Read Chapter 29: The Audition

The grip of the lighting rig was the first thing Elise noticed. A black C-stand arm angled over the rehearsal space like a skeletal finger, its sandbag anchor barely holding. Theo was watching her watch it. She let her gaze drop.

“You’re doing that thing,” he said. “Scanning the room for exits.”

“Old habit.” She pulled at the collar of the plain white shirt Julian had chosen for the screen test. No costume, no makeup beyond a dusting of powder. The point was to see them raw. The point was to see if the public would buy what they’d confessed in that backstage room.

“In here, the only exit is through the scene,” Theo said, and his voice had an edge she didn’t recognize. Not cruelty. Something closer to dare.

Julian stood behind the camera operator, tablet in hand, his expression unreadable. A reader’s script lay open on a stool between them, but neither had touched it. The scene they’d been given was a locked-door sequence from the third act—the one Theo had been drafted months ago, before the rewrite he kept promising and never started. In it, the couple has discovered a secret that could destroy them. They have two minutes before the police arrive. They decide what to tell the world.

Theo had stripped the dialogue to a single page of stage directions and one line of text.

*We don’t speak of what we hide.*

“Whenever you’re ready,” Julian said.

The operator rolled. The red tally light blinked on.

Elise felt the air change. Not the studio air anymore—the heavy, filtered silence of a hospital corridor. She didn’t plan it. Her body remembered. She crossed to the window that looked out on the London street, but she didn’t see the traffic. She saw the corridor outside Isla’s room. The one Theo had described to her in the dressing room, voice cracking at the edges.

He came up behind her. Close enough that she could feel the warmth of him without contact. The scene required them to be a couple hiding a diagnosis, a terminal one, from the press outside. Elise knew the shape of that lie. She’d lived a version of it for the last year, hiding failure instead of illness.

“Say it,” Theo said, his line barely a whisper. “Say what you’re thinking.”

Elise turned. Her hand found his chest—not a gesture she’d rehearsed, just the need to anchor herself. His heart hammered under her palm.

“I’m thinking,” she said, and her voice came out wrong, thick and small, “that I don’t know how to pretend anymore.”

Theo’s jaw tightened. In the corner of her eye she saw Julian shift, but she didn’t look. Theo’s fingers came up, brushed a strand of hair from her face. The gesture was so tender it hurt.

“That’s the problem,” he said. “I don’t think we are pretending.”

It wasn’t in the scene. Neither was her next move. Elise went up on her toes and kissed him.

It was not the kiss from the press conference—the staged dip-and-swoop engineered for the lenses. This was slower, and it frightened her more. His mouth met hers with a hesitation that told her he was as unsure as she was, and that uncertainty made it real. She felt the seam of performance split, the character and the woman bleeding into one another until she couldn’t tell if her pulse was racing for the camera or for him.

He pulled back first. His hand was still on her jaw. His eyes were dark, and she read something in them that made her throat close. Recognition. Fear. Want.

“Cut,” Julian said.

The operator killed the feed. The red light died.

Neither of them moved. Elise’s hand was still on Theo’s chest. His was still on her face. She could feel the eyes of the crew on them—five people, maybe six, pretending to check monitors and adjust lenses. No one spoke.

Elise lowered her hand first. Theo’s dropped to his side a beat later.

“That was—” Julian started.

“When will you have the footage cut?” Elise asked. Her voice was steady now, clinical. She felt Theo’s gaze on her but didn’t meet it.

“Forty-eight hours,” Julian said, a small frown forming. “The director wants a second take. More controlled.”

“The second take isn’t going to be better,” Theo said quietly.

Julian studied them both. For a long moment, no one said anything. Then Julian nodded, clipped his tablet shut, and walked toward the door. “I’ll send the footage to your phones. Take a break. We’ll regroup on the announcement.”

The crew filed out. The room felt enormous suddenly, loud with the absence of bodies.

Theo was still looking at her. She could feel the weight of it.

“Elise.”

“Don’t,” she said.

“Don’t what?”

She turned to face him. Her chest was tight, and she hated that he could probably see it. “Don’t ask me what that was. Because I don’t know. And I don’t want to know. Not until we’ve dealt with Marcus, and the injunction, and the three morning shows Camille has booked that we haven’t prepared for, and the fact that my lawyer hasn’t gotten the footage from the building that proves I didn’t steal your script.”

Theo’s expression flickered. Hurt, maybe. Or frustration. He opened his mouth to speak, and his phone buzzed against the stool.

He glanced down at it. His face changed.

Elise crossed the room. “What is it?”

He didn’t lift the screen. His thumb hovered over the message. She saw the notification preview—a thumbnail image, grainy, and a timestamp that predated her arrival in London by six years. In the center of the frame, a younger version of Elise, eyes dilated, nose dusted with white powder, laughing at someone outside the shot.

Her stomach dropped through the floor.

“It’s the photograph,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

Theo’s thumb swiped the notification away. He pocketed the phone. His face was unreadable again, and that frightened her more than the image had.

“He sent it from a burner,” Theo said. “No trace. Nothing to block, nothing to countersue.”

“Theo, I can explain. It was one night at a festival. I was twenty-two, and I didn’t even—the line wasn’t—it was a mistake I’ve paid for a thousand times over. And no one has ever seen that photograph because the only copy was held by a dealer who died in Ibiza. I thought it died with him.”

Theo looked at her for a long moment. Then he walked to the stool where the reader’s script lay, picked it up, and turned to a page near the end. He held it out to her.

“Read the third-act rewrite,” he said. “The one I haven’t started yet.”

Elise took the script. She looked down at the page. Blank. All of it blank, except for a single line scrawled in his handwriting in the margin near the final page.

*The truth is the only thing they can’t take from us.*

She looked up, and Theo was already at the door, phone in hand, dialing.

“Who are you calling?” she asked.

“Marcus,” Theo said. His voice was flat, hard. “He wants a war. I’m going to give him one on my terms, not his.”

The door clicked shut behind him. Elise was alone in the room, the blank script page in her hands, the ghost of his kiss still burning on her mouth. Somewhere far away, her phone buzzed. Julian’s name lit the screen. But she didn’t answer. She was watching the door Theo had walked through, and the silence his absence left in the room, realizing that for the first time since they’d signed that contract, she was less afraid of the man holding the photograph than she was of the one who had just left to confront him without her.