The Perfect Find

Jenna Jones is a 40-year-old former fashion director at Darling magazine who, after a devastating breakup and two years away from the industry, returns to New York City broke and desperate to rebuild her career. She accepts a position at StyleZine.com, an online fashion magazine owned by Belladonna Media. Her boss is Darcy Vale, the intimidating CEO of Belladonna Media, with whom Jenna has had a bitter rivalry since their early twenties, when Jenna unknowingly dated Darcy's fiancé. Darcy gives Jenna an eight-month contract to triple the site's readership and orders her to build a social media presence, a concept Jenna barely understands.

Jenna struggles to fit in among StyleZine's digital-savvy staff. A phone call from Brian Stein, her former partner of 20 years and a wealthy real estate developer, deepens her distress. Brian reveals he is dating someone new, reopening old wounds: He wasted years pretending to want marriage and children before withdrawing both intimacy and commitment.

At a party thrown by her best friend Elodie Franklin, a blunt and sexually liberated hotel creative director, Jenna gets drunk and ends up kissing a charming 22-year-old stranger. He is funny, effortlessly cool, and a recent USC film school graduate. Their chemistry is overwhelming, but Elodie discovers them and separates them before they can exchange names.

On Monday, Darcy introduces Jenna to StyleZine's new videographer: Eric Combs, Darcy's own son. Both are stunned. They agree to keep their encounter secret and focus on producing their assigned web series.

Their first attempt fails. Jenna insists on interviewing a reclusive shoe designer, but the shoot yields nothing usable. Eric admits he suspected the idea would fail and let it happen to prove a point. Darcy gives them one final chance.

Their early dynamic is volatile. Eric's backstory gradually emerges: He was raised primarily by his paternal grandmother in a Brooklyn housing project while Darcy pursued her career. His father, Otis Combs, a kind but struggling musician, was shot and killed when Eric was 10. Darcy moved Eric to Manhattan, erased their past, and never got him counseling. Despite a largely absent mother, Eric thrived academically and won a directing award at USC for his short film Tyler on Perry Street.

A truce forms when they share deeply personal stories at a colleague's birthday gathering. They discover a shared love of silent film and obscure cultural history, and their friendship deepens rapidly. After a chaotic dinner party at Jenna's apartment, the two stay up late talking. Jenna describes her ideal love by referencing Greta Garbo's Flesh and the Devil, calling it a connection that is wild, fated, and impossible to resist. They nearly give in to their desire but pull back. Eric leaves, then lingers outside her building while Jenna watches from her window.

The next day, Jenna conceives the idea for "The Perfect Find": a web series in which stylish women describe a dream fashion item they can never find, while Jenna interviews them in their closets and StyleZine produces limited-edition copies of each piece. Eric shoots each episode in a distinct cinematic style matched to the subject's personality. The series goes viral, quadrupling StyleZine's readership. The secret engine of its success is their charged creative chemistry: He films her while consumed by desire, and she radiates confidence knowing it.

Professional triumph leads to personal surrender. They begin a secret relationship, establishing rules to hide it at the office: five-minute conversations, clandestine meetings in a 10th-floor fashion closet, no physical intimacy at work. They break the last rule within days and carry on the affair for months.

A New York magazine profile of StyleZine shifts its focus from Darcy to Jenna and Eric, with intimate photos that make their connection unmistakable. Darcy is furious at being sidelined. At a gala, supermodel Suki Delgado drunkenly confirms to Darcy that she saw the couple together months earlier.

Cracks appear as Jenna and Eric confront the realities of their different life stages. Eric's quote in the magazine about wanting no ties during his career-building years haunts Jenna. At a birthday party for the daughter of Jenna's close friend Billie Burke-Lane, a cosmetics executive, conversations about fertility and mortgages underscore Eric's youth. Billie's six-year-old innocently reveals that Eric talked about wanting a wedding with Jenna, and Billie assumes they are engaged. On a pier afterward, Jenna and Eric fight bitterly. Eric declares his love but is deeply hurt by Jenna's attempts to present him as something he is not.

Meanwhile, Brian finds Jenna at a gala and confesses the real reason their relationship collapsed: not infidelity, but a catastrophic financial loss from investing with convicted fraudster Bernie Madoff, followed by a cocaine problem he was too ashamed to reveal. He proposes marriage, offering everything Jenna once wanted. She declines, telling him she loves Eric.

At Darcy's condo, where Eric still lives, Jenna sees his childhood bedroom for the first time: Kobe Bryant posters, Nike boxes, and an empty pizza box. The visceral evidence of his youth forces her to face what she has been avoiding. She tells him she wants to break up, admitting for the first time that she wants marriage and a baby, things he cannot yet provide. Eric agrees he is not ready. They cling to each other before she leaves.

Darcy springs her trap. She has secretly installed a security camera in the fashion closet where Jenna and Eric recently had sex. At an editorial meeting, she forces the footage into the open. Eric announces the relationship himself, and both are fired. In Darcy's office, Eric retaliates by threatening to expose his mother's worst secrets, including having Luca Belladonna's wife imprisoned on trumped-up charges and abandoning young Eric at an airport overnight. Darcy backs down. Jenna and Eric walk out together, share a final kiss on the sidewalk, and part ways.

Four years later, Jenna is a Fashion Theory professor at Fordham University, living in Brooklyn near her closest friends. She has a three-year-old son named Otis, after Eric's father. She conceived him accidentally during their final weeks together when antibiotics weakened her birth control, but she chose not to tell Eric, knowing he would have abandoned his career to be a father before he was ready.

At a Brooklyn playground, Jenna spots Eric scouting locations for his first feature film, based on the last day of his father's life. He secured an agent at South by Southwest, has been shooting international commercials, and has his own apartment. They admit they have never gotten over each other. Jenna introduces him to Otis. Eric sees his own face in the child and is overwhelmed. Otis asks Eric to play basketball. Eric takes his son's hand and they walk to the court. Jenna watches them, decides this is her happy ending, and walks toward them.