“And dangerous women make the best stories.”

“I’m not producing garbage anymore. And neither are you.” Sofia slid a thin binder across the table. “This is The Slow Burn . It’s about three women in their late fifties. A chef reopening her restaurant after a scandal. A retired detective solving a cold case from her bedroom. And a former actress—”

The Slow Burn was bought by a streaming service for a record sum. It became a sleeper hit, then a phenomenon. Critics called it “ferocious,” “tender,” and “a middle-finger to every casting director who ever asked a fifty-year-old woman to play a corpse.”

“Lena, darling. I’ve got something. It’s a script. A small part. The mother of the groom.”

A young woman in the front row, maybe twenty-two, with a press badge and nervous eyes, asked: “Ms. Vasquez, do you think there’s still a place for women your age in cinema?”

The applause was a living thing. It roared, it wept, it stood.

“A former actress who decides to steal a painting from the museum that fired her from its docent program for being ‘too old for the patrons.’” Sofia grinned. “It’s a heist. A comedy. A gut-punch drama. And the three leads are between forty-eight and sixty-two.”