When the email came in, its subject line as anticlimactic as a chain-store receipt, Rose couldn't help but smirk. Confirmation, in the end, was a binary thing—her name at the top of the call sheet, a line in a spreadsheet, a contract sent, a universe shifted subtly in her favor. She had landed the role, and every moment of calculated preparation, every late-night self-tape filmed in the flickering blue of her studio's lamplight, had paid off. There was a momentary high—ecstatic, chest-thumping, wickedly personal—but she didn't let herself dwell in the triumph of it. Already, she was planning her next move.
This job, like the others, was a direct result of the invisible latticework of her own efforts, threaded together with the wire-thin advantage granted by her peculiar gift: the knowledge of things not yet said, not yet done. Yet as Rose reread the agreement, parsing legalese with one eye and the future with the other, she felt a familiar tightness in her throat. It wasn't doubt, exactly, but the awareness that talent, even shaped by fate into a weapon, was not enough. Hollywood was a labyrinth—no, a hydra, with every corridor of opportunity branching into a dozen new hazards. One misstep, and the whole thing could turn on her. She needed someone who could play the game as ruthlessly as she did, only from the other side of the table.
Rose's mind, always cross-referencing timelines, ran through the list of agents who would soon become legends and liabilities in equal measure. She'd done the research; she knew the industry power-brokers by name, by reputation, by the finer points of their eventual scandals. Only one name kept surfacing, again and again, in every permutation of the future that promised her both creative freedom and commercial success: Richard Lovett. He was still a junior agent now—hungry, unpolished, prone to risk—but within a decade he'd be the kingmaker at CAA, and every young starlet in town would kill for his endorsement.
She would not wait for him to find her. Rose opened her laptop and began drafting the email that would, in its own way, set history in motion. She was careful—cleverly referencing minor industry events she knew he'd just experienced, flattering his taste in new talent, building a rapport that would later seem both prescient and deeply personal. She signed off with just enough confidence to intrigue, but not overwhelm, a man who would soon have his pick of the city's desperate and dazzling.
By the time she hit SEND, Rose already saw the branching possibilities: a frank phone call, a tentative handshake, a meeting over coffee where her insight would startle him, and, finally, the contract that would tie them together in mutual ambition. If she played this right, she wouldn't just have a representative—she'd have a coconspirator. Someone who would believe in the inevitability of her rise, because she'd mapped it out for him, breadcrumb by breadcrumb.
Her phone buzzed, vibrating across the Formica table, and Rose snatched it up with the reflexes of someone who had learned never to let momentum slip. The reply was instantaneous, almost eager. She smiled, already rehearsing the conversation she knew they'd have.
If the game was rigged, she thought, best to stack the deck yourself. ( i am aware that email was invented yet but in this instance it was the only way of communicating that i could think off.
I sent out the bait for him to be intrigued enough, i take a deep breath trepidaIn the strange, liminal hours before the city stirred, Rose hovered over her inbox, the soft glow of the screen falling over her face, illuminating the faintest flicker of anxious triumph in her expression. She'd written and rewritten her outreach to Richard Lovett no less than seven times, each draft a careful calibration of anecdote, insight, and just enough flattery to stoke the ego of a man who, by all accounts, already believed he was destined for legend. It was a delicate transaction: she needed to seem both mysterious and accessible, both the product and the architect of Hollywood's next epoch. In the end, she signed off not with a polite best regards, but a line that would stick with him, a riddle she knew he wouldn't be able to resist solving.
When the reply came—less than five minutes after her message landed—Rose felt a pulse of satisfaction and something more primal, like the click of a lock that tells you you've finally, after much patience, found the precise combination. She let it sit unopened for a moment, savoring the tension, then clicked through.
As predicted, Richard was intrigued—his words, though calculated, betrayed an undercurrent of hunger: the ambition of a young man convinced he was one favor away from the inner circle. He complimented her initiative, referenced the same industry gossip she'd seeded in her email, and subtly invited her to outmaneuver the narrative. Rose recognized the pattern; she'd mapped it out in advance, right down to the cadence of his sentences, the performative humility that masked his restless drive.
She envisioned the future iterations of their correspondence: the exchange of confidences, the raw barter of secrets, the slow gravitational pull that would inevitably draw them into a partnership where each stood to gain and lose in equal measure. But for now, she typed her response in measured, deliberate strokes—a promise of mutual benefit, a hint of the outsized success they'd broker together if only he'd trust her instincts against the usual grain. She didn't need to threaten or cajole; she simply had to let him glimpse what was possible if he put his faith in her compass.
As she pressed send, Rose felt the calculus of ambition settle over her. This was the game, after all: you make yourself indispensable by seeing further and moving faster, by knowing not just the next move but the entire endgame. The difference now was that for all her advantage, she still had to endure the inertia of cause and effect—the slow, grinding clockwork of other people catching up to the inevitability she already carried inside her.
The following morning, Richard responded with a boldness that made her laugh out loud: a proposal for coffee at a hotel bar frequented by the city's up-and-coming power-brokers. No chaperones, no assistants, just the two of them, with the tacit understanding that whatever alliances were forged here could outlast the contracts themselves. Rose accepted in a single line, and in doing so, set the next wave of her plan in motion.
She would play the role that was written for her—the vanguard, the anomaly, the actress whose career would be engineered not by luck or lineage, but by her own ruthless clarity. And in Richard, she'd found not just a handler, but an accomplice, one who understood that sometimes you had to break the rules in order to write them.
She was already running through the conversation in her head, the questions he'd ask, the secrets she'd choose to reveal. But more than that, she was plotting the headlines and the history books, the careful way the two of them would be remembered.
Their meeting was inevitable; its outcome had already been written, somewhere, by the version of herself that dwelled a few weeks or a few years ahead.
iously open the reply from him. As I expected, he seemed intrigued about me, and as he is young and eager to prove himself, it is the perfect opportunity and profitable future for both of us. I can use my future knowledge to help him sign talent which will make me favourable to him when he runs the agency in the far away future.