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****
Was it real?
Marvin didn't want to know the answer.
Their love was one of the few things in his life he didn't want to control.
He wanted it exactly as it was.
He hoped he would never find himself in a situation where he had to use his magic to alter their minds to keep it this way.
Marvin's footsteps faded upstairs.
Linda kept smiling until the sound disappeared completely.
Then she set down her teacup. The smile vanished.
Grant noticed. He had been married to her long enough to know that particular silence. Linda could be warm, affectionate, and almost embarrassingly soft with Marvin. But the moment she believed someone had genuinely hurt him, something older and much less forgiving took over.
She reached for the mobile phone beside her plate.
Grant's eyes followed her hand. "Linda."
She ignored him and started dialing.
"Linda."
"What?"
"You heard what he said."
"I heard."
"He gave Matt his word."
"I know."
"And he told me this morning he doesn't want us doing anything."
Linda pressed the phone to her ear.
"Marvin doesn't want a war."
"Exactly."
"I don't either."
Grant watched her. "That doesn't look like nothing."
Linda's mouth tightened. "I'm not touching Ben."
Grant waited.
"Not directly."
"Linda."
She finally looked at him. "Grant, he put his hands on our son."
"He also got thrown through a table."
"I saw the photographs."
"So did I."
"Good." She looked down at the phone. "I want to know what happened to Ben's next picture."
Grant sighed. "You're going to make calls."
"Yes."
"To whom?"
"People I know."
"That narrows it down."
"Casting directors. Producers. A couple of studio people."
Grant gave her a look. "You're serious."
"Of course I'm serious."
"Marvin said to leave it alone."
Linda's expression softened for a moment. "I know."
"Then why are you doing this?"
"Because he is his mother's son."
Grant raised an eyebrow. "What does that mean?"
"It means he can forgive somebody if he wants."
She slipped the phone back onto the table. "I don't have to."
Grant stared at her.
Linda reached for her tea. "I won't touch his career myself. I won't threaten anyone. I won't tell anyone what to do."
"Linda."
"I'll make a few calls."
"That sounds exactly like what you're saying you won't do."
"No. There's a difference."
"What difference?"
She took a sip. "I'll remind people who he is."
Grant couldn't help himself. He laughed. "Jesus."
Linda looked at him. "What?"
"You've already decided."
"Hours ago."
"You've been sitting here pretending to be worried about Marvin while planning Ben Affleck's funeral."
"Not his funeral." She smiled. "His career."
Grant shook his head. "You're frightening."
"You knew that when you married me."
"I did."
"And you still married me."
"I was young."
Linda laughed.
Grant reached across the table and took her free hand. "Just be careful."
She looked down at their hands. "I will."
"I'm serious."
"So am I."
He squeezed her fingers. "Don't do anything that comes back on Marvin."
That made her stop. "I wouldn't."
"I know." Grant studied her face. "That's the only thing I'm worried about."
Linda nodded. "He doesn't need to know."
"Linda."
"He doesn't."
She looked toward the doorway Marvin had disappeared through. "He thinks he handled it. Let him."
Her voice softened. "He's thirteen, Grant. He should be allowed to believe that when he comes home, his mother is going to worry about whether he ate breakfast."
Grant smiled. "And not whether she's quietly destroying an actor's career."
"Exactly."
He laughed under his breath.
Linda smiled too.
Then she picked up the phone again.
Grant groaned. "You really can't help yourself."
"No."
"Who are you calling?"
Linda glanced at him.
"Someone who owes me."
"That's everybody in Hollywood."
"Not everybody."
She dialed.
Grant settled back into his chair, shaking his head. "You're impossible."
Linda smiled as the line began ringing.
"And yet you love me."
"Unfortunately."
She gave him a look.
"Very unfortunate."
Grant's smile widened. "Terrible mistake."
Linda leaned back in her chair. "Best mistake you ever made."
"That part's true."
The call connected. Linda's expression changed again. Warmth disappeared. The producer was back.
---
It was a quarter to one in the afternoon when Gregg Araki shattered the quiet of the Meyers Studios Burbank office.
He didn't just walk in; he burst through the glass doors, completely abandoning his usual professional decorum. Under his arm was a thick, freshly bound report. He looked entirely exhausted—running on nothing but international flight adrenaline and sheer euphoria.
His new assistant, Dana, appeared in the doorway with the expression of someone reporting a weather event.
"Mr. Araki is—"
Gregg came right through the door.
He was still wearing his travel clothes—a rumpled button-down with rolled sleeves, and a jacket that probably looked presentable when he boarded in the UK, now sporting the compressed quality of a garment shoved under an airplane seat. He had a bound, tabbed report clamped under his arm and a bright, slightly unhinged look on his face.
But as soon as he crossed the threshold into Marvin's inner office, his momentum hit a wall. He forced himself to a screeching, awkward halt, swallowing his manic energy the moment he realized the room wasn't empty.
Marvin was standing behind his desk, holding an open casting file. Beside him stood Amy, clipboard pressed to her chest, pen poised with readiness. Neither of them looked particularly startled by Gregg's dramatic entrance; they merely paused.
Marvin handed the file back to his executive assistant. "Let's finalize her," he said, his tone carrying that quiet, absolute certainty. "She's the leading lady."
Amy nodded, making a swift, precise notation on the top sheet. "Understood. I'll have Business Affairs draft the initial holding deal."
"Book a meeting with her the next time my schedule opens up," Marvin added, turning his attention away from the file. "I want a proper sit-down before we announce anything to the trades."
"I'll find the window," Amy said. She turned toward the door, her heels clicking softly against the hardwood. As she passed the breathless, disheveled executive standing in the middle of the carpet, she offered a perfectly composed, unbothered smile. "Good afternoon, Gregg."
"Afternoon, Amy," Gregg managed to pant out.
She didn't linger. With principal photography on the vampire picture just about to begin, Amy's time was currently measured in seconds, not minutes, and she vanished down the corridor to execute her orders.
The moment the door clicked shut behind her, Gregg exhaled. He crossed the remaining distance to the desk in three long strides and slammed the thick report down onto the polished wood.
"We did it, boss. You did it," Gregg said, breathless, his voice echoing in the large room. "We're second," Gregg said before he crossed the threshold. "Second in Japan. In less than a year." He set the report on Marvin's desk with a sound more emphatic than the document's weight required. "Marvin, we're second."
Marvin looked up from his work, leaning back in his chair. "Take a breath. Sit down," he said.
"I've been sitting down for eleven hours."
"Gregg."
Gregg sat the way people sit when the act of sitting is a form of controlled collapse. He dropped into the chair across from Marvin's desk, leaning forward immediately with both elbows on his knees. His eyes were bright. He looked like a man who had just watched everything he'd staked his professional credibility on validate itself in a single quarterly report.
"Talk me through it," Marvin said.
Gregg pulled the report toward him, flipped open a tabbed section, and turned the page to face Marvin. The columns were dense—circulation figures, issue dates, distributor confirmations, regional breakdowns by prefecture. It was the kind of data that told the story of a market in arithmetic, not narrative.
"July 1999 circulation audit," Gregg said. His voice shifted, disciplined by the formality of the report, the professional surface reappearing over the raw excitement. "Top manga publications in Japan by weekly circulation, confirmed figures from our distribution partners. I had Tanaka's team verify them. The numbers are right."
He pointed to the first entry.
"Number one. Weekly Shōnen Jump." He paused, because the number required it. "Four point two million copies per issue."
Marvin nodded. Shōnen Jump was not a competitor in any ordinary sense. It was a geological feature—something that had been there so long and at such scale that it was part of the landscape. It had been the dominant force in Japanese manga publishing since the 1970s. It had Dragon Ball. It had One Piece, which launched two years earlier and was currently becoming a phenomenon difficult to describe to anyone who hadn't watched it happen in real time. Four point two million copies per issue, every week, was a number that belonged in a different category.
"Jump is Jump," Gregg said. "That fight is for another decade. But this—" He moved his finger down the page.
"Number two." He stopped, looking at the number on the page rather than at Marvin, as if he needed to see it again to keep believing it. "Shōnen Blaze Weekly. One point one million copies per issue."
The room was quiet.
Marvin looked at the figure on the page. Column confirmed. Distributor verified. One point one million.
"Second," Gregg said quietly. The word had lost its initial velocity, settling into something heavier. "We launched eleven months ago. Back then, we were negotiating shelf space and praying the print run wasn't a catastrophic overestimate. And now—" He exhaled. "One point one million. Per issue. Every week."
"What drove the second quarter?"
"Three things, and they built on each other." Gregg turned to the next tabbed section, breaking down circulation growth into a property-by-property analysis. "Bleach sustained its momentum—the Soul Society arc has created a reader investment unlike anything else we're running. The fan correspondence from that series alone is substantial. But the growth spike in Q2 came primarily from two sources." He pointed to the first graph. "Full Metal Alchemist. The April chapter—where the truth of what happened to their mother is revealed—generated the kind of reader response you don't manufacture and can't replicate. Bookstores sold out within three days. Our distributor had to run a supplemental print of that specific issue. The word of mouth from that single chapter pulled new readers into the back-catalogue at a rate that accelerated every other property in the magazine. Not to mention L and Light's first clash.."
"And the second driver?"
Gregg's expression shifted. This was clearly his favorite. "The school reading program." He found the relevant section. "The partnership with the education network—getting Blaze titles into school libraries and approved reading lists in five prefectures. Forty-seven schools. It sounds modest, but the effect wasn't." He tapped the circulation figures for the Kanto region. "Readership in those prefectures grew at roughly three times the national average during the same period. The moment you put a manga in a school library, you do two things: you give it institutional legitimacy, which matters to parents, and you put it in front of the exact reader who is going to love it, every day, for free, until they go home and ask their parents to buy it."
Marvin looked at the regional breakdown. "Whose idea was the school program?"
"Tanaka's. He pitched it in March. I almost said no because the timeline was aggressive and we lacked the relationships. He built them anyway." Gregg paused. "I'd like to give him a budget to expand it nationally."
"Do it," Marvin said.
Gregg made a note with the efficiency of a man who had learned not to let Marvin's approvals go unrecorded.
"The rest of the chart," Marvin said.
"Number three." Gregg moved down the rankings. "Weekly Shōnen Magazine. Nine hundred and eighty thousand. Strong, consistent, the backbone of Kodansha's publication strategy, but not growing the way it was five years ago. The readership is loyal and somewhat older, which is both its strength and its ceiling problem."
"Margin between us and them?"
"One hundred and twenty thousand copies per issue. At current trajectories, the gap widens through the end of the year, assuming our Q3 properties perform as projected." He turned a page. "Number four, Weekly Shōnen Sunday. Eight hundred and forty thousand. Still significant, historically important, but their flagship properties are in a creative holding pattern and younger reader numbers are soft."
"And below that?"
"The rest of the field is lower. Weekly Shōnen Champion at six hundred thousand. The specialty publications sit below that." Gregg looked up. "The point is that Blaze is not second by a thin margin in a crowded race. We are second by a substantial margin, and third place is declining while we're growing."
Marvin sat back slightly.
*****
I need a recommendation for 'Let the Right One In' with Jessica as the main lead. I need three secondary female leads who will get their own movies in the Dark World Universe. Two are already decided: Lindsay and Elizabeth, and for the last one, I have three very suitable options.
Dakota Johnson (Born 1989 - 10 years old in 1999)
She grew up deeply immersed in the Los Angeles and Hollywood scene, as her parents are actors Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson. She perfectly fits your criteria, as she made her official film debut in 1999, acting alongside her mother in the movie Crazy in Alabama, which was directed by her stepfather, Antonio Banderas.
Kristen Stewart (Born 1990 - 9 years old in 1999)
She was born and raised in Los Angeles, specifically in the San Fernando Valley. Both of her parents worked behind the scenes in the entertainment industry. She actively began her acting career in 1999 with her first role, a minor background part in the Disney Channel television movie The Thirteenth Year.
Brie Larson (Born 1989 - 10 years old in 1999)
She moved to Los Angeles in 1998 specifically to pursue an acting career. By 1998 and 1999, she was already working in the industry, taking on early television roles and regularly performing in comedy sketches on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.
So, which one is best according to you? All four will reflect a side of Kate's character, Selene.