Roman Voss hadn't directed a film since 2011, but his name still worked like a key. It got tables at restaurants that turned away Oscar winners. It got his daughters meetings with agents who'd never watched a single episode of their podcast before offering representation.
He was seventy-three now, silver-haired and sun-worn, still handsome in the specific, weathered way that Hollywood rewarded in men and punished in women. He rarely appeared on *Unwaxed* itself — "the girls' thing," he called it, with a fondness that always sounded slightly like condescension — but his presence saturated every episode, anyway. Guests wanted to be near it. Advertisers paid for it. Journalists, when they profiled the sisters, always *daughters of legendary director Roman Voss* in the very first line, as if the girls themselves were a footnote to him rather than the other way around.
Sophia had grown up watching her father charm his way out of critical reviews. Poor investments, had whispered about the lawsuits in the nineties that had evaporated before they ever reached a courtroom. She'd absorbed the lesson so early she couldn't remember learning it: *fame isn't about being loved. It's about being useful enough that people decide not to look too closely.*
She used that lesson now every time the red light blinked on. There was a photograph in the front hallway — Roman at forty, on a red carpet, one arm around a starlet nobody remembered, the other raised in a wave to a crowd that had loved him before he'd done anything to earn it. Sophia used to stop in front of it as a kid and study his face, trying to find the trick in it, the thing that made an entire industry decide to forgive a man in advance. She'd never found it. She'd started eventually to suspect there wasn't a trick at all — that the forgiveness came first, unconditional, and the man simply grew into the space it left him.
She wondered, sometimes, whether she and Selene had inherited that same blank check, or whether they'd have to spend their whole lives finding out exactly how much of it was real.