Le Corbeau: Falling for the lead

TAKE FOUR

The bell above the door gave a polite little ding as Ronan stepped inside. Immediately, the entire swarm of customers turned to look in his direction. Thankfully, his sunglasses were translucent; he couldn't afford to be recognized so early in the morning.

Warm morning light streamed through the windows of A. Lacroix Pâtissier, casting syrupy gold on the pastel walls. The place looked like a Pinterest board brought to life, dominated by rosy pinks, soft whites, and brass accents, with delicate glass cloches showcasing flaky, edible masterpieces.

Smooth jazz played in the background. Piaf, maybe. Or some vibey Spotify remix of the real thing. Ronan took a breath, his fingers twitching as his white tee stuck to his back. How did people date in public? He wouldn't know. This was entirely new and scary territory for him since his ex-wife.

He scanned the space. There she was.

His Raya date, Léa, sitting at the counter, dark waves of hair flowing down her linen dress. She had a coffee in one hand, her phone in the other, and was tapping her card to the register with the brutal finality of someone who had just been stood up.

She was leaving, and Ronan felt the punch of her disappointment in his gut.

"Okay. Breathe. Just walk over and apologize," he muttered, stepping forward. But before he could reach her, life had other plans.

“Mon dieu… c’est Jack Cross?!” a voice yelled from the back, followed by a tray clattering in the distance. A teenage girl raised her phone, squealing at the sight of him. Another woman gasped dramatically into her latte foam. The dam had broken from just that one recognition, rendering his sunglasses disguise utterly useless.

"Death Altitude!" someone shouted in a thick French accent.

"Oh my god, I love you!!" Another remarked, a bit more English than French.

"Say the line! SAY THE LINE!" One kid, not even old enough to have seen the first one when it came out, led the charge, and soon the rest followed suit, chanting along with him.

"JACK CROSS! JACK CROSS! JACK CR..."

The barista dropped a croissant with a dramatic splat, failing to stop the ruckus that had developed in her establishment.

Léa whirled around, coffee halfway to her lips, and her expression dropped faster than the pastry. Her date, the same man that stood her up, was only a few feet away, occupied by the ravenous crowd forming around him.

Seeing the disappointment on her face, Ronan raised a hand to signal, "Wait, I can explain," but she was already heading for the door, jaw set tight. Ronan took a step forward, instantly blocked by a fan horde achieving lockdown like a human croissant press.

“S'il te plaît, juste une photo!” Someone shoved a Minecraft-style pickaxe into his hand. Feeling trapped. Ronan automatically engaged "Jack Cross mode," plastering on a diplomatic, lopsided smolder while sweating bullets inside.

"Merci, merci… love y'all, but I'm kinda in a hurry," he mumbled, scrawling his signature on a movie poster.

Through the camera flashes, he saw Léa standing at the threshold of the second entrance. She looked dead into his eyes like a sniper about to pull the trigger; a silent shake of her head, and then she was out the door.

Immediately, Ronan slammed the plastic pickaxe onto the counter. "Gotta run, folks. Jack Cross—out!"

He vaulted a fallen chair, skirted a girl mid-selfie, and burst through the doors like he was escaping a bank heist. The bells jingled behind him as he sprinted down the cobblestone street, dodging a perplexed mime and a vintage bicycle.

"Hey! Wait—listen!" he called out, short of breath.

Léa didn't slow down. She marched forward like the lead in a Parisian indie drama, forcing him to hustle harder on the uneven cobbles just to stay parallel with her.

"Please! Just stop for a..."

"You don't respect my time," she interrupted, not even looking at him. Her flat, precise French accent sliced clean through the street noise. "You knew the hour. You knew the place. There is no excuse, Ronan."

"I do respect it, I swear, I just..."

"Respect. People's. Time," she said, finally stopping abruptly to nail him with a glare that froze a passing street violinist mid-bow. Stripped of his movie-star ego, Ronan looked entirely punched in the soul by the raw truth of it. His mouth opened, then closed, completely defenseless.

Desperate, his voice dropped to a soft, fragile whisper. "Can I have one more chance? Just… one more?"

Léa looked at him, her expression devoid of the anger he was used to facing from his ex-wife, Ariadne. "I have other things to do, Ronan. And I'm sure you do too."

She turned on her heel. weaving seamlessly into the Parisian crowd before she finally vanished. Ronan stood alone in the wide Parisian light, hoping against hope that his life was a movie and a director would yell "cut" any minute now.

Speaking of, he looked down at his watch. He had thirty minutes left till his audition. Thirty minutes to get across town and convince a room full of strangers that he still had something to offer besides the hollow myth of his name. He tried to inhale, to pretend the rush of traffic was applause, but the trick didn't work anymore.

"Jack Cross, oui?"

He turned numbly. It was a young woman from the patisserie, holding out a paper cup topped with heart-shaped foam. "A latte. And maybe… a selfie?"

Ronan blinked, the request landing like a heavy brick. Mechanically, he rolled his shoulders back, engaged the smile, and nodded.

Click. Another digital snapshot added to the public archive of him pretending to be fine.

***

"No, no, Ronan...stop. Let's cut there," Noah Westwood's voice crackled through the laptop speakers, sounding raspy via the hotel’s sluggish Wi-Fi.

Ronan froze on the edge of the plush velvet sofa, his hand hovering mid-air. This was his third take of the same scene, and he could tell it wouldn't be his last. On camera, the twenty-six-year-old director looked like a walking anxiety attack in a thrifted blazer, running a hand through a mass of messy dark curls.

"You're acting with your biceps again," Noah muttered, squinting into his webcam while his grandfather’s dead Rolex glinted on his wrist. "Doctor Germain is a small-town physician drowning in a sea of anonymous poison-pen letters. He is small. He is paranoid. When you deliver the line about the town finding out his secret, you shouldn't look like you're about to punch a helicopter out of the sky. I don't want Jack Cross. I want Cillian Murphy in Oppenheimer when the room goes quiet. You know a man being slowly crushed by consequences he can't control. Take it again from page four. And please, lose the smolder."

Ronan gave a practiced, agreeable nod, the same one he gave directors right before doing whatever the hell he wanted anyway. He had honestly thought an indie audition would be a walk in the park, a simple courtesy read for an A-lister taking a massive pay cut. Instead, it was an absolute technical nightmare.

Mainstream blockbusters were easy; you hit your mark, memorized three lines of dialogue that usually involved shouting, and let the CGI green screen do the heavy lifting. But this? This small-budget noir required an agonizing, hyper-fixated control over every single micro-expression. Noah wasn't looking for charisma; he was demanding the kind of raw, naked vulnerability that Ronan usually hid behind a stunt double. It was harder, faster, and infinitely more terrifying than anything he’d done since his reality TV days.

"Right. Sag the shoulders. Look miserable. Got it," Ronan muttered to himself, purposely letting his posture cave in. He stared at the digital script on his screen, trying to summon the quiet desperation of a man trapped in a French village full of secrets. Then he took a slow breath and began the paragraph again.

"The letters keep coming," Ronan said, forcing his eyes to stay hollow, locking onto the tiny green camera light as if it were his only lifeline. "Every morning, under the door, in the mail... he knows. He knows what I did in that hospital room. But if this town finds out..."

"Better! Yes, that's it!" Noah interrupted, his eyes lighting up with that intense, neurotic film-school passion. "The stillness is working. Hold that exact note. Give me the c****x. The final realization paragraph, right now while you have the momentum."

Ronan centered himself, feeling the shift. He was actually doing it, stripping away the movie-star skin layer by layer. With that realization in mind, he took a deliberate, heavy beat, letting the quiet panic of the scene build in the vacuum of the penthouse.

But before his lips could part, a sharp, digital chime echoed from the laptop.

User 'Executive Producer' is requesting to join the meeting.

Noah muttered a distracted apology off-camera, his trackpad clicking as he admitted the late arrival. "Keep going, Ronan, don't lose the feed. Push straight into the final line."

Ronan locked his jaw, keeping his eyes anchored to the lens, forcing himself to ride out the digital interruption. "Because if the truth comes to light, there won't be a trial," he whispered, the emotion raw and heavy in his chest. "There will only be the..."

His eyes flicked to the corner of his monitor as a new webcam tile expanded onto the screen. Sitting in the center of it, dark waves of hair catching the light above a simple linen dress, was a very familiar woman. The digital nameplate beneath her video feed read: Léa Escola: Executive Producer.

Léa! The date he had fumbled only a few minutes ago.

The shock hit Ronan like a physical slap, scattering his focus into absolute chaos. His brain misfired, the lines he’d been fighting to grasp dissolving into thin air.

"...only be the..." Ronan fumbled, his voice cracking as his eyes darted from Noah’s enthusiastic face straight to her digital square. He blinked rapidly, his throat tightening as his carefully constructed indie persona shattered in real-time.

"The... sorry. The execution. No. The fallout. Wait, what's the word?"

Léa didn't respond or look surprised to see him. She simply leaned back in her office chair, picked up a white porcelain cup, and took a slow, deliberate sip, watching his entire career rebrand crash and burn through her webcam with absolute indifference.