Chapter 15
EMMA
Cannes doesn’t look real, even now, even when the car finally breaks the wall of traffic and crests the headland so that the bay opens up below us in a fresco of blue, silver, and perfect, impossible light.
I fixate on the light. I’d heard about the C?te d’Azur haze all my life, but no one got it right.
There’s nothing gentle about it. The light here cuts like a scalpel, carving every boat hull, red-tiled roof, and palm tree shadow into something too vivid to be natural.
Even the festival’s white marquees seem to throb with desperation, as if the entire landscape is auditioning for a role it will never get.
Our driver is the kind of man who doesn’t need a surname, just a single syllable.
I think it’s “Serge,” but I am not positive and am too tired to ask.
In the last thirty-six hours, I have: changed time zones twice, done two live broadcasts, faked a non-hangover for the American morning shows, almost had a panic attack in the Nice airport lounge, and broken a two-year streak of not crying in public in the departure lounge at Madrid.
I’m so exhausted, the inside of my head feels sandblasted and fragile.
Asher places his hand on my thigh, his thumb tracing lazy circles against my skin. “Nice looked good on you,” I say, and the words come out goofy and flat.
He turns and smiles. The sunglasses hide his eyes, but I can tell by the set of his mouth that last night’s weirdness is at least thirty percent mended.
“Not half as good as you,” he says, then adds, “Should we practice sounding surprised when they tell us we’re the only interesting couple at Cannes? ”
I groan and lean my forehead against the window. “You are such a shit.”
“True,” he agrees, squeezing my leg in punctuation.
The W Hotel in Barcelona felt like an overfunded fortress.
Here, the InterContinental is a circus midway.
Paparazzi have staked out every curb, and even the interns look airbrushed.
My stylist, Chantal, is waiting in the lobby with a binder full of mayhem and a pale blue pot of “deep focus” eye patches that she slaps under my eyes before I’ve put down my bag.
“You’re not tired,” she tells me. “You’re radiant. ”
“Thank you, mama,” I say, but she’s already rearranging my bones.
The next four hours descend into the kind of ritual I find both comforting and degrading: hair tamed and lacquered, skin shellacked with serums, a dress zipped up in stages until it fits me like a rebuke.
My phone chimes with reminders every half hour.
The schedule is so tight that if Asher and I had a fight in the elevator, Tabloid Logic says it would cinematically reappear in our body language for the rest of the evening.
When we finally meet for the “casual” pre-gala photo call, I make a show of staring at my phone. “Why do you smell like aftershave and blackmail?”
He grins—his genuine smile, not the publicity weapon. “Why do you look like you could kill a man with your pinky toe?”
We don’t talk about the other stuff: the emails from Antonio, the texts from producers, the fact that Asher’s face is currently plastered across billboards for a movie in which his character spends thirty percent of screen time dying of a rare blood disorder.
Instead, we step into a thicket of photographers, let them slice us into data, and pretend neither of us is anything but delighted to be here.
“Lean in, lean in!” one shouts, and Asher pulls me against him so tightly I feel his pulse through the fabric.
A dozen voices bark commands at once: “Emma, chin up—no, left shoulder back! Asher, catch her mid-laugh! There it is—freeze that moment! Perfect!”
It is perfect if you’re into that kind of thing.
Afterward, we’re herded to a conference room with a view of the marina, where the sea is so shockingly blue it looks like a blue screen awaiting post-production.
Neither of us is allowed coffee (“Nothing that might compromise your smile,” she says, as if our teeth were priceless heirlooms on temporary loan), so we sip lemon water and wait for the studio to call us in.
After a few minutes, Asher’s manager, Craig—hair more vertical than usual, teeth glowing with the kind of polish that costs more than most people earn a year—motions us into a side room to “catch up.”
“First,” Craig says, checking the door even though no one else is in the room, “let’s both take a deep breath.”
Asher closes his eyes and holds an exaggerated yoga pose to make me laugh. I need a good laugh. The mounting pressure of our official debut is making my stomach so somersaults.
“Second,” Craig says, “you two are killing it. I mean, murder. They haven’t seen numbers like this since…well, ever.”
He pulls out his tablet and slides a graph across the table.
There are three lines, one of which has a hockey-stick upward bend.
“That’s us on Twitter. That’s TikTok. And this—” he slides the line with the scariest spike “—is international Google searches. Asher, you’re huge in the Balkans.
Emma, the entire Pacific Rim has decided you are some kind of goddess, and there are memes about your arms.”
“My arms?”
“People are obsessed. It’s a thing now,” Craig says. “And the best part—Eclipse Run is outpacing every major demo. The love story angle is the number one driver. Even the studio execs are losing their shit.”
This is the part where we’re supposed to smile, which Asher does, but I just nod.
It doesn’t feel bad, but it doesn’t feel like anything.
All I can think about is the blue of the marina, and how in a few hours I have to walk up the red carpet in five-inch heels and not trip over my own prettiest dress any fashion house has ever loaned me.
“Here’s the only note,” Craig says, voice dropping a register.
“Marketing wants to stagger the next phase. Tonight, you show up together, do your thing, and then taper off. Play coy. Don’t do the full template romance everywhere.
Let the narrative breathe. They want the premiere next month to be ambiguous—a surprise, possibly, with you two as the big reveal, but only if the conversation flags. ”
“Translation,” Asher says, “They want us horny but mysterious.”
Craig winks. “Exactly. On the side, you can increase the fan engagement—just keep it PG unless we greenlight a more risqué rollout.” He turns to me. “And Emma, the other reason I brought you in: you’re on their shortlist for the Bressard project.”
I almost drop the cookie. “When did this happen?”
“Yesterday. He watched your Madrid interview and called his agent immediately. They’re going to ‘float your name’ at the dinner tonight. If you’re interested.”
“If I’m interested,” I echo, like a moron.
If. You. Are.” Craig gives me the world’s most condescending finger-gun, then turns to Asher. "And you need to report to London earlier than expected. Duncan Lowden wants you to start rehearsals immediately after the premiere tour.”
Asher’s jaw tightens almost imperceptibly. "I thought we had a buffer week.”
"Not anymore.” Craig shrugs like it’s nothing, though we all know Duncan Lowden never takes no for an answer. "But hey—you’ve always wanted to work with him, right?”
From there, it’s the usual handshake and backslap.
Craig hands us off to a “handler” with teeth even whiter than his, and we’re zipped off to wardrobe checks and more interviews.
The afternoon blurs: I answer the same ten questions until I don’t even notice when Asher’s hand finds my back, or when the handler slips me a lozenge because my voice is ragged from overuse.
At 5:45, I stand in the hotel corridor staring at the ocean and wonder if anyone has ever died of imposter syndrome.
Chantal zips me into my dress—cobalt, with a neckline that is basically a dare—and stabs two dozen pins into my hair.
The transformation complete, she steps back and just says, quietly, “You’re ready. ”
I am not, but I walk anyway.
The red carpet at Cannes is not a carpet but an event.
It breathes. It moves under you. The photographers are corralled like livestock, but the effect is gladiatorial—a stadium of glossy black lenses, each one loaded for blood.
I step out, hand in Asher’s, and for two seconds it is absolute chaos: shouts, bulbs, a strobe blur so intense I have to look down just to keep moving.
He guides me up the stairs, and every time a camera flashes, I feel the heat on my bare arms.
At the top, we pause for photos, and he leans in, cheek almost brushing mine. “Want to make them insane?”
I whisper, “Always.”
He kisses the side of my face, too chaste to scandalize but not quite friendly, and a bank of photographers goes nearly feral.
I grip his hand harder than necessary as we sweep into the Palais, ducking through the chaos, and it doesn’t let up until we’re through security and into the relative darkness of the main hall.
We stand, breathless and slightly shell-shocked, while the line behind us snakes through.
I feel oddly detached from my own body, watching the scene from somewhere several feet overhead.
Everyone here is beautiful, but somehow nobody else is breathing the same air the way we do.
It’s both exhilarating and quietly terrifying.
In the theater, I take my seat between Asher and the director, a soft-spoken French-Canadian whose English is somehow even more charming than his French. The lights go down. All I can hear is blood in my ears.
Eclipse Run begins with a literal bang—a rocket launch, then a cut to my character, sleep-deprived and mascara-streaked, cursing in two languages. I watch myself play a person even more tightly wound than I am, and marvel at how easy it is to forget the cameras were ever there.