2. Dylan #3
In the morning, I’ll be more present, make time for her. I’ll take her to dinner and actually listen. The promise settles over me, comfortable and familiar, one I’ve made a hundred times before.
I promise myself. Tomorrow, things will be different.
The promise echoes in my mind as I fall asleep, too tired to recognize how many times I made it before.
***
Selene
He’s asleep.
I can tell by the way his breathing has deepened, the slight twitch of his shoulder as he settles into unconsciousness. Dylan always falls asleep fast, while I lie awake for hours analyzing every word he said and didn’t say.
Tonight, like every night this week, he talked about Claudette.
Her instincts. Her talent. Her incredible ability to see what’s not working and fix it. The way she challenges him creatively. The way she makes his work better.
He doesn’t realize he’s describing everything I used to be to him.
I reach across him slowly, carefully, my fingers stretching toward the bedside table where his script sits.
He brought it home tonight, which is the first time he’s done that in months, and part of me hoped it was a sign.
Maybe he wanted to show it to me. That maybe we’d stay up late debating the third act like we used to.
Instead, he talked about Claudette for an hour and passed out with the script unopened in the bedside table.
My fingers close around the cover, and I slide it off the table as gently as possible, holding my breath until I’m sure he hasn’t stirred.
The weight of it in my hands is familiar. Scripts have always felt like possibility to me, as if holding someone’s dream before it becomes real. I used to love this part, the moment before diving in, when anything could be waiting inside those pages.
I open the cover.
Claudette’s handwriting stares back at me from the title page.
For a moment, I can’t process what I’m seeing.
The loops and swirls of her penmanship, confident and expansive, fill the margins where my notes used to live.
She’s written in purple ink, because of course she has, and her comments are everywhere.
Character insights. Staging suggestions. Emotional beats she wants to emphasize.
This scene needs more tension. Build the silence before the reveal.
Cut the exposition. Show, don’t tell.
Dylan, the blocking in the apartment scene isn’t working. What if she enters from the window instead of the door? Creates visual asymmetry that mirrors her internal chaos.
I flip to the next page, then the next, my heart pounding harder with each new discovery. Her writing is on every page. Her ideas. Her vision. Her creative fingerprints all over my husband’s work, in the exact spaces where I used to leave mine.
She’s not just his co-producer. She’s his creative partner.
She’s everything I used to be before I let him push me out and convince me I was choosing to step back.
I close the script carefully and set it back on the bedside table, exactly where it was before. Dylan hasn’t moved. He’s still facing away from me, still lost in the deep sleep of someone whose conscience is perfectly clear.
I lie back against my pillow and stare at the ceiling, my eyes burning with tears I refuse to let fall.
Five years ago, Claudette and I stopped speaking.
The fight was vicious, and Dylan was at the center of it, though he doesn’t know that.
He doesn’t know that Claudette told me I didn’t deserve him.
That I was holding him back. That someone with my career trajectory had no business tying herself to a rookie who might only be a one hit wonder, and that I should step aside so he could find someone who would actually support his vision instead of trying to compete with it.
I told her she was jealous. That she couldn’t stand watching me have both the career and the love, and she was trying to sabotage something she could never build herself.
We haven’t spoken since.
And now she’s here. In my husband’s scripts. In his late-night editing sessions. In every conversation we manage to have, her name falling from his lips like a prayer.
I turn my head and look at his sleeping form. The broad shoulders. The dark hair falling across his forehead. The face I’ve loved for seven years, the face I built my entire life around.
He has no idea what he’s done.
He has no idea what he’s still doing.
The tears finally fall, silent and hot against my temples, and I press my fist against my mouth to muffle the sound of my breaking.
Tomorrow, things will be different. The promise he kept telling me for the past five years resurfaces in my mind.
I heard him make that same promise last week. And the week before that. And every week for the past five years, while I slowly disappeared into the background of his brilliant, all-consuming life.
I close my eyes and see Claudette’s handwriting on the inside of my eyelids, purple ink spreading across everything I used to claim as mine.
Tomorrow won’t be different.
I’m starting to understand that nothing will be different, not until I make it so.