Chapter 17
Rose
The script was three pages long. Rose had read it four times, and it managed to get worse with every pass.
She dropped it onto the kitchen table in the pool house, sliding it toward Quinn. He picked it up with the grim enthusiasm of a man who’d been waiting his whole life for a soap opera to break out in his kitchen.
“Star-crossed lovers,” he murmured after a moment.
“Keep reading.”
He did. Kayla was on the sofa, legs tucked under her, alternating between a handful of crackers and her own copy of the script. She’d gone quiet halfway through page one.
“Okay,” Quinn said, setting the pages down.
“So the official lore is that you met Lizanne while you were planning her wedding to Trina. You fell for each other, but she was committed, so nothing happened. Then the breakup, she called to cancel the wedding, then you had a meeting, and—” He looked up. “Instant love.”
“Instant,” Rose flatly confirmed.
“Mutual?”
“Deeply.”
Quinn looked at the script. “Rose, honestly? It’s a great story.”
“It’s fiction, Quinn.”
“All the best stories are fiction. That’s why people pay for them.” He leaned back, the chair creaking. “Think about the optics. You’re the wedding planner who fell for the bride. That’s a movie. At least a prestige limited series.”
“It is a limited series. That’s the problem. And I’m the lead.”
Kayla set her crackers aside. “Walk me through the part where you supposedly realized you were in love with her.”
Rose glanced at the page. “The vineyard. According to this, we were doing the venue walkthrough and something clicked.”
“Something clicked,” Kayla repeated, her voice deadpan.
“Their word, not mine.”
Kayla and Quinn traded a look that Rose pointedly ignored. She picked up her script and folded it until the paper groaned.
The vineyard. Right. Something had clicked that afternoon—just not the cinematic, slow-motion epiphany the script was selling.
It was more of a shift, a quiet settling over a glass of wine.
Rose had spent the following week trying to un-click it, failing in that private way she seemed to be failing at everything involving Lizanne lately.
She hadn’t told them about the bridal salon.
She wasn’t going to, either. She’d made that call while hauling her jeans back on in that cramped changing room with hands that wouldn’t stop shaking. She was absolutely not telling them.
“The line about her eyes,” Kayla said, tapping the script. “About them being the first thing you noticed. Can you say that without your face doing that weird thing?”
“My face doesn’t do things.”
“Rose. Your face is a one-woman theater troupe.”
“I’ll manage the line.”
“And the part about knowing she was different from anyone you’d ever met?”
“I’ll manage that too.”
Quinn was watching her as if he had a theory and was being uncharacteristically polite about not sharing it. Rose met his stare until he finally looked back at the table.
“It’s a good story,” he said again, quieter. “Regardless of anything else.”
***
The confessional was set up in the main house, in a side room the production team had purged of personality.
They’d dressed it to look like a private sitting room—two chairs angled just so, soft lamps, a low table with flowers.
It looked intimate and unstudied. It had taken three hours to make it look that way.
Rose sat in her chair while a stranger buffed her face with a brush and someone else fought with a backlight behind the camera. The director was whispering to his assistant about vulnerability. Across the room, Lizanne was talking to Pat, her back to Rose, looking entirely unbothered.
Rose had been on camera enough this week to know she hated it.
She knew it intellectually, but her body felt it every time the red light bled out—a tightening in the chest, a sudden, acute awareness of her own features that made her look exactly as stiff as Kayla had predicted.
Pat was telling the crew it was just wedding nerves, a lie so close to the truth Rose couldn’t bring herself to correct it.
The makeup woman stepped back. Rose looked at the empty chair across from her.
Lizanne crossed the room and sat. She was wearing a dark green silk top Rose hadn’t seen before, her hair down, and she looked at Rose the way she did when the cameras were off—assessing, direct, and strangely not unkind.
“Your hair,” Lizanne said.
“What about it?”
“It’s doing something at the temple.” She leaned forward, her fingers moving through the strands, smoothing them back into place. Her other hand came up, resting against Rose’s cheek for a second while she judged the work.
Rose stayed perfectly still.
“Better,” Lizanne said, dropping her hands.
The director called for positions. Rose looked at the script in her lap and watched the words turn into a meaningless blur.
They ran the first take.
Rose hit four lines, choked on the fifth, and the director called “cut” with the thin patience of a man who was counting his billable hours.
They reset. Rose stared at the page. The words were simple.
She knew them. But when the camera rolled, she opened her mouth and everything came out wrong—a transposed syllable, a pause that felt like a cliff edge.
Lizanne finished her own lines perfectly. The director cut again.
“Time out,” Rose said.
The director nodded. The crew took that collective step back that they always did when the “talent” was having a breakdown.
Lizanne reached across and took Rose’s hand.
It wasn’t a performance; the cameras were down. She just took it. Rose looked at their joined hands, then up at Lizanne.
“You’re overthinking it,” Lizanne said. “You’re watching yourself perform the words instead of just saying them.”
“I’m aware of that.”
“Then stop.”
“Incredible advice. Very helpful.”
“Rose.” Lizanne’s thumb brushed the back of her hand—once, firm. “You’re a natural at this. You’re composed, you’re smart. The camera isn’t going to find a secret in your face that you don’t put there.”
Rose looked at her. “So, be myself. That’s the tip?”
“Yes.”
“Myself is a woman who made a catastrophic life choice with a man who emptied her bank account and walked out on his kid. A woman who has spent years pretending she’s fine and is now sitting in a fake room pretending to be in love with a woman she was coerced into marrying.
” She said it quietly, without heat. “Being ‘myself’ isn’t exactly a position of strength, Lizanne. ”
Lizanne was silent for a beat and Rose felt bad because the truth was, that kiss, that…event…at the bridal salon hadn’t been fake or coerced.
“When I got to Hollywood,” she said, “I was twenty-two with forty dollars and a change of clothes. My first job was at a theater in Burbank. I mopped up vomit after the late shows and scraped gum off the bottom of seats.” She paused.
“I did that for fourteen months. I took the bus to every audition I could find, and then I went back and cleaned the floors.” She didn’t break eye contact.
“The past is just the past. It doesn’t get a seat at this table unless you pull the chair out for it. ”
Rose stared at her.
She thought about the changing room. The dreams she’d had both while sleeping and while making peanut butter sandwiches since then. Standing on that platform in the ivory lace and seeing a version of herself she didn’t recognize—not because it was a lie, but because it felt like a possibility.
“Okay,” she said.
“Okay,” Lizanne echoed. She squeezed Rose’s hand once and let go.
They reset for take three.
The director called action. Rose looked at Lizanne and said the first line.
It came out clean—natural, the rhythm right where it needed to be.
Lizanne answered, and Rose pushed back, and suddenly the script felt like a conversation they’d already had in another life.
The story was a lie and the words were a script, but Lizanne was right there, and Rose found she didn’t need to think about the lines at all as long as she kept her eyes on Lizanne’s face.
They cleared the whole three pages in one take.
The director murmured to his assistant. The crew shifted, the tension in the room evaporating.
Lizanne reached over and took Rose’s hand again, briefly. A squeeze.
Rose squeezed back.
She didn’t analyze why. She didn’t pull out the chair. She just held on for the three seconds it lasted and then reached for her water. The room exploded into motion around them—lights being moved, footage being reviewed—and Rose sat there in her chair and realized she was breathing normally.
The director walked over. “That was excellent,” he said, looking primarily at Rose. “Seriously. That’s going to cut beautifully.”
Rose nodded.
Lizanne dropped back into her polished, professional persona, making a joke that had the director laughing as he walked away.
Rose looked at the script in her lap. The grand tale of how they fell in love.
Three pages of “truths” she’d just delivered to a camera lens, not a word of it real.
And yet, with the warmth of the lamps and the fading pressure of Lizanne’s hand still on hers, it felt like the most honest thing she’d done all week.
She folded the script, shoved it in her pocket, and refused to think about what that meant.