“I’m aware of that.”
“Then stop.”
“Incredible advice. Very helpful.”
“Rose.” Lizanne’s thumb brushed the back of her hand—once, firm. “You’re a natural at this. You’re composed, you’re smart. The camera isn’t going to find a secret in your face that you don’t put there.”
Rose looked at her. “So, be myself. That’s the tip?”
“Yes.”
“Myself is a woman who made a catastrophic life choice with a man who emptied her bank account and walked out on his kid. A woman who has spent years pretending she’s fine and is now sitting in a fake room pretending to be in love with a woman she was coerced into marrying.” She said it quietly, without heat. “Being ‘myself’ isn’t exactly a position of strength, Lizanne.”
Lizanne was silent for a beat and Rose felt bad because the truth was, that kiss, that…event…at the bridal salon hadn’t been fake or coerced.
“When I got to Hollywood,” she said, “I was twenty-two with forty dollars and a change of clothes. My first job was at a theater in Burbank. I mopped up vomit after the late shows and scraped gum off the bottom of seats.” She paused. “I did that for fourteen months. I took the bus to every audition I could find, and then I went back and cleaned the floors.” She didn’t break eye contact. “The past is just the past. It doesn’t get a seat at this table unless you pull the chair out for it.”
Rose stared at her.
She thought about the changing room. The dreams she’d had both while sleeping and while making peanut butter sandwiches since then. Standing on that platform in the ivory lace and seeing a version of herself she didn’t recognize—not because it was a lie, but because it felt like a possibility.
“Okay,” she said.
“Okay,” Lizanne echoed. She squeezed Rose’s hand once and let go.
They reset for take three.
The director called action. Rose looked at Lizanne and said the first line. It came out clean—natural, the rhythm right where it needed to be. Lizanne answered, and Rose pushed back, and suddenly the script felt like a conversation they’d already had in another life. The story was a lie and the words were a script, but Lizanne was right there, and Rose found she didn’t need to think about the lines at all as long as she kept her eyes on Lizanne’s face.
They cleared the whole three pages in one take.
The director murmured to his assistant. The crew shifted, the tension in the room evaporating.
Lizanne reached over and took Rose’s hand again, briefly. A squeeze.
Rose squeezed back.
She didn’t analyze why. She didn’t pull out the chair. She just held on for the three seconds it lasted and then reached for her water. The room exploded into motion around them—lights being moved, footage being reviewed—and Rose sat there in her chair and realized she was breathing normally.
The director walked over. “That was excellent,” he said, looking primarily at Rose. “Seriously. That’s going to cut beautifully.”
Rose nodded.
Lizanne dropped back into her polished, professional persona, making a joke that had the director laughing as he walked away.
Rose looked at the script in her lap. The grand tale of how they fell in love. Three pages of “truths” she’d just delivered to a camera lens, not a word of it real. And yet, with the warmth of the lamps and the fading pressure of Lizanne’s hand still on hers, it felt like the most honest thing she’d done all week.
She folded the script, shoved it in her pocket, and refused to think about what that meant.
Chapter 18
Lizanne
October 27th
Pat said the dress fit perfectly. It did. But as Lizanne stood before the full-length mirror in the vineyard’s bridal suite, she found that a perfect fit solved exactly nothing.
She thought about her mother. Her mother should have been here today, standing just over Lizanne’s left shoulder, dabbing her eyes with a folded tissue so she didn’t ruin her eyeliner.
