“Not in the ballroom?” was Audrey’s next gambit.
“No.”
Now Audrey was closer, she could see that Linda had tears in her eyes. “Rough week?”
Linda nodded.
And Audrey, still not completely certain she wasn’t being either invasive, manipulative, or both, sat down next to her. “I—umm—I should probably say that I’ve been watching you from Jennifer’s trailer.”
“How’d I look?” asked Linda. There was a kind of hollow irony in her voice, a trying-to-have-a-sense-of-humour-about-things tone that Audrey recognised.
“Like you’d had a rough week.”
“I’ve completely blanked on macaron.” It was an absurd sentence to be saying. In some ways even more absurd now she was off camera.
Audrey did her best to radiate sympathy. “Yeah. You did freeze up a bit.”
“I just”—Linda made a swirling motion next to her head—“I just got stuck in a loop because I know meringue is really finnicky and if you don’t fold it exactly right it doesn’t foot properly—”
“Foot properly?”
“A macaron should have a little”—she made a sort of very broad hourglass shape with her hands—“foot at the bottom of each half.”
That wasn’t something Audrey had ever noticed, which suggested she’d probably been eliminated at about the right time. “And that made you get…stuck in a loop?”
“Short version: I couldn’t decide what to do because I was getting too worried about how little time I had left to decide what to do.”
It wasn’tquitea problem Audrey could say she’d shared. Her brain tended to play different kinds of tricks. But she could understand the heart of it. “So how do you want to play this?”
As soon as the words were out of her mouth, Audrey was wondering at the shape of them. They did and didn’t sound like her. But they also felt like the right thing to say. Because Jennifer had—once again and fuck her—been right. Linda knew she was on TV and needed to act like it.
Linda looked down dolefully. “I’m not sure. I could go back in, but honestly I don’t think there’s any way I can make forty-eight macarons in the time left. And then I’ll have to stand in front of Wilfred and Marianne and hear them trying to be nice about my total failure. I’m almost—would it be really shitty of me if I just, like, quit?”
There was a pause while Audrey thought about it. If she’d just been a contestant on the show, she wouldn’t have hesitated to say, “Do it.” But now she was…she was something else? And it was hard for her not to look at the show from Jennifer’s perspective; to think not only about the stories, but how to frame them. What the numbers would do and what people would say and how it would play in the East Midlands and the U.S. syndication.
Except she was still Audrey Lane. And, while she’d kind of lost track of who that was for a time, she was starting to remember what it meant. That although Audrey Lane could be as hard-arsed as she needed to be, she also baked cupcakes. And made terrible quilts. And gave a shit about people.
“You know,” she said, “you’re here for yourself at the end of the day. If the show’s messing with your head, it’s fine to just say fuck it.”
Linda blinked. “Are you sure?”
“Completely.”
“But won’t I—I don’t know—be letting people down?”
There were a bunch of ways to go here. So Audrey decided fuck it and went with the simplest. “No. You absolutely aren’t. I know it feels like a big deal, but it’s just a TV show. It’s not worth making yourself unhappy over.”
“But what if I’m more unhappy if I leave?” wondered Linda, perhaps predictably given the role she was being edited into.
“Don’t overthink it.” Audrey laid a partly reassuring, partly restraining hand on Linda’s shoulder. “One, you are your own priority. Two, I guarantee Jennifer has gamed this out.”
“Is this the wires and the mirrors again?”
“Kind of. But it works for you this time.”
“How?”
“Because you’re here to be the one who takes everything really to heart.”
