulled the iPad out of my hands. "Don't read those. It's bad for you."
I looked up and Adrian's text was on my phone.
Like your gift?
My thumb went still on the screen.
Outside the SUV my fans were still calling my name.
Inside the SUV you could hear the AC ticking.
I typed: What did you do.
He typed back inside ten seconds: Shut him up.
I stared at those three words and my stomach turned over once.
Three minutes later a photo came through.
Liam Spence's desk. His monitors still on. A silver USB-C stick on the keyboard with a piece of label tape on it. The label tape said MARCHETTI.
The next text:
I didn't ask Adrian what had been on the USB.
I knew.
Five years ago my older sister Mara Marchetti bled to death in my arms in the alley behind the Vesper Club with a silver stick wet in her right hand. She'd shot phone video of Sumner Halloran's ledger and dumped it to a thumb drive. She made it as far as the loading-dock door.
The phone video on that thumb drive was the only thing in the world that said her death was not what the LAPD eventually said it was.
Liam Spence had a copy of it. I don't know how. I never figured out how.
He'd held it over my head for two years.
Want it kept private? Have dinner with me.
I'd gone to the police. I'd gone three times.
The Vesper Club security cameras had been "down for maintenance" that night. The bartender who'd seen her run for the back door recanted. Mara's blood alcohol came back at 0.19, which is high enough for an LA medical examiner to write accidental fall, loading-dock stairs and close the file.
The Vesper Club is on the eighteenth floor of a building above Sunset. The freeholder of that building is a Delaware LLC. The single member of the Delaware LLC is Halloran Entertainment Holdings.
That's why I moved to Los Angeles.
Not to act.
Not really.
I came here because this was the only city where Sumner Halloran ate dinner.
The morning after Liam Spence's body was scraped off Mulholland, I sat on my kitchen floor in Koreatown and didn't go to bed.
At seven a.m. the buzzer went off.
Adrian was at the door with two coffees and a paper bag from the bakery on Larchmont. He set them on the counter like nothing.
"Didn't sleep."
I looked at him. "Liam Spence's thumb drive. Did you actually destroy it."
He took the lid off one of the coffees and put the cup in my hand.
"Anything that filthy. It only ever hurts you to have it around."
I laughed.
"That was mine, Adrian."
His hand stopped moving.
He looked up. His voice dropped.
"Sloane. Stop digging into the past."
"Why."
He took a step closer. He took my chin between his thumb and forefinger and tilted my face up.
"Because you can't carry what's down there."
I held his eyes.
This was the face Vanity Fair had put on a fold-out cover. Half the women in the agency would have walked through a glass door for it.
I only wanted to put one crack in it.
I said, soft: "What are you scared of."
He let go of my chin.
The espresso machine on the counter coughed and hissed and started building pressure.
He turned away from me.