The mill staircase looks better under lights than it ever did in real life.
I step onto the bottom grate, heels ringing against metal, and the sound bounces up into the rafters of Stage 14, swallowed by the constant hum of the air conditioning. Thick cables snake along the floor, black tape crossing over silver, and beyond the railing a forest of stands and cameras glints under the rigs. Fake smoke curls from hidden machines, sweet and chemical, barely cutting through the stronger smell of coffee and powdered sugar from craft service.
“Nora, picture’s up,” the first AD shouts, voice cutting through the murmurs of crew and the rustle of wardrobe brushes. “We’re going from your line at the landing.”
I climb halfway, hand grazing the cold railing, and tilt my chin toward Camera A. The staircase is a meticulous lie: distressed metal painted to look corroded, damp patches airbrushed on, a spray bottle standing by for last looks. There’s no river here, no fog, just recycled air and a concrete soundstage outside the walls. I tell my shoulders that my body knows the difference. My heart doesn’t quite buy it.
“You good?” Marcus calls from behind the monitors.
I look down and find him near video village, navy suit in a sea of hoodies and cargo shorts. He holds a branded bottle of green juice in one hand, sunglasses hooked in the open collar of his shirt even though we’re indoors. He gives me that easy, practiced grin that says he owns the room and, in a way, he does.
“I’m great,” I call back. My voice carries nicely; it always has. “Let’s get you another Emmy reel, right?”
A ripple of laughter moves across the crew. Someone at the monitor says, “I like confident Nora,” and another voice replies, “She knows this is her show.”
Marcus raises the bottle in a little toast, then points at me, subtle reminder and promise all at once. Second Chances. My title in the opening credits. My face on every billboard riding the curve of Sunset. My last best shot at staying more than a nostalgia quiz answer.
The showrunner, Lena, steps onto the stairs below me to walk beats one more time. She smells like citrus and cold brew. “Okay,” she says, touching the fabric of my sleeve, grounding me. “You’re cornered, you’re furious, but you’re not going to blow your life up again, not this time. You already did that once. So everything has to live in your eyes.”
“Everything always lives in my eyes,” I say, automatically teasing, but my throat tightens around the last word. Again. Once.
Lena’s gaze flicks to my hand on the rail. “You good with the stairs? We can build you a mark if you want.”
“I’m fine,” I tell her. “I grew up on worse.”
She laughs and hops down, calling for quiet on set. The gaffer adjusts something up in the shadows, a flag swinging into place. A donut disappears into a grip’s mouth in one neat bite before he melts back into darkness. The red light on Camera A blinks to life.
“Rolling,” the script supervisor calls. “Second Chances, episode three, scene twenty-one, take three.”
I breathe in the cold of the stage and the sugar in the air. This is the part I know how to do. I let my shoulders drop, let my jaw soften, step into my character’s wreckage instead of my own.
“And—action.”
I charge up the remaining steps, breath loud in my ears, and turn on my mark. Across from me, my scene partner—playing my character’s estranged sister—blocks the way to the door at the top landing. Her cheeks shine with fake tears under the lights, but her voice hits clean.
“You don’t get to rewrite what you did,” she snaps. “You set that fire. We were there.”
Heat flashes under my skin, automatic. I hear my cue land in her mouth and feel my body pick up the rhythm, like hitting familiar choreography.
“You have no idea what I did,” I say, and my voice drops on the last word, rough and low. I take a step up, closing distance without touching her. “You were gone. You ran. I stayed. I fixed it. My whole life since then—”
On the word “life,” I grab the railing.
The metal bites cold against my palm.
For a second, I taste iron. Not the tang of old set paint, not the faint sweetness of the smoke machines, but river water and rust and that particular wet chill from back home in Pennsylvania mornings, the kind that lived in my bones. The staircase under my boots tilts; the air loses its recycled chill and turns damp, heavy. For one impossible heartbeat, Stage 14 falls away and I stand in the mill, the real one, with fog seeping through broken windows and a girl’s voice echoing up from below.
“Cut!”
The shout snaps the world back into place. The railing is just a prop again. The cold turns back into AC. Crew members move and cough and shift on their marks. The background actor in the corner adjusts his hat and checks his phone while the cameras reset.
My fingers stay glued to the rail.
“That was gorgeous,” Lena calls, already clapping. A couple of grips join in, then more. “You gave me everything without moving an inch.”
I pull my hand back and flex it, one finger at a time. The chill rides up to my elbow before it fades. I breathe out slowly, keeping my smile loose.
“So we like it?” I call, my voice light. “Please tell me that was the one, because my quads are going to quit the union.”
Laughter again. The tension, mine not theirs, melts enough that I can shift my weight and walk down the steps without staring at my feet like they might give way.
Marcus walks toward me as the crew resets practicals. The smell of fresh fake smoke kicks up as a PA drags a machine into place, sweet scent wrapping around us.
“That,” Marcus says, stopping at the base of the stairs, “is the woman they write profiles about.”
“You mean the woman who climbs stairs on cue?” I ask. “Incredible skill set.”
He studies my face, that micro-scan he does in the half-second before deciding which role to play: dad, lawyer, bad cop, coach. Today he chooses coach. His hand brushes my arm, a touch that reads paternal on any stray camera.
“You land this series the way you landed that take,” he says, “and no one will ever care about who you were at sixteen.”
A tiny muscle in my cheek twitches. “I thought we already paid people to make sure no one cares about that.”
“We did,” he says, smile fixed. “They did a wonderful job. You still don’t trust your own credits.”
The first AD calls for one more pick-up of my reaction, tighter. Marcus steps back toward video village, already spinning something with a nearby journalist from a streaming blog. I catch the words “healing” and “reinvention” drifting over from his end of the room.
Healing requires distance. Reinvention requires forgetting. Both depend on nobody pulling the old clips.
I walk back up the staircase. This time, when I reach for the railing, I make sure my fingers barely graze it, chasing the temperature with a kind of morbid curiosity. It feels normal. Painted. Ordinary. My pulse slows.
The close-up goes even better. I hold tears in my eyes without letting them fall; my jaw clenches just enough; I swallow in the beat after my sister’s line, a small, human twitch the camera will love. When Lena finally yells, “Print it, moving on,” I exhale and let my body sag.
“That’s a company wrap on Nora,” the AD announces. Crew applauds, a few whistles peppered in. Somebody hands me a paper cup of green sludge that tastes like cucumber and lawn clippings and survival.
I make my rounds, hugging background actors, thanking the guy who handled the smoke machine, letting the sound mixer tell me about his daughter’s school play. My muscles buzz with good exhaustion, the kind that used to keep me up all night when I was twenty and hungry and convinced this town would spit me out by September.
At the stage door, I pause.
Through the metal, I can feel faint vibrations from some neighboring set’s sound system—bass thumps and distant laughter. When the door opens, daylight hits my eyes, bright and flat. The Silverline Studios lot stretches out in a patchwork of asphalt and facades: New York street here, suburban cul-de-sac there, a fake small-town diner backed right up against a green screen the size of a warehouse.
Influencers in sponsored athleisure take selfies by a mural while a knot of union crew in faded band tees leans against a grip truck, smoking and scrolling. I nod at the crew, pass the influencers without them noticing, and head toward my waiting SUV.
The SUV’s tinted windows throw my reflection back at me: careful hair, expertly smudged eyeliner, soft beige sweater under a leather jacket. America’s sweetheart, thirty-four and still marketable. Nothing of a river town girl who knew how to climb rusted stairs in the dark.
“Big week, Hayes,” Marcus says, catching up and opening the car door himself like he doesn’t pay three people to do that for me. “Go home. Hydrate. Do not read anything dumber than a New Yorker profile.”
“That narrows my options,” I say, sliding into the cool leather.
“You hired me to narrow your options.” He taps the roof. “Text me when you’re locked inside the glass bubble.”
The driver pulls away, weaving past a golf cart stacked with prop Christmas trees. As we exit the lot, the city unfurls below us, sun hanging low over the hazy outline of the hills. Glass towers catch the light and throw it back, each window a tiny mirror. In my hometown, glass meant diner sugar dispensers and beer bottles on the riverbank. Here, it watches me from every angle.
By the time we climb into Laurel Canyon, the sky has softened to pink. My house appears around the last curve: clean lines, floor-to-ceiling windows, the pool dark and still behind a sheet of glass. It looks like the renderings the architect showed me years ago, the promise of “a sanctuary with a view.”
Inside, the air smells faintly of lemon cleaner and the expensive candle my assistant insists on ordering in bulk. I kick off my boots by the door and flex my toes into the cool hardwood. Silence wraps around me, broken only by the faint buzz of the fridge and the distant rush of traffic from the canyon road below.
I grab a bottle of water, then trade it for a green juice out of guilt. The liquid hits my tongue, grassy and cold. I lean against the kitchen island, facing the wall of glass. From here, Los Angeles glitters like a jewelry spill, each pinpoint light tied to a story I will never know.
My phone lights up where I dropped it on the counter. Twelve new texts, three missed calls, a stack of notifications from apps my publicist insists I keep even though I would happily throw the whole thing in the pool.
I thumb through the essentials—Marcus confirming tomorrow’s arrival time, Lena sending a string of fire emojis, my mom leaving a voicemail she will later claim was an accident. Then I tap into my main social app, the one tied to my public persona. The follower count remains ridiculous; the mentions tab is a fire hose.
Clips from today’s shoot already circulate. Somebody from lighting captured me laughing between takes, head thrown back, and captioned it, “Our queen knows she’s killing it.” A fan account has compiled side-by-side stills from my old rom-coms and today’s gritty staircase scene, praising my “range.” Comments stack up: heart emojis, crying emojis, long paragraphs about feeling seen by my character’s anxiety.
I double-tap a few posts, reply to one with a quick “you have no idea how much this means,” because that is part of the job now. Every bit of engagement buys goodwill. Goodwill buys grace. Grace buys privacy.
I scroll further and notice a tag I don’t recognize: @SecondChanceReceipts, a handle that did not exist when we started filming. The profile picture is a grainy screenshot of the “Second Chances” title card. Their bio reads, “Watching the edits. Saving the cuts.”
My chest tightens in a way that has nothing to do with the juice.
Curiosity wins. I tap the handle. Their grid is small: a few reposts of official trailers, a meme about my character’s wardrobe, a freeze-frame of me on that staircase with a caption about “the symbolism of stairs.” Then, three posts down, a square that looks different. Older. No logo.
I click it and the world narrows to a low-resolution still with the washed-out color of early digital footage. Sixteen-year-old me stands on a metal stair landing, hair in messy waves, wearing a green hoodie I thought made me look like a grown-up back then. Beside me stands another girl in a dark beanie and a denim jacket, shoulders angled as if she already plans to leave. The background isn’t a set. It’s the real mill staircase: chipped paint, rust blooms where the rail meets the wall, a sliver of foggy river visible through broken windows.
The caption reads, “Remember the one who disappeared?”
The app’s pink heart icon waits under the photo, patient and indifferent.
I hold the phone closer until the pixels break apart. My own younger face looks cocky, eyes bright with the kind of hunger you only get once. The other girl’s features blur at this resolution, but the lines of her body hit something low in my spine—a memory of standing shoulder to shoulder on a cold, wet night, arguing about lines and safety and who got to be brave.
No tags. My name in the hashtag cluster, sure. The show’s name. The town’s. But under “people in this photo,” the app says, “No one identified.”
My thumb hovers over the screen. I tell myself this is just nostalgia content. That someone, somewhere dug up an old still from a rerun or a DVD extra and thought it would be fun to stir the pot. Fans love a good “lost character” theory. They build whole wiki pages around characters who appeared in three scenes and never came back.
“The internet never forgets,” I say out loud, voice thin in the empty kitchen.
Outside, beyond the glass, a helicopter buzz sweeps across the canyon. Its light passes over the house for a second, a brief wash of brightness that slides across the floor and up the cabinets like a search beam. I stand very still until it moves on.
The past is edited. The records are sealed. The footage is gone or buried where no one can access it without burning a career.
I take a screenshot anyway. My hand trembles just enough that the image blurs.
Then I notice the timestamp on the post. It went up less than an hour ago, while I stood on a fake staircase pretending the past had nothing left to teach me.
I lock my phone and set it face down on the counter, but the afterimage of the grainy still lingers behind my eyes. In the glass in front of me, my reflection floats over the city lights, older and smoother, hiding the girl on the mill stairs who stands beside someone the internet is already calling “the one who disappeared.”