Sierra was still on the phone when Ethan knocked on the door a full ten minutes early to collect her for their usual afternoon scene-running on the Quad.
“I’ve gotta go, I’ll let you know if it’s assigned seating,” she said, opening the door while trying to hang up. “...I think it’s just, like, a general admission situation... Yes, there are chairs... You’re thinking of standing room, it’s not that... I will, it’s, like, two months away.”
She looked at Ethan, embarrassed, mouthed, Sorry. He shook his head, not seeming to mind, glancing at the photos on her desk, which he always looked at.
“I know, I’m excited too... Okay, love you too.” She hung up, exhaled.
“So you do have a secret boyfriend,” he said.
“My parents.” She rolled her eyes. “They already bought tickets for the Black Box show.”
“I didn’t think those were even on sale yet—”
“They’re not. But they begged the box office.”
“Wow—”
“Exactly,” she laughed. “And that’s all you need to know about my family. Thank God I’m not on the main stage or they would find a way to move here all summer.”
“Not the worst problem to have,” he said, just wistful enough.
“Sorry.” She felt bad, even though she knew he didn’t mean for her to.
“Nah, it’s cool. It would just make me nervous, anyway, to have the whole family here or whatever.” He shrugged it off.
“If it’s any consolation, they did harass me about my dissertation too, so that was annoying,” she said, hopeful.
“Thank God,” he sighed in mock relief. He pulled out his copy of Julius Caesar. “Ready?”
She grabbed her bag, and they set out to their usual shady spot on the Quad.
“Rehearsal ended early? Two days before opening?” she asked. “Guess the understudies have it all under control.” Harlow had spoken endlessly about covering Charlie’s roles during the Romeo and Juliet rehearsals while she was in London for three days.
“They’re fine but nothing special.” Ethan smiled. “Blunt and Charlie are back today supposedly. They’ll be at the dress rehearsal tonight. What do you think that was all about, anyway? Kind of a crazy time for international travel, right?”
Sierra just shrugged. “Who knows?” But she did. And she hated keeping this secret from Ethan. If the theater closed before the end of the season, there would be no agents or casting directors coming to see the apprentices, no potential to catch someone’s eye, launch a career. This place had to remain open long enough for that to happen. For their lives to begin. Hers, Ethan’s. Harlow’s. Everyone had a shot. But Sierra knew better than to say anything. Instead, she pivoted. “You have to tell me what the vibe is like tonight, with them back.”
“I’ll tell you, but first you’ll have to kill me,” he joked, hopping to his feet, tossing his copy of Julius Caesar at her, which she caught. “Come at me, Brutus.”
Cameras rolling on the cozy set of Good Day, Boston—the first stop on the company’s media push the day before opening night of Romeo and Juliet—Charlie settled back between Chase and Matteo, attempting to project the necessary degree of sunshine for morning TV.
If she was being honest with herself, Charlie was possibly a little bit nervous about opening night. About the show. About everything. Nick was still the only director who had ever actually fired her—even though her other two film directors had surely wanted to—for being too vocal/hostile/opinionated/insistent/reckless. She had needed to harden her shell again as they drove back into town yesterday, and as she reentered that house on Avon.
Matteo had greeted her with a raised eyebrow. “How’d it go?” he’d asked, following her to her room. He was the only one who really knew the full financial mess that was the Chamberlain. Danica and Chase had been fed the same story as everyone else: Charlie went home for “family matters,” and Nick had a previously scheduled meeting about a postseason project. No one should’ve bought those stories, but they had.
“Dame Sarah can’t be bothered to return this summer. She sends her deepest regrets,” Charlie had told Matteo in her mother’s posh accent.
“No, I mean, how did it go?” he’d asked again, and she’d known he meant with Nick.
“It was okay, could’ve been worse,” she’d said with a finality. Matteo had understood and nodded, polite enough not to ask more.
She reviewed the past few days in her head as she sat beneath the hot lights of the TV studio. Charlie had forgotten how much she disliked this part of every project: the selling part. Luckily, Chase had taken over, charming the host, doing most of the talking, letting the rest of them smile and nod. But it couldn’t last forever.
“And, Charlie, this must be quite a change of pace,” said the host, a perky blonde named Grace Garfield. “I’m sure many of our viewers are as familiar with your past films as they are with your movie theater—North End Cinema.” Charlie smiled, nodded, took a sip of water from her Good Day, Boston mug. “But before joining Chamberlain, you were involved in a horrific crash, here in Boston Harbor...”
Charlie smiled again. After a long pause she asked, “Is that a question? Then, true.”
“What has it been like recovering from that?” Grace leaned in, chin perched on her hand.
“I’ve been incredibly successful at not talking about that,” Charlie said as her costars laughed nervously. She smiled, took another sip. “It was not the best night of my life.”
“Would you say you’ve healed from that trauma?” Grace asked.
“I would say, I don’t remember a lot of it.”
“Fascinating. No memory?” she said, hooking on. “And you were more or less required to join the cast as a community service—”
“You know what?” Matteo jumped in. “We’re glad she’s okay, of course, and also just happy to have her here, despite the circumstances. When you see her in the show you really—”
“You had a famous relationship with Nicholas Blunt during his film version of The Tempest,” Grace went on.
“Not so much during,” Charlie felt the need to clarify.
“Well, even so, can we take this to mean you two are together again?”
Charlie, still smiling politely at Grace, rose to her feet, unclipped the mic from her shirt collar and calmly yanked the entire battery pack up through her black satin blouse and out at the neck, like a magic trick where a colorful scarf is pulled endlessly from a hat. Finally, she dropped the whole mess on the floor and strolled off set, continuing right out of the building and down the street, summoning an Uber and taking herself to the next meeting, arriving early at a Boston magazine photo shoot.
Nick hadn’t planned to watch Good Day, Boston. He was in his office, avoiding everything he had so impressively pushed out of his mind in London. He had a lot to catch up on—emails, calls, inevitable new rejections—from the past sixty hours. And then there was tomorrow’s sold-out opening night to prepare for. He had comped tickets to potential investors and would be there pleasantly harassing them with his sales pitch. It felt not unlike what everyone on stage would be doing, except he would just be playing a version of himself rather than a Shakespearean character. He needed the show to be good, he needed the reviews to be good, he needed it all to feel exciting enough that these potential investors in attendance would feel desperate to be part of this world.
When he stumbled onto Good Day, Boston’s website, streaming live, he knew from the host’s first question to Charlie that it would derail. But Charlie being Charlie always made for the most compelling viewing.
Rehearsals for the play itself had actually been going not terribly. That frenetic energy and adrenaline had set in, as he remembered it could before a show run, all the performers clicking. Even Chase. He wouldn’t win awards—his body and words still plenty robotic—but he was passable, and truthfully, it was enough just having him here to be worth the chunk of the budget that went to securing him.
Some duos were better than others: Chase was best as Juliet—which they renamed Julian—opposite Matteo. Danica had pleasantly surprised him, and when she played Juliet, she savored it like something precious and fleeting. Charlie could handle all of the parts, not just with skill and ease, but her wildfire. And while Nick would always prefer her as Juliet, he could agree that her Romeo—or Ramona, as they dubbed the character when she or Danica had the role—felt powerful and playful and free. Her Romeo made this old, weathered play almost shockingly new. Now, if it could just be enough to score some more hefty contributions. Weren’t people looking for tax write-offs anymore?
With the costumes gathered—white on white on white, jeans and T-shirts and blazers and tank tops and leggings and dresses to pop against the minimalist black on black on black sets—and ready to go in dressing rooms so far in advance, Sierra had been moonlighting: first painting sets, and now inspecting each of the five hundred seats in the theater for damage, repairing tears in fabric, removing egregious stains.
She worked quietly, methodically and at a snail’s pace, finding it impossible not to be drawn into the show’s final dress rehearsal. Privy to the behind-the-scenes catastrophes—further swordplay injuries, major memorization fails (Chase had only just gone off-book four days before opening) and the sideshow fascination of Nicholas-and-Charlie’s ups and downs—Sierra had expected it to be, well, rocky. But instead it fizzed, all chemistry and magic. She couldn’t peel her eyes away.
Ethan especially—she had found herself captivated when he was onstage. She forgot that he was someone she knew, someone she ran lines with in the Quad between rehearsals. That this was the same friend who joked about the terrible cafeteria food and never charged her for her iced tea at the pub and who liked to drop into her Black Box rehearsals to watch whenever he could. Which made her more nervous than she would ever admit, even though he only ever gave her the most glowing praise. Watching him now, she had another thought: if nothing came of this apprenticeship, professionally, she would at least be grateful for this friendship.