Read This Is Where We Live for Free Online Page B

then, this last weekend, instead of going wide as promised, her distributor yanked the film altogether, hoping to cut its losses. Just like that, less than three weeks after opening night, the film was gone. Almost as if it had never been made in the first place. Claudia wondered if she’d hallucinated the entire thing.
    There would be other movies, she reminded herself. If all went as promised, she’d be directing a new one by the end of the year. Except that Carter wasn’t returning her calls, which hardly seemed like a promising sign. She had never been an insomniac, but during the last two weeks, night after night, she had found herself awake at three in the morning. She would lie there in the dark, Jeremy placidly snoring beside her, and feel the increasingly familiar battle lines being drawn between body and mind: her thoughts setting off on a circuitous race course, denying her bleary body another night’s sleep. Three o’clock in the morning had become her hour, the Hour of Claudia, Queen of Fret.
    “Breakfast?” Claudia turned to see Jeremy in the doorway, with a plate of scrambled eggs in hand.
    “Aren’t you going to be late for work?” She reached out for the plate.
    “Edgar’s got meetings in New York this week, so I can go in at lunchtime and no one will notice. Honestly, I could skip work entirely and he wouldn’t know the difference.”
    “Nice work ethic,” she said. “Maybe you want to use this as an opportunity to patch the cracks from the earthquake?”
    “That’s your job.” He flashed an apologetic grin. “I’m going to catch up on those bills. And I want to work on a new song.”
    “Oh? How close are you to finishing the album?” She immediately regretted the question. In the dozen times she had asked him this over the course of the last year, the answer had consistently been the same: “Soon.” With each repetition the question sounded less like enthusiastic curiosity and more like wifely badgering. She didn’t want to be that kind of wife—like her mom, always nagging her dad to mow the lawn or winterize the attic. Anyway, the album was dependent not just on Jeremy but on the other three members of his band. But with each passing month some of the air was let out of Claudia’s excitement and she couldn’t help but wonder why, exactly, the album was taking so damn long.
    “We’re close-ish,” he said. He poked at an air bubble in the paint, a cheery cerulean color that she and Jeremy had applied themselves, somewhat sloppily.
    At her elbow, the phone rang. She glanced at the caller ID: Carter Curtis . “Finally!” she muttered, grabbing for the phone.
    “Tell him to get us that check soon.” Jeremy tapped twice on the doorframe and then disappeared back into the living room.
    Carter’s voice on the other end was hollow and distant, as if he were speaking from one end of a tin can.
    “Claudia? Carter.”
    “Please tell me you have the signed deal in front of you.” She hunched over her desk, putting her nose close to a postcard that her parents had sent her from their recent RV trip to Mount Rushmore. George Washington stared back at her with stoic resignation.
    Carter hesitated a half second too long, and in that moment Claudia knew. She lowered her forehead to the desk and braced herself.
    “Unfortunately, no,” he said. “Fox backed out.”
    Claudia could feel her breath fogging the surface of her desk. She squeezed her eyes closed, determined not to cry while on the phone with her agent.
    “OK,” she said. “Well, can we go back to Universal or Warner or any of the other studios who wanted to buy the script.”
    “That’s what I’ve been doing all week. And they all passed.”
    “They suddenly don’t like my script anymore? Didn’t the executive at Warner call it ‘Oscar bait’ just last month?”
    Carter sighed heavily. In the background, she could hear honking—he was in his car. “You know how it is in Hollywood, Claudia. They have no sense