Chapter 17
EMMA
The red carpet is longer this time, or it may feel that way.
They put me in a dress that looks like spun gold, and the way Chantal “styled” it means I am wearing nothing, essentially, except for artful layers of shimmer and teeth-on-edge confidence.
My body feels like it’s been dipped in a narcotic.
Asher walks beside me in a black suit with no tie. He’s a little rumpled, which apparently everyone finds irresistible. There are so many flashes that for a second, the night turns into day. They shout my name, his name, our names as one. The shout is bigger now, a surging wave.
We reach the photo pit and freeze, just as instructed, for eight, ten, twelve heartbeats.
Someone calls, “Show us a kiss!”
I look at Asher, ready to laugh it off, but his face is so warm—so soft. He leans in, and I feel his lips at my temple, brief and gentle. The crowd maybe wanted more, but I can hear the “awws” even through the barricades.
We move on, through the doors of the Palais, into the dark. I see us reflected in the glass: a pair of creatures stitched together from someone else’s wishful thinking.
Inside, they seat us in the front row. The festival director gives a speech in perfect English, then worse French. Our director says a few words, then the movie begins.
I’ve never seen it with a crowd. Two minutes in, I realize I can’t remember a single line I delivered. All my anxiety telescopes into my knees, my fingers, the back of my throat. Next to me, Asher is motionless.
The movie plays, and I watch myself flicker on the giant screen, a taller, cooler, steelier version of me.
She is not someone I recognize, but by the midpoint, I want to be her.
For a moment, I even forget about the world watching, the writers in the back row, the execs waiting to see if I’m worth the gamble.
At the end, there is silence, then applause. It swells from polite to raucous, and my heart does a weird, dangerous thing. I glance over, and Asher is clapping too, actually clapping, the kind of face lighting up that you can’t fake. I want to touch him.
When the lights come up, we stand for a bow. I know I should be devastated or ecstatic, but instead I’m just raw.
Out in the lobby, Jessie throws herself at me, champagne in hand. “You demolished! You killed!” She’s so loud, even the French critics glance over.
Myrna finds us, her dress the color of a papercut, and pulls me aside again. “Final numbers come out this week. If the chatter is strong enough, you might have a say in how it goes down.”
I know what she means. The studio is watching the chemistry, the “narrative.” If I want to be the next big thing, I have to play this right to the end.
“You’re up for actress of the festival,” she says, lowering her voice. “Unprecedented for this kind of movie. And Asher, too. They’re calling you ‘the new gold standard.’”
I want to feel elated, triumphant. Instead, I think, maybe I’m just lucky that I get to keep pretending.
We end up at a party in an actual castle, the kind built for a prince or an arms dealer. The crowd is half-famous, half-wannabe, and Asher and I are both. I know I should network, but I want nothing more than to climb one of the turrets, look out to sea, and scream until my brain stops hurting.
But Asher is different tonight. He’s more relaxed, or maybe just more reckless. He introduces me to everyone as his “co-star and main reason for living.” People laugh, but I see the way their gazes stick to me after, cataloguing, recalibrating.
In a dim room with velvet couches, we find a brief stillness. He leans against a window overlooking moonlit water.
“What happens after tomorrow?” he asks.
“We get on a plane and go home,” I say, but it doesn’t feel true.
He shakes his head, a glint in his eye. “No, I mean us. Does it vanish, or is it just beginning?”
I’m about to say something clever, but he puts a hand to my face, thumb at my cheekbone, and for a second I have no idea what to say. The silence gets so big I feel weirdly safe inside it.
I finally say, “What do you want?”
“Honestly?” He lets out a breath. “I want to see if any of this is real. Not just for the cameras. Not just for the week.”
I laugh, but it isn’t a joke. “What if it is?”
He kisses me, slower and more patient than any rehearsal. The party goes on behind us, louder and brighter, but I can’t hear it.
After that, everything moves in jump cuts. The morning is a press scrum, a blur of luggage, noise, and high heels. Chantal screams at some poor intern for misplacing my sunglasses, and then it’s time for the awards.
Cannes does not give out its big prizes lightly. There are three rounds of speeches, three rounds of clapping. When they call my name, it feels rubbery and distant, like it’s happening to someone else. I stand and walk to the stage, and the crowd is a hundred points of color and heat.
I thank the director, the cast, and the festival. I want to thank Asher, but that would be a shattering breach of some unspoken contract, so I look at him sitting in the first row, and he smiles so hard I think he might break.
Backstage, the photographers corral us for “winner’s circle” shots. My face aches from smiling. My phone buzzes with texts—my mother, my agent, half the cast from minor parts I don’t remember filming.
Jessie hands me a glass of something clear and potent. “Tell me again how you’ll never wear gold,” she teases. I laugh, and for a second, it’s real laughter, a memory of myself from before the last month of transformation.
That night, we go to the beach, just Asher and me, ditching everyone on the PR machine.
The wind is cool off the Mediterranean, salt-stung, winding little snarls through my hair.
He takes off his shoes and rolls up the cuffs of his tuxedo pants, and I do the same, shivering as we walk ankle-deep in the froth.
For a moment, we’re just people again—two silhouettes thrown across a beach, laughing over nothing, our hands brushing as we comb the jetty for sea glass.
“This is the part they never print,” Asher says, crouching to examine a blue shard. “The after, when you don’t know if you’re more tired or relieved.”
“Or who you were before.” I can still feel the heat of the lights on my skin, the prickle of a thousand eyes. The scampering adrenaline makes my muscles jitter now, in the anticlimax. My feet are numb, but my bones are humming.
His smile reaches all the way to his eyes, creating a map of fine lines. “Next time, let’s disappear to Tangier for a week. Not tell a soul.”
"The industry would implode,” I say. “Deadline would run a dozen conspiracy theories by lunchtime.”
He shakes his head, sea breeze ruffling his hair. “They’d only be looking for you. This is your moment, Em.”
Something in his tone—a reverence, a certainty—makes me feel simultaneously significant and exposed. I glance down at the sand between my toes. “Please. The Valentino gown got more press coverage than I did.”
He stops, pivots, standing barefoot and childish in the surf. “That’s not how it looked from my seat,” he says. “It’s like you walked up there and every camera in the world remembered how to blink.”
He means it. I want to bat it away, but it lands. “You’re such a romantic for someone who hates poetry,” I say, and then, “Are you proud of me?”
He snorts in disbelief and closes the space between us. “Em, there are astronauts who could spot you from orbit tonight.”
His arms are around me, and the ocean’s roar covers everything, and for a second, the night feels private again, the world a blank page. I bury my face in his jacket and breathe the clean soap and salt of his neck.
“I’m scared,” I say quietly. “I won, and it doesn’t even feel real.”
He strokes my hair, careful. “I know. The trick is, you get up tomorrow, and it’s still there, and you keep doing it for as long as you love it. That’s the only real thing.”
That’s the only real thing. For a moment, I remember Holcomb in the car, and the way he said you can’t be a star forever, but you can be present, for right now. No one tells you what comes after you win except more of the same, but higher.
Asher kisses the top of my head. “I’m proud of you,” he says, “but I was proud already, before the prize.”
I walk up the sand in silence with Asher until we reach the causeway, where the streetlights cut the darkness into manageable fragments.
We’re both damp, both buzzed on cheap French vodka and something unnameable but sharper.
Red carpet crews are still setting up for tomorrow’s films, even at this hour—striking lights, coiling cables, rebuilding the stage for the next cycle of arrivals.
The festival never really sleeps; it only recedes and surges with its own tidal schedule.
Asher’s phone vibrates. “We’re being summoned, apparently,” he says, scrolling through a notification with mock gravity. “Conference room at the Carlton in ten minutes. Must be favorable, unless they’re sacking me with extra fanfare.”
I groan. “Jessie warned me. The execs are having a late pow-wow, champagne optional.”
“Shall we?” he asks, offering his arm in parody of old-world courtship.
I link my arm through his and let him lead me toward the hotel, sand still stuck between my toes.
Inside the Carlton, the contrast is cartoonish—the hush of brushed marble, the emptied hallway scented of lilies and hotel soap.
It’s past midnight, and yet black-suited men patrol the lobby, women in backless dresses warm the bar like well-placed brandy.
The gilded mirrors, scalloped ceilings, and the chandelier massive enough to collapse the universe haven’t changed since Nixon was president.