Parallel Fires

She crossed a continent to put out the fire. She should have known better. Fire travels.

Hollywood, 1923. Diana Grant has arrived in the city of illusions with an invented name and a gift she gives away for free. By day she’s nobody, a scenarist. By midnight she’s the studio’s secret weapon, gutting broken screenplays and handing them back alive, her name nowhere on the title cards. She’s built a life out of being invisible. Invisible is safe. Invisible doesn’t burn.

Three thousand miles east, Teddy Calloway has finally put down the bottle after several stops and starts, and the silence underneath it nearly kills him. Sober for the first time since the war, he pours the wreckage into a play and turns his ruin into the most talked-about work on Broadway. Critics who’d written him off as a drunk with a trust fund are calling him the voice of his generation. But the play is about her. It runs and runs, and every night a thousand strangers weep over a woman in California who doesn’t know she’s the reason. He counts his sober days like beads on a wire. He has everything he ever wanted and the only person he wants to tell is the one he drove away.

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