UNDERSTUDY

The office smelled like lemon polish and old paper, which was how Mara knew, before anyone said a word, that whatever this was, it wasn't a callback. Real casting offices smelled like coffee gone cold in paper cups and the particular anxious sweat of forty people who'd all worn the same audition blazer that week. This place smelled like a library that charged by the hour. Dark wood shelves. A window that looked out over the river instead of a parking garage. A man in a gray suit sitting across from her who hadn't once looked at his phone. "Ms. Voss," he said. "Thank you for coming on short notice." "You said it was urgent." She kept her voice even. She'd learned a long time ago that the fastest way to lose the upper hand in a room was to let anyone see you needed something. "You didn't say urgent doing what." "Mr. Ashford will explain the specifics himself." The lawyer — she'd clocked him as a lawyer within thirty seconds, something about the way he chose each word like it cost him personally — slid a single sheet of paper across the desk. Not a script. Not sides. A confidentiality agreement, dense with clauses, her name already typed at the top like they'd been certain she would say yes before she'd walked in the door. "I haven't agreed to anything." "No," he agreed. "But you'll want to hear the offer before you decide you don't want to." She almost laughed. It was such a specific kind of arrogance, the kind that assumed everyone had a price and the only real question was whether you'd found it yet. She'd met men like this before, at galas she'd waited tables at, at auditions where the director's assistant had more power than the director. She signed the confidentiality agreement anyway, because eleven hundred dollars was sitting in her checking account and her rent was due in six days, and because some small, stupid, hopeful part of her still believed that *urgent* and *strange* sometimes turned out to be the same thing as *lucky*. The door opened before she'd finished capping the pen. She recognized him before she could stop the reaction from showing on her face, which was its own small professional failure — the entire point of eight years in rooms like this one had been learning not to react. Julian Ashford didn't look like the photographs. The photographs, the handful that still circulated from before he'd disappeared from in front of cameras entirely, showed a leaner face, an easier posture, a man who still expected the world to be simple. This version of him moved like someone permanently bracing for a piece of furniture to be in the wrong place. He didn't offer his hand. He sat, instead, in the chair beside the lawyer, close enough that she understood immediately this was his meeting and the lawyer was just the person who'd set the table. "You've done regional theater for eight years," he said. No greeting. No thank you for coming. "Two understudy contracts that became lead roles when the actual lead got sick. One national commercial. You almost got cast in *Ferry Street* last spring before they went with someone with a bigger following." "You had someone look into me." "I had someone look into forty people. You were the only one who didn't quit the *Ferry Street* callback process after the network passed. Most actors would have walked. You stayed for notes on a role you didn't get." "I wanted to know what I did wrong." "That's the answer I was hoping you'd give." He said it like a man checking a box, not a man paying a compliment, and something about the flatness of it needled her more than an insult would have. "I need you to pretend to be my son's girlfriend for the next several months. In front of one person specifically. My father." The room went very quiet. Somewhere below them, through the old glass, a boat horn sounded on the river. "I'm sorry," Mara said. "I don't think I heard that correctly." "You heard it correctly." "You want to hire me to date your son." "I want to hire you to *appear* to date my son. Theo won't be participating beyond what's necessary to sell it in the same room as my father. You and I will handle the logistics. The texts, the photographs, the details that make a relationship look real instead of arranged. My father has approximately six months, according to his doctors, possibly less. He has spent the last three years asking Theo when he's going to bring someone home. This is the closest thing to an answer we can give him." She looked between the two men, waiting for one of them to indicate this was some elaborate, tasteless joke. Neither did. The lawyer was already sliding a second document across the desk, this one thicker, tabbed in places, a number circled on the final page that made her pulse do something complicated in her throat. "Why not just find someone who actually wants to date him?" "Because a real relationship would take longer than six months to look believable, and because Theo doesn't want one right now, and because my father would ask questions a stranger couldn't answer under pressure. You're an actress. This is a role. You'd be paid the way you'd be paid for any role, except this one doesn't end when the curtain comes down for the night. It ends when he does." The bluntness of it should have repulsed her. Instead it did something else — it made the whole absurd proposal feel, for one disorienting second, like the most honest job offer she'd ever been given. No one pretending it was an opportunity. No one calling it a passion project. Just a transaction, laid out plainly, with an ending already written into it. "And you're the one who hired me. Not your son." "Theo doesn't know you exist yet. He agreed to the concept. He did not agree to like the execution, and he won't, because he doesn't like most things I do. You'll meet him this week and he will be difficult about it, and you should be prepared for that." "You're very forthcoming about how badly this is going to go." For the first time, something shifted in his face — not quite a smile, more like the ghost of the idea of one, gone before she could be sure she'd seen it. "I find people trust the offer more when I don't oversell it." She should have said no. She ran the arithmetic anyway, the way she ran it every month: rent, the dwindling savings that were supposed to be for headshots and never were, the callback she hadn't heard back from, the fact that her agent hadn't returned a call in eleven days. The number on that second page wasn't life-changing. It was better than that. It was *specific* money — the kind that meant she could stop performing math in the middle of the night, stop deciding between the electric bill and the subway pass. "I need to know what happens if I say no right now," she said. "Nothing happens. You walk out, you keep the confidentiality agreement you already signed, and this conversation never occurred to either of us again." Julian said it like the outcome was equally acceptable to him either way, which she didn't believe for a second — his hands, folded on the desk, were pressed together just slightly too hard for a man who didn't care. "And if I say yes?" "Then you meet my father on Sunday. And you should know before you agree to anything — he's sharper than people expect from a man his age. If you're doing this to take advantage of a dying man, he'll see it in about four minutes, and it will hurt him more than never trying at all. I need someone who can actually make him believe it. Not someone who can just say the lines." It was, she would think much later, the exact wrong thing to say to her — a challenge dressed as a warning — because some competitive, wounded, understudy part of her had spent eight years being told she wasn't quite believable enough for the role, wasn't quite the one you'd choose first, and here was a man handing her the single hardest audition of her life and telling her, in so many words, that he doubted she could pull it off. "I can make anyone believe anything," she said, "if you give me enough true things to work with." Julian studied her for a long moment, the kind of look she recognized from directors right before they made a decision they weren't going to explain out loud. "Sign the contract," he said, "and I'll start giving you true things tonight." She picked up the pen. Her hand, she noted with some distant, clinical part of her brain, was steadier than it had any right to be. She had no idea, signing her name below a stranger's, that the truest thing in the entire arrangement was going to end up being him.