UNDERSTUDY

True Things

He was true to his word, which was somehow worse than if he'd lied.

The email came at 11:40 that night, from an address with no name attached, just a string of numbers and letters that looked like it had been generated specifically not to be traced back to anyone. No subject line. Attached: a document titled simply *T.A.*, forty-one pages long.

Mara sat cross-legged on her mattress with her laptop balanced on a pillow, the radiator ticking against the cold the way it always did in October, and read the entire life of a man she'd never met.

Theo Ashford. Twenty-four. Allergic to shellfish, badly, carried an EpiPen he pretended he didn't need. Left-handed. Went by "Theo," never "Theodore," and would correct you exactly once before deciding you weren't worth the second correction. Worked as a carpenter for the Fenwick Street Theater, building sets instead of standing on them, which the document noted "was likely a choice, not a limitation" without elaborating further. Had a dog, a rescue mutt named Pigeon, for reasons the file didn't explain and Mara found herself wanting to know anyway. Hadn't lived under the same roof as his father since he was sixteen. Called his grandfather every Sunday at six, without fail, had done so for six years.

There was a section near the end, shorter than the others, titled *Sensitivities*. It read, in full: *Do not mention the accident from Theo's sophomore year of high school unless he brings it up first. Do not ask about his mother. Do not, under any circumstances, imply that this arrangement was his idea.*

She read that last line three times.

She thought about texting the number the lawyer had given her — for logistics only, he'd specified, as if logistics were a category of conversation that couldn't also contain a person's discomfort — and asking what, exactly, she was supposed to do with forty-one pages of a stranger's most private facts, treated like blocking notes for a play. In the end she didn't text anyone. She read the whole file twice, turned off the light, and lay awake longer than she wanted to admit, running lines that didn't exist yet for a role that had no script, only a very detailed list of things she wasn't allowed to say.

---

The Fenwick Street Theater smelled like sawdust and old velvet, which she found she preferred to lemon polish.

She found Theo by the sound of a table saw before she found him by sight — a long, ugly shriek of metal on wood coming from somewhere behind a half-built staircase flat, the kind of set piece that would look, from twelve feet back under stage lights, like real oak instead of pine and glue. He didn't look up when she came around the flat. He was younger than his photograph, or maybe just less careful about how he held his face when no one important was watching. Sawdust in his hair. A flannel shirt with a burn hole near the cuff.

"You're the girlfriend," he said, before she'd said anything at all, not a question.

"Mara."

"I know your name. I read the file too." He set the wood down, finally looked at her, and she understood immediately what Julian had meant about being prepared for this to go badly — there was nothing warm in the look, but nothing cruel either, just a flat, assessing hostility, the specific kind you save for something you've been told to accept and have decided you won't pretend to like just because you've agreed to tolerate it. "Did he pay you before or after you found out whose family you were joining?"

"Before. I signed something. I assume that's relevant to whatever point you're building toward."

Something flickered — not quite approval, but recognition, like he'd expected her to fold and was recalibrating slightly that she hadn't. "My point is that you don't owe any of us anything real. You're doing a job. I get that. I'm not going to pretend I'm thrilled some woman I've never met is about to tell my dying grandfather she loves me, but I get why he set it up this way, so I'm not going to make it harder than it has to be. I just need you to understand something before Sunday."

"Go ahead."

"My grandfather is the only person in that family who's ever actually shown up for me without wanting something back. If I find out — if I so much as *suspect* — that you're using this to get close to my father for some reason of your own, I will end this so fast neither of you will have time to explain yourselves. I don't care what he's paying you. I don't care what your career needs. Edmund doesn't get hurt because two adults couldn't be honest with each other about what this actually is."

It was, she realized, the most any of the Ashford men had said to her that wasn't a term negotiated by a lawyer. She respected it more than she expected to.

"For what it's worth," she said, "I don't want anything from your father. I met him yesterday for forty minutes and he looked at me like I was a line item."

"That's just how he is with anyone he hasn't decided to trust yet." Theo picked the wood back up, turned it over, examined a joint with more attention than the joint probably needed, a way of not looking at her while he kept talking. "He was different before. Before the thing with the movie, before he basically vanished for two years and came back directing instead of acting. I don't actually know what happened. Nobody's ever told me the real version. I was fourteen and everyone just started talking about my dad in the past tense like he'd died, except he was still around, just — smaller. Quieter. Like something had been surgically removed and they didn't tell me what."

He said it like it didn't matter to him, in the same flat, distracted voice he'd use to talk about the joint in the wood, and that was somehow the thing that convinced her it mattered enormously.

"You've never asked him?"

"I asked him once. He told me it was complicated and that he'd explain when I was older." Theo huffed something that wasn't quite a laugh. "I'm twenty-four. I think we've hit older."

She didn't have an answer for that, and didn't try to invent one, which she suspected — correctly, though she wouldn't know it for months — was the first thing she did that Theo actually respected.

"So," he said, straightening, wiping his palms on his jeans, done with the subject as abruptly as he'd opened it. "Sunday. Family dinner. My grandfather's house. You'll meet my father's assistant, who thinks she runs the household even though technically she doesn't, and possibly my aunt Ruth, who will ask you invasive questions about your intentions because she thinks it's charming that she's blunt. Stick to the file. Don't improvise details we haven't agreed on. And for God's sake, don't call me babe, or anything like that, I will visibly recoil and it'll ruin the whole thing."

"Noted. What do I call you?"

"Theo's fine. Maybe 'T' if you're feeling ambitious, but I make no promises about my face staying neutral if you try it." For the first time, something almost like humor crossed his expression, gone as quickly as it came. "Look — this is going to be strange for a while. I'm not going to be easy about it, because I'm not built that way and pretending otherwise this early would just be its own kind of lie. But you clearly didn't have to come here and have this conversation with me directly. You could've just shown up Sunday and let my dad handle the details. You didn't. That counts for something."

"I like to know what I'm walking into."

"Yeah." He looked at her for a second too long, like he was recalculating something. "My dad's not going to tell you that about himself. Just — whatever you're picturing when you picture him, from the file, from the two conversations you've had. It's not the whole picture. I don't know what the whole picture is anymore, honestly. But it's not that."

---

She didn't see Julian again until Thursday, three days before the dinner, when he called — an actual phone call, not a text, not an email routed through an anonymous address — to go over what he called "narrative alignment," as though they were producers prepping a pitch instead of two people about to lie to a dying man's face.

"Theo talked to you," he said. Not a question.

"You knew he would."

"I hoped he would. It's better if the two of you build your own version of events instead of memorizing mine. My father will ask questions neither of us anticipated. It's easier to answer them honestly if there's an actual foundation of information under the lie, instead of just a script."

"Is that what you did? Build a foundation of information under a lie?"

There was a pause on the line, longer than the question warranted, long enough that she wondered if she'd overstepped in a way that would cost her the job before it had properly started.

"That's a fair question," he said finally, in a voice that had lost some of the flatness from their first meeting. "I don't have a good answer for it yet. Ask me again after Sunday."

He hung up before she could decide whether that had been an answer or a promise, and she sat with the phone still warm against her ear for a long moment, thinking about a fourteen-year-old boy watching his father go quiet and small, and wondering exactly how many people in this family were keeping a version of the truth in reserve, waiting for someone to finally ask the right question.