Hitting my marks felt like running a marathon I’d already run a thousand times before. So easy, so unchallenging, so uninspiring, that you resent even being asked to lace up your shoes. Maybe if I was getting roles that excited me, maybe if I still felt I had something to prove, I don’t know, maybe I would have reacted differently. There are so many women who continue to do incredible work well into their eighties or nineties. Celia was like that. She could have turned in riveting performance after riveting performance forever, because she was always consumed by the work. But my heart wasn’t in it. My heart was never in the craft of acting, only in the proving. Proving my power, proving my worth, proving my talent. I'd proved it all. “That’s fine,” Harry said. “You don’t have to act anymore.” “But if I’m not acting, why would I live in Los Angeles? I want to live somewhere I can be free, where no one will pay attention to me. Do you remember when you were little, and whether it was on your block or a few blocks down, there was inevitably a pair of older ladies who lived together as roommates, and no one asked any questions because nobody cared? I want to be one of those ladies. I can’t do that here.” “You can’t do that anywhere,” Harry said. “That’s the price you pay for who you are.” “T don’t accept that. I think it’s very possible for me to do that.” “Well, I don’t want to do that. So what I’m proposing is that you and I remarry. And Celia marries my friend.” “We can talk about it later,” I said, standing up and taking my toiletry bag to the bathroom. “Evelyn, you don’t get to decide what this family does unilaterally.” “Who said anything about unilaterally? All I’m saying is that I want to talk about it later. There are a number of options here. We can go to Europe, we can move here, we can stay in New York.” Harry shook his head. “He can’t move to New York.”