1. Selene #2
Setting the phone down, I wander through the house in my silk robe, trying to find something to do with myself.
The kitchen is spotless and fully stocked with groceries I didn’t buy and unfamiliar ingredients I didn’t know how to cook.
The living room has a state-of-the-art entertainment system I’ve never figured out how to use.
The gym has equipment I could exercise on, but the thought of running on a treadmill in this beautiful, empty house makes me want to scream.
I end up in the home office we were supposed to share.
It’s Dylan’s office now, really. His awards line the shelves, golden statues and crystal plaques that catch the light and throw rainbows across the walls.
His scripts are stacked on the desk, covered in his handwriting.
His vision boards hang on the walls, filled with imagery for projects he’s developing, projects I used to be part of.
There’s a small desk in the corner that was supposed to be mine. It’s been reduced to a catch-all for things that don’t belong anywhere else. Old mail. A broken lamp no one got around to throwing away. A box of memorabilia from events I can’t remember attending.
I push aside the clutter, and my fingers brush against something familiar.
My notebook.
It’s leather-bound and worn, the spine cracked from years of use. I flip it open and find my own handwriting staring back at me, notes and ideas and half-formed dreams I’d almost forgotten I ever had.
Character study: woman unraveling in real-time, discovering her husband’s affair through small domestic details. The coffee cup with lipstick that isn’t hers. The unfamiliar perfume on his collar. The way he angles his phone away when he texts.
Potential title: What She Didn’t See
Three-act structure thoughts: First act establishes the “perfect” marriage. We see it through her eyes as she wants to see it. Second act introduces cracks she can’t ignore. Third act is her choosing herself over the comfort of willful blindness.
I wrote this six years ago, when I was still actively developing projects.
When Dylan and I used to stay up until three in the morning debating character motivations and scene transitions.
When he valued my creative input enough to seek it out, enough to fight me on it, enough to ultimately trust my instincts over his own.
When did that stop?
I flip through more pages. Notes on cinematography techniques. Character backstories I developed for roles that never got made. Ideas for films I wanted to produce, stories about women who were complicated, but real.
At the bottom of the page, a scribbled note in different ink, added later:
Dylan thinks this one has real potential. He wants to develop it together once he finishes post-production on his current project.
That was five years ago. We never developed it together. We never developed anything together again.
I sink into the chair and stare at the notebook in my hands, trying to remember when I became this person.
This woman who waits in empty mansions for text messages that never come, who plans dates that get declined by assistants, who finds her abandoned dreams shoved into corners and buried under broken lamps.
This wasn’t supposed to be my story.
I was supposed to be someone. I was someone, before I let myself become nothing but his wife.
I had vision and ambition and the kind of raw drive that scared men who weren’t strong enough to match it.
Dylan used to love that about me. He used to say that my fire was the thing that made him fall in love with me, that watching me command a room made him want to be better.
Somewhere along the way, my fire became inconvenient. Too bright, too demanding, too much. And I banked it down willingly, told myself I was being supportive, being a good partner, giving him space to grow into the visionary he was always meant to be.
I didn’t realize I was slowly suffocating myself in the process.
The notebook feels heavier in my hands than it should. I flip to a fresh page, thinking maybe I’ll journal about how I’m feeling, try to process the mess of emotions tangled in my chest.
Instead, I just stare at the blank page for a long time.
Then I flip back to my old notes. The character studies. The story ideas. The three-act structures I mapped out with the confidence of someone who believed she had a story worth saying.
I look up from the notebook and take in the office that isn’t mine, the house that doesn’t feel like home, the life I’ve somehow sleepwalked into without ever consciously choosing it.
The walls of this mansion have never felt so close.
I press my palm flat against the page where I once wrote about a woman discovering her husband’s betrayal through small domestic details, and I think about coffee cups and lipstick stains and phones angled away during conversations.
My mind drifts off to how I haven’t been on a film set in three years.
How my husband’s assistant knows his schedule better than I do.
I think about the way the crew yesterday felt as if I was just the model and the beautiful wife, even though I used to produce films that won awards, films that mattered, films that made girls like Jessie move across the country to chase impossible dreams.
My phone buzzes again. Another social media notification. Another stranger calling my marriage perfect.
I close the notebook and hold it against my chest carefully. Like it’s the version of myself I lost somewhere between falling in love and waking up alone in a house that has never, not once in five years, actually felt like mine.
The afternoon light slants through the window, casting long shadows across the room.
I have nowhere to be. No one expecting me. No purpose beyond waiting for a husband who can’t be bothered to reject me himself.
When I flip the notebook back open to a random page, I find a note I don’t remember writing:
Story idea: a woman who builds a gilded cage and decorates it so beautifully she forgets she’s trapped inside.
My throat tightens.
Closing the notebook again, I press it harder against my chest, and I try to remember the last time I felt like myself instead of just a reflection of someone else’s success.
I can’t.
The silence of the mansion settles around me, and for the first time in years, I let myself wonder if this beautiful life I’ve built is actually a life at all or just a very convincing portrait of one.