“That isn’t what I’m doing.”

“You don’t know yourself like I know you, Gracie. You never have,” Able says. “You want me to notice you. That’s why you’re doing all of this.”

My breath is coming thick and fast now as I try to wade through his words, unpicking them like I always have to. He moves his hand up to my head and starts to gently stroke my hair as panic floods through me, its icy claws gripping my heart.

“After everything you’ve done to me, please, please don’t make me feel like I’m crazy too,” I say. My memory of the assaults are sometimes razor sharp, but at other times they break and shatter like a strobe light. I can’t quite reach any of it right now, when I need to believe in myself the most. My eyes fill with tears but I blink them away.

“Can you speak to someone about this? Or would you like me to? Maybe Nathan, or your parents?”

“I’m not a child,” I say.

“Then stop acting like a lovesick teenager. It’s embarrassing,” he says as he snatches his hand away, and the thing that gets me is he doesn’t even look at me once after that. He just stares out the window at a view he’s seen a thousand times before. He’s bored with the conversation.

“Was the girl at the launderette an actress?”

“Can you watch the road?”

“Tell me the truth,” I say.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says.

“Was the girl at the launderette an actress?” I repeat. “The girl trying on the sequined dresses. The broken girl who spat at me, who you chose to use as a lesson in my good fortune.”

“Of course she was an actress,” Able says after a pause. “What were the fucking chances? Open your eyes, Grace.”

“I was just a kid, you know,” I say, and my desperation is rendering the gaps between my words nonexistent. The lights on the road ahead flare in my tears. “And I couldn’t admit that I never wanted any of it, because then I would have to be a victim. I couldn’t afford to be a victim.”

“So you’re here because you want me to absolve you? If what you just said was true, then you wouldn’t need me to do that,” he says, still staring out the window. I push my foot down harder on the accelerator and turn left onto Malibu Canyon at the last minute. As always, the truth is slipping further out of reach with every word he says.

“Don’t do that. That isn’t what this is about,” I say, and I can see that he’s getting nervous about the speed I’m driving at because he’s looking at me again now.

“I know. I know exactly what this is about, because I know you, Gracie, better than you know yourself. You’re upset that I stopped needing you. I understand that, nobody likes to feel rejected. Especially not an actress.”

“This is not about rejection. This is about how I am unable to have a relationship because of you, and I don’t have a single person in the world to talk to. This is about how you ruined me. Not as an actress, but as a person,” I say, my voice thick.

“Will you at least fucking look at me?” I say, driving even faster now. I feel like I’m underwater again, kicking and flipping in the black, pressure building in my lungs. I want to break the surface, but I don’t know how to make it all stop.

“Pull over, Gracie, and let’s try to talk about this like adults. I get it. I’ve always cared about you more than your own parents do. But right now I’m the embodiment of everything you hate about your life, and I’m willing to take that blame until we can get you the help you need.”

I press my foot onto the accelerator and swing around a bend, near blinded by my own tears. The drop on the side of the winding road cutting through the mountains is at least two hundred feet. I can feel Able tense as we climb even higher, approaching a tunnel.

“Where the hell are you going? For fuck’s sake, Grace, pull over.” Able’s calm facade is slipping and his knuckles are white as he reaches over and grips the steering wheel. I swerve and he lets go instantly. Adrenaline rushes through my body.

“Not until you admit what you did to me.” I push down harder on the gas when he tries to grab my arm. He closes his eyes and speaks through gritted teeth so that I have to strain to hear him.

“You’re a fucking psychopath.”

We enter the tunnel at seventy miles per hour, and I turn the headlights off so that the road ahead is lit only by the dim strip of lights lining the roof above us. Able is breathing heavily next to me and I can smell his sour, whiskey-laced breath in the dark. He turns to me and grips my thigh, speaking quietly but quickly, each word burning a brand onto my body.

“Do you want me to actually fuck you? Is that it? You never once said no, Grace. Remember that when—”

I never do get to hear the end of Able’s sentence, because by this point we are out of the other side of the tunnel and soaring through the night, pausing in midair for one pure, perfect second before we fall three hundred feet into the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains. Funnily enough, it’s at that exact moment that I think maybe LA is quite beautiful after all.

* * *

? ? ?

Things I remember from the accident: his voice—low and gentle, despite everything else about him. The feel of his hand on my leg just before I do it. A familiar something prickling through my body, too complex to label. The full moon hanging cleanly in the sky for the first time in a while. When I finally turn to look at him, he laughs because he doesn’t think I’ll go through with it. If I really think about it, this is what makes me do it. One small jerk of the wheel and then that perfect in-between moment just after we clear the road but before we start to fall. The sound of Tom Petty’s voice as we crash down, down, tumbling to the bottom of the earth. A piercing, jagged tear, and then nothing but stillness.

After

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

I wake up on Christmas day with a tight, four-inch gash above my right eyebrow, a broken nose, a fractured patella and a mouth as dry as Death Valley in August. It turns out I was both unoriginal and ill prepared when I drove off Malibu Canyon at that particular moment. If I’d looked into it, I would have discovered that, in 1964, a couple walked away untouched from a wreck in the exact same three-hundred-foot ravine, and, more recently, in 2012, a car of six teenagers survived a crash in the same spot. I should probably have known I’d be invincible—I always get the things I don’t want.

I tell the hospital that I don’t want any visitors, and the doctors and nurses fall over themselves to tend to me over the next couple of days, to tell me how lucky I am and how well I’m recovering. They list other actors with facial scarring, and tell me that they’ll put me in touch with the most prolific cosmetic surgeons for my second rhinoplasty. Every hour a new delivery of flowers or presents arrive. Even from my hospital bed, I understand that I’m infinitely more interesting after surviving this crash.

I have to give a statement to the police, a simple process that ends when one of the detectives asks me to record a video message for her daughter. I shouldn’t be surprised anymore, but somehow I still am.

“Why are you sorry?” I ask the male one after he apologizes for what happened to me for the fourth time. His skin is fleshy and pink, like a rare steak.

“We know you were just doing the guy a favor. His blood alcohol level was through the roof.”

“Through the roof,” I say, forcing a smile. “I get it.”

I’ve always hated puns.

The officer shifts uncomfortably in the plastic hospital seat, and the other cop takes over. She’s small with bad skin and perfect hands. I can’t stop staring at her hands, which become self-conscious under my gaze, twisting and eventually slipping underneath her legs. I force myself to meet her eyes instead.

“Guys like this think they can just do what they want, huh? He was lucky you were there. You must be his guardian angel or something, mama.”

* * *

? ? ?

I stop in at Able’s room on my way out of the hospital. My nurse told me that he has a cut that is almost an exact mirror image of mine, over his left eyebrow, acquired when a large piece of the windshield flew into the back of the car, slicing us both neatly on its way. Mine needed exactly two more stitches than his, twelve in total, but other than that they are almost identical. We will now forever be bound by our scars, along with everything else.