“Blow out the candles before you go to sleep,” Nate said finally, words clipped, already turning to go. “The whole hillside’s a fire corridor. I’m not having the house burn down in week one.”
“Good night to you, too.”
“Good night, Jasmine.”
He left. She heard his footsteps recede, heard a door close somewhere far away. She stood alone on the terrace with her heart going hard and the music playing on and the city glittering below.
She was furious. Furious at him. At the cold, beautiful house. At the whole stupid bargain.
She blew out every candle but one.
That one she left burning on the windowsill. She climbed into the enormous unfamiliar bed, pulled the sheets in close around her, and lay there counting down the first of many nights. She knew only one thing: that this was going to be even harder than she’d thought.
CHAPTER 9
JASMINE
Jasmine had been to this studio lot a hundred times. Callbacks, table reads, shoots. But the casting building tucked at the far edge of it still made her stomach turn over, the way it had the first time she’d walked into one at twenty-two, broke and hungry and hoping to be seen. A decade of work hadn’t killed that nerve. She suspected nothing would.
She gave her name to the woman at the front desk, took a bottle of water she didn’t drink, and sat in the small waiting area with three other actresses. They all pretended not to study each other. She knew two of them by face. They’d all been at the same callbacks for years, and one of them had just come off a popular TV show. There was a courtesy among actresses at this level, a smile, a brief warm hello, and beneath it the same knowledge that only one of them would be walking out with this part.
The role was Taylor Hartner. A captain. The hard-edged anchor of a superhero film that, if it worked, would run three sequels deep and shape the next ten years of her career. She’d read the script in one sitting and known, all the way down, that she couldplay this woman. That kind of certainty arrived maybe twice a decade, if you were lucky.
She also knew the part was a body. Action sequences. Wirework. Months of training. The breakdown had been clear: no one was getting cast on charisma alone.
She pushed away that reality. Thinking too hard about her health limitations would make her freeze up, and she was actually feeling pretty good today. Despite Nate’s house not feeling like a home, the bed was extremely comfortable, and she’d spent her first few nights in it sleeping like the dead.
An assistant appeared in the doorway and called her name, and Jasmine stood, smoothed her dark jeans, and followed him into the room where the casting team was waiting.
The room itself was nothing special. It had a long table, four chairs facing one, and a pitcher of water. But the people behind the table were not nothing, and her pulse picked up despite herself. There was the director, a woman whose last film Jasmine had watched three times. Two producers she’d known by name since film school. And the casting director, whose smile was the only easy one in the room.
“Jasmine. Thanks for coming in. Sit, sit.”
She sat.
They talked first. They always did, at this level. About the world of the film, the bones of the character, whether Jasmine had questions about the arc. She answered carefully and listened harder than she spoke. The director said something about Taylor’s grief.
Then they read.
She did three scenes. The first one she played clean and controlled, the way she’d rehearsed it with her coach. For the second, the director asked her to try smaller, quieter, and Jasmine took the note and went almost to a whisper, and when she looked up at the end, one of the producers had set down his pen. The third was the one she’d been afraid of, a fight, dialogue cut between blocking, the kind of writing that lived or died on physical presence. She did it standing.
When she finished, the room was quiet for a beat. One of the producers glanced sideways at the director. The director didn’t glance back. She was still looking at Jasmine, head slightly tilted, like she’d just heard a piece of music she hadn’t expected. Then she smiled.
“Okay,” she said softly. “Okay.”
It wasn’t a yes. Nothing was ever a yes in the room. But her chest filled up so fast she had to remember to breathe. They thanked her warmly. The casting director walked her out herself, which was a thing they didn’t bother to do for actresses they weren’t seriously considering. Jasmine thanked them all by name on the way, kept her voice steady and her hands loose, and didn’t let her face show anything until she was past the front desk, past the waiting actresses, out the door, and walking down the row of palms toward her car.
Then she let herself smile.
It was a stupid grin, the kind she hadn’t worn in months. She walked the long way across the lot just to keep it on her face. The sun was high and flat, the soundstages enormous on either side of her, golf carts whirring past with crew in headsets and cables coiled at their feet. Somewhere a horse whinnied. Somewhere else a hammer rang against metal. She loved all of it. She’d lovedall of it from the first time she’d ever set foot on a working lot. And the thing she hadn’t let herself think about, through all the months of doctors and tests and quiet bad news, was how much she would miss this if her body finally gave out.
She didn’t need this part. That was the strange truth she’d been carrying around since the boardroom. In a year she’d have a hundred million dollars. She could afford to lose every audition for the rest of her life and still keep the lights on for her mother and herself. She didn’t need it.
But she wanted it. She wanted it so badly her chest hurt.
She reached her car, and her phone buzzed.
Marco. Her agent. He never called this fast unless something had happened.
