Chapter Ten
“I know what you did.”
Dimple froze. She was back at Irene Singh’s party, at Isaac Klossner’s apartment. Everyone in the room turned to her, ants crawling under her skin. In the distance, a body thudded against the ground.
Hadn’t she already put out this fire? Isaac and Irene were dead. And yet here she was again. Dimple’s head was spinning.
“What—” She had just begun formulating her response when she was interrupted.
“Cut!” Jerome Bardoux said from his director’s chair. “We’re moving on.”
Like a camera lens out of focus, the world tipped back into place.
Dimple was on set. The man in front of her was not wearing an ill-fitting black suit.
Nor did he carry a tray of alcohol. Everyone in the room was breathing, alive.
Dimple inhaled deep, lies straining against the capacity of her lungs.
It was always disconcerting, coming out of such an emotionally charged scene. For how crowded movie sets were, it was difficult to think one could get swept away by a page of memorized lines. Dimple took in the bright lights and background chatter, grounding herself in reality.
“That was good,” Chris Porter said, sounding more shocked than he had any right to be. Dimple found she much preferred his somber on-screen persona to the way he presented in real life.
Insomnia followed Dimple and Chris’s characters as they revisited the events of a night in their youth when everyone in their friend group except the two of them had died.
The scene they’d just shot was the start of them realizing it had been their fault.
They’d unknowingly slaughtered their friends in their sleep.
Dimple released the breath she’d been holding.
“Why do you sound surprised?” Shyla Patel asked, coming to stand beside Dimple with her arms crossed.
If Dimple had to pick a favorite co-star, it would be Shyla. She was a bit younger—closer to Irene’s age before she died—but she had a lot of talent. In Insomnia, she played Dimple’s best friend, and their camaraderie at times transcended the screen.
“It was a compliment,” Chris scowled.
As Shyla and Chris traded barbs, as usual, Dimple came to the realization that her co-stars were impressed with her. Even Jerome Bardoux seemed pleased, though he would never admit it in so many words, but the fact that he’d moved on without even a second take for safety spoke volumes.
Only, Dimple had not been acting.
The same thing had happened a few days prior when Chris’s character killed Shyla’s with a push off a ledge.
It was a moment of immense gravity, the start of Dimple’s redemption arc, and she’d frozen then just as she had today.
Ghosts awaited her at the bottom of the ledge.
In place of Shyla’s golden brown skin caked with dirt and blood splattered across the ground, Dimple had seen Irene lying there, motionless.
The greatest performers claimed that the best acting was derived from personal experience, but surely this was too far.
What would she have said, had Jerome not interrupted her?
Would she have uttered a name she had no business knowing, like Isaac Klossner?
Or would it have been an admission of guilt?
Dimple closed her eyes. She needed to get ahold of herself.
Innocent Dimple Kapoor had been close friends with Irene Singh.
She’d never met Isaac Klossner.
She did not know what it was to kill.
And she was a damn good actress.
This role was even more important than the one she was playing on-screen.
“Are you okay? You seem kind of out of it,” Shyla asked, nudging Dimple with her elbow until she opened her eyes. Chris Porter had moved off to the side, discussing something with Jerome Bardoux.
“Just thinking about how her fingerprints were all over that door,” Dimple muttered.
She and Shyla had created a game of cataloging all the ways Dimple’s character would’ve been caught in real life. It was rather fun.
Shyla laughed. “And are you telling me there’s not anyone else at that party who heard her scream?”
A flash of deleted camera footage—Irene Singh’s mouth open in a soundless scream. Falling, falling.
Dimple snapped herself out of it with forced pleasantry. “Exactly. She wouldn’t stand a chance.”