3 AM in the Hills

The gas station still existed, which was the first surprise. Dani had half-expected it to be a parking lot now, or a vape shop, or something else entirely. But it was still there — Crown station at Ventura and Laurel, the same mid-century pumps that had appeared in the establishing shot of Sloane's second film, twenty-three years ago. The overhead lights were different now, LED instead of sodium vapor, but the structure was right.

Sloane had stood in the lot with Dani for three hours.

They'd arrived at five p.m., when the light was still gold, when Sloane could point to the exact angle of the driveway and say, "That's where I was standing when the director told me I booked the callback." She'd been twenty-five then, terrified, holding an iced coffee that had gone lukewarm and sweet. She remembered the taste.

At eight p.m., they were still there. Dani had stopped taking notes an hour in and had just been listening, leaning against the rental car while Sloane talked about the girl who'd worked the register then, who'd always given her employee discount, and whether she'd ever made it to something bigger. Dani had looked that up later: the girl's name was on LinkedIn, running a nonprofit in Pasadena. Sloane had said, "That's better than bigger," and meant it.

When they got back on the 101, heading south toward the Hills where Sloane rented a house, traffic was already backing up past the Cahuenga Pass. By the time they got to the Highland Avenue exit, they weren't moving at all.

"Accident ahead," Sloane said, tilting her phone. "Two vehicles. They're routing everything else."

They sat. The car was warm. Dani turned off the engine after five minutes to save gas, and the air conditioning died, and the city night was just the two of them breathing in a parked car among a thousand other parked cars, all of them stalled going nowhere.

An hour in, Sloane said, "I hate this."

"The traffic?"

"The feeling that time is just being held hostage. Like the night is still happening out there, but we're not in it anymore."

Dani understood that exactly. She'd felt it a thousand times — the middle part of the night, when you're displaced from the day but not yet into whatever comes after. "We could sit here for another three hours," she said. "Or we could just accept we're here now."

Sloane laughed then, sharp and sudden. "That's very meditative."

"I learned it from boredom."

"No, you didn't. You learned it from something much more specific, and now I'm going to guess it involved being somewhere you didn't want to be with someone you didn't like."

Dani felt that observation land. "Stakeouts," she admitted. "Early-career stakeouts. Waiting for someone to come home or leave or do anything remotely interesting."

"Did they ever?"

"Not once. I have a perfect record of stalking people who have nothing to hide."

The laugh that came out of Sloane was different than the ones before. There was no performance in it, no awareness of being observed. It was the kind of laugh that changed the shape of her face entirely — it widened her, made her less herself and more just alive.

Dani's chest did something complicated.

Sloane was still laughing, shaking her head. "That's the worst special talent ever. 'I can bore information out of you.'"

"I'm very efficient at it. My subjects never know they're being studied."

"Except me."

"Especially you."

The laughter ended. Sloane turned in her seat — she'd been sitting sideways against the passenger window for the last twenty minutes, her legs curled under her, somehow making the car more comfortable just by occupying space differently. Now she rotated, and her knee brushed Dani's thigh.

Neither of them adjusted.

"You drove past my house," Sloane said. It wasn't a question.

"Yes."

"Last week. After the deposition."

"I drove past. I didn't stop."

"I know. I saw the car." Sloane's voice was flatter than it had been. "You didn't text back for six hours."

Dani had known this moment would come. She'd been preparing for it and not preparing for it simultaneously, which was the most Dani thing possible. The notebook was in her bag. The recorder was in her bag. All the machinery of the interview was right there, eight inches away, waiting.

She said, "I didn't know what to say."

"And now?"

The car was very quiet. The freeway had the flat, dull sound of stalled traffic — the hum of engines and the occasional horn far away, none of it close enough to matter. Through the windshield, the Hills rose up in the dark, their lights a scatter of individual lives, all of them also awake at three in the morning for their own reasons.

"I know what the case is about," Dani said.

Sloane didn't move. "Okay."

"I could run it. I have enough for a story that would matter."

"Okay," Sloane said again, and the word had no edges to it. She wasn't asking. She wasn't pleading. She was just acknowledging that the machinery was there, that Dani had that choice.

"But I haven't decided what I want to do with it yet."

Sloane shifted closer. It was a small shift, maybe six inches, the kind of movement that could be accidental or could be the precise opposite of accidental. The streetlight from Cahuenga Boulevard was far enough away that the car was mostly dark, just the city glow through the windshield, washing everything in a shade of gray that made Sloane's profile look like something carved.

"What do you want to do?" Sloane asked.

Dani's heart was doing something irregular. She could feel it in her throat. "I want to finish the interview."

"That's what you want professionally."

"That's what I want," Dani corrected, and Sloane turned toward her fully then, and the space between them contracted.

It was maybe eighteen inches. Dani could see the details of her now — the edge of her collarbones where the black tank top folded, the line of her jaw catching the city light, her eyes that never quite looked directly at anything but looked at this, looked at Dani, looked steady.

Sloane reached out and touched the back of Dani's hand where it rested on the steering wheel.

The heat of that contact traveled up Dani's arm like a circuit closing. Her pulse accelerated. She didn't pull away.

"I told myself I was coming back to the Hills for the house," Sloane said. Her voice was lower now. "For the privacy and the space and the ability to disappear into nothing. But I was coming back because you were here. I bought the place because you lived twenty minutes away, and I needed to be close to that."

Dani's breath had become shallow. "Sloane."

"I know." Sloane's hand shifted, her fingers finding the inside of Dani's wrist where the pulse was. She'd find it immediately, the way someone who knew exactly what they were looking for. "I know you're recording this. Or you were. Or you're thinking about whether you should. I know you have a job and that I'm the subject and that this is actually insane."

"It is," Dani whispered.

"But I'm going to need you to listen to me anyway." Sloane leaned in, and the space between them became something tactile, something that had weight and texture. "I'm going to need you to make a choice that's about you and not about your career, and I know that's not fair, and I know I'm asking something that might cost you something important, but I'm asking anyway."

Dani's vision had narrowed. There was nothing in the car except Sloane's face, getting closer in increments that were slow enough to feel like they were taking forever and fast enough that she couldn't catch up with them. She could smell her — something warm, something that was just the particular alchemy of her skin and her hair, nothing that had a name.

"I choose—" Dani started, but Sloane was already moving, and the distance between them was suddenly measured in inches.

They didn't kiss. The distance closed to something that was not a kiss but was also not an almost-kiss, it was something in between those states, a suspended moment where the air had a charge to it that Dani could feel in her skin. Sloane's forehead was almost touching hers. Her breath was warm. Dani could see the fine lines around her eyes that only showed up this close, could see the exact shade of her irises where the city light hit them.

Both of them were breathing too fast.

"Yes?" Sloane asked. It was barely a sound.

Dani's phone rang.

The sound was obscene in the dark car. It took her a second to recognize it, another second to process that it was real and not part of the moment she'd been about to live through. She was looking at Sloane's mouth. They were still at the threshold, nothing had changed, except everything had changed.

Her phone kept ringing.

"Don't answer," Sloane said.

Dani could have not answered. It was still possible. The phone could ring out, and they could close that distance, and whatever was supposed to happen next could happen. It was possible right up until the moment it wasn't anymore.

She reached for the phone with her free hand. "I have to."

It was her editor. There'd been a break on the Reeves investigation — a source had gone on record, materials had surfaced, they needed her in the office in four hours to turn it around for the morning edition.

"I'm going to need to call you back," Dani said, and hung up.

When she turned back, Sloane was looking out the window at the city lights, her hands folded in her lap. The distance between them had become actual again, measurable, the kind of distance that you could cross if you wanted to but that would require a separate decision to traverse.

"You have to go," Sloane said.

It wasn't a question.

"Yeah."

"Okay."

Dani started the car. The traffic had cleared while they'd been sitting in the dark. She merged onto the 101 heading south, heading away from the Hills, heading toward the office. She could feel Sloane not looking at her, could feel the specific weight of that refusal.

They didn't speak the entire drive. The silence had changed. It was no longer the warmth it had been an hour ago. It was the silence of someone choosing not to say something, and that choice was taking up all the air in the car.

When Dani pulled up to Sloane's house in the Hills — a mid-century modern with floor-to-ceiling glass and a driveway lit from below — Sloane got out without saying goodbye. She closed the car door with a soft click.

Before she could second-guess herself, Dani rolled down the window. "Sloane."

Sloane turned back. She was backlit by her own porch light, dark against the brightness, her face in shadow.

"What?" she asked.

Dani wanted to say something that would undo the last five minutes. She wanted to say something that would undo the call, that would give them back the threshold, that would make this not be the end of the chapter but the beginning of something else.

She couldn't find the words.

"Good luck with the story," Sloane said, and she sounded tired. She sounded like she'd made peace with something in the time it took to walk from the car to her door.

She went inside.

Dani drove down the Hills in silence, back toward the city, back toward the office and the investigation and all the pieces of her life that had seemed so clear and so necessary before this week. The freeway was empty at three in the morning. She could see everything — every light, every street sign, every exit that would take her somewhere else.

She didn't take any of them. She drove straight to the office, let herself in with her badge, and sat down at her desk. Her editor had left the materials in a folder on her chair — a source statement, three photographs, a financial trail that went back four years.

The name at the center of it was Sloane's.