Page 16 of Marriage & Mockery

“I know. I’m⁠—”

“I don’t need another apology right now.” I squeezed my eyes shut. “I just needed you to hear that it followed me. Even here. While I was trying to do something as simple as buy some freaking snacks.”

The line was quiet for a moment before he asked, “Where are you, baby? It’s killing me that you’re dealing with this alone.”

I looked around the bungalow and shook my head. “Somewhere you don’t deserve to be. Not yet.”

Then I hung up before he could say anything else. I stared at the phone after the call ended, hating that he was right about the alone part.

Before I could change my mind, I opened my message thread with Felicity.

Me

If you’re up for it, I think I could use the company after all.

The reply came faster than I expected.

Felicity

Give me an hour.

I set the phone down, looked at the open bottle of wine, and let out a slow breath. Maybe spending some time with my best friend would help me get out of my own head.

9

BENNETT

The rest of the week blurred into the usual cycle of notes and rewrites, with barely any communication from Laina. By Friday, I was running on caffeine and nerves, having only gotten a few hours of sleep each night. My bed felt too empty without my wife next to me, but she hadn’t given me any sign she was ready to come home yet.

Forcing my dejected thoughts out of my head, I scanned my episode six notes while I walked to the soundstage. It was already filled with pre-tape energy when I got there. People were being seated, and the crew moved with the focused pace that came with filming in front of a live audience.

I took my place near the bank of video monitors, headset around my neck. This was the part of the job that normally fed my muse—watching the performance in real time, catching the half-second delays in a joke, rewriting a line between takes, and pitching a tighter punchline when something didn’t fully land with the audience.

Jordan dropped onto the seat beside me. “Pirate bit’s up third. Charlotte wants one more pass on the ‘sea claimed my ship’ line before we go to tape.”

“No.” I shook my head. “Let’s hear it as is on the first take and adjust if it’s dragging.”

He nodded and stood to go deliver the news to the actress, who asked for last-minute rewrites on a regular basis. It was Jordan’s turn to disappoint her since I’d done it just last week.

I scanned the set as a production assistant handed me a fresh coffee I hadn’t asked for. I thanked her without looking away from the screens. Everything appeared to be ready to make a few hundred people laugh on cue. My job was to make sure the reactions came at the right places, big enough for the final edit.

I flipped to the pirate bit pages and read them over again. And for the first time since creating Sally’s character, I felt a niggle of doubt. But then my attention was pulled to the stage, where Peter started to go over the rules with the audience before getting them pumped up. I put my headset on and stared at the monitors, focusing on the only thing I could control right now. My job.

While the audience warmed up and the first two scenes ran, I stayed on the pages for the invitation to the pool. The dialogue was solid. The escalation was well-timed. On paper, it worked perfectly.

Then I thought about Laina sitting at the dining table last year, brown kraft paper spread underneath a dark canvas with antique keys laid out in a careful pattern. She’d been mapping some obscure constellation she found in an old astronomy book. It had caught her attention because the star’s formation represented a giraffe, one of her favorite animals.

Struggling with a key that kept slipping, she’d laughed under her breath. Then she’d joked about how she must have been a disgruntled Renaissance painter in a past life—the kind who got stuck painting the same angels over and over until they got it just right.

It had been the kind of throwaway comment Laina made when she was focused on something. She probably didn’t even remember saying it, but I did.

And I had used it for inspiration.

Somewhere between that quiet moment and the version in the script in front of me, the painter had become a pirate queen. The mild joke had become a full delusion, dramatized into something an audience would laugh at on command.

I stared at the line about the sea claiming her ship and felt the first real drop in my stomach that had nothing to do with nerves over timing or punchlines. But it was too late for second thoughts.

Charlotte took her mark. The floor manager called for quiet. The cameras pushed in.