I peel the last strip of tape from my mic and place the transmitter in the PA’s outstretched palm, feeling twenty pounds lighter the second the battery pack leaves my spine.
“You’re clear, Nora,” she says. “Wardrobe wants you in that blue blouse for scene twenty-three. Trailer three.”
Stage 14’s air conditioning roars above us, blasting refrigerated air over the fake living room set. The chemical tang of yesterday’s fake smoke still clings to the curtains; someone left a half-eaten glazed donut on the coffee table, the icing sweating under the lights. I nod, offer the crew a wave, and slip through the maze of cables toward the open lot.
Outside, the sun hits me full force. The Los Angeles sky is blank and hard, color like a screensaver. Golf carts buzz past, background actors scroll their phones in clusters, and an influencer I vaguely recognize poses with a craft-service smoothie, ring light held by her assistant. The hierarchy of who gets shade and who stands in the heat reveals itself in canopies and clipboards.
My phone buzzes in my pocket—another alert about the podcast chart position, or the premiere numbers, or a text from Marcus reminding me about my “talking points.” I let it buzz. I have ten minutes before they call me back, and I want those ten minutes to belong to my skin, not my brand.
Wardrobe trailer three sits along the edge of the lot, a white box with a metal step and my name printed on a piece of paper taped to the door: NORA HAYES – CHANGES. Someone has drawn a little heart next to it in Sharpie. The metal step burns through the thin soles of my sneakers when I climb up.
Inside, the air is cooler, scented with fabric softener and cheap vanilla body spray. Racks of clothes press in on both sides, a rainbow of blouses and coats and dresses crammed into too little space. A tiny mirror framed in bare bulbs sits over a narrow counter littered with safety pins, lint rollers, and a half-empty bottle of green juice sweating onto a script page.
I close the door behind me and let my shoulders drop. The hum of the lot drops to a muffled thrum through the trailer’s thin walls. For a breath, I stand there with my eyes closed, listening to the faint rattle of hangers and the buzz of the bulbs.
Privacy. Bought by day rates and NDAs and carefully worded apologies. My entire life engineered to look unguarded while never truly unobserved. Right now, though, it’s just me and a flimsy door and the soft rustle of polyester.
I toe off my sneakers and unbutton my blouse, fingers moving on autopilot. My reflection in the mirror looks washed out under the bulbs, makeup melting at the edges, hair pinned in the “off-duty but hot” arrangement the network loves. I stick my tongue out at myself and snort.
“You nailed that last take,” I tell the mirror under my breath, just to hear a voice that isn’t a director’s. “You get five minutes of not being content.”
A sound answers me. A sharp, clean click from behind.
The hair on my arms lifts. I turn back to the door, bra half-fastened. The handle sits in its usual place, metal dull under the overhead light. The little privacy bolt above it has always stuck; wardrobe leaves it open so no one locks themselves in by accident. At least, that’s what they told us during the tour.
I hear the click again in my memory, replaying it, placing it. Not a passing cart. Not the AC. A lock sliding into place.
“Hello?” I call. My voice bounces off the narrow walls. I wrap an arm across my chest and step closer, fingers reaching for the handle.
It doesn’t turn.
I try again, harder. The metal bites into my palm. I twist until my wrist protests, then shove my shoulder against the door. The trailer barely shivers.
“Very funny,” I say, louder now. “If this is someone’s idea of a prank, it’s tired. Open the door.”
Outside, the world keeps moving. A muffled laugh from somewhere, the beep of a reversing truck, the far-off whine of a leaf blower. No footsteps right outside. No rattle of keys in the lock.
My throat dries out. I jiggle the handle rapidly, the way I used to jiggle the knob on the bathroom door in our Pennsylvania house when my mom fell asleep and forgot she’d locked it. The same locked-in feeling starts behind my breastbone, small at first, then stretching.
The overhead bulbs flicker once, twice, then go out.
Darkness folds in fast, thick as cloth. The only light comes from the thin strip at the bottom of the door, a pale line across the floor that does nothing for the space above my shoulders. The air feels heavier already, breath sticking halfway down.
Breathe, I order myself. You’ve done underwater stunts, panic rooms, horror scenes. This is a trailer. This is not a mill. This is not a staircase.
I reach for my phone on the counter, fingertips skimming scattered safety pins until they land on cool glass. My homescreen blooms in my face, too bright, showing me a thumbnail of myself from last night’s premiere party: laughing, glass of champagne in hand, city lights behind us through the restaurant window.
Glass, always glass. Windows, screens, the illusion that visibility equals safety.
I swipe to the flashlight and angle the beam toward the door to inspect the lock, already composing a polite but firm complaint to the safety officer.
The light hits the wall first.
A square of white paper stares back at me. Taped crookedly to the wood paneling at eye level, right next to the doorframe. The light flares across it, revealing a grainy photograph: the interior of an industrial building, metal stairs cutting across the frame, blurred motion.
A Polaroid.
My breath catches on a hook. I step closer without meaning to, beam steadying. The mill staircase emerges from the shadows of the image, that familiar angle I’ve seen in fan forums and in midnight DMs: railing rusted, steps slick, brick wall behind it tagged with a looping spray-painted word.
I peel the edge of the photo away from the wall. The tape releases with a soft tear. When I turn it toward the phone light, my fingertips pick up the faint chemical smell trapped in the paper—the sour-sweet of old developer fluid.
Someone printed this. Someone touched this. Someone brought it here.
Something crinkles under my bare foot. I jerk back and shine the light down. Another Polaroid lies on the floor, half-crushed. This one shows the mill exterior, river curls of fog clinging around the foundation, the windows broken eyes watching the water.
My pulse climbs into my throat. I sweep the light across the rest of the trailer.
More Polaroids. Taped to the side of the mirror, to the cabinet above the counter, pinned under a stray bobby pin on the lip of the costume rack. Each one a fragment: the mill’s loading dock, the staircase from below, a close-up of the metal railing with a dark rust streak where Lila’s blood once dried. No gore, nothing explicit, just enough suggestion that my skin goes cold.
I back into the mirror. The bulb above my head pings as it cools, a tiny metallic contraction that reads in my body as a distant step on a catwalk.
“Stop it,” I whisper to the empty air. “Stop it, stop it—”
I swing the light toward the far end of the trailer, the narrow space opposite the door where a full-length dressing mirror hangs. My own reflection jumps toward me, pale face distorted by the glare. For a second, my mind pastes teenage features over mine—choppier hair, sharper angles, a different set to the mouth.
Then I see it. Taped smack in the center of the mirror, right over where my chest would be.
Lila.
Not blurred, not background, not half-turned. She faces the camera straight-on, standing on the mill staircase, one hand wrapped around the railing. Her hair hangs damp around her face, bits of it sticking to her cheeks. There’s a smudge of dirt on her jaw, the kind that appears when makeup wears off under long hours and bad conditions. Her eyes lock onto whoever held the camera with a look I recognize in my own press photos when I’m tired of pretending: a dare and a warning at once.
The Polaroid flattens her there forever, seventeen and furious and un-vanished.
My knees loosen. I catch myself on the counter, sending a cascade of safety pins to the linoleum with a metallic rain. The air in the trailer shrinks again. My lungs pull but there’s no space inside to hold the breath.
“Let me out,” I rasp, not sure who I’m talking to anymore. I swing the flashlight beam back to the door and slam my palm against it. “Hey! Is anyone out there? The door’s stuck!”
My voice ricochets off the walls, thin compared to the roar of the AC units outside. I hit the door again, harder. The narrow window at the top of the door has always been frosted, but now I see a rectangle of darker shadow over it, and when I raise the light I understand why.
Another Polaroid. Taped right over the glass. This one shows one of the mill’s shattered windows, spiderweb cracks radiating from a central impact point. The outside world gone, replaced by another layer of memory.
My throat tightens to the point of pain. I slam my shoulder into the metal, ignoring the flare in my bruised collarbone from last week’s stunt. I shout until my voice scrapes raw.
“Nora?”
The voice outside slices through the panic like a hand through water. I freeze, ear pressed to the door.
“Nora, you in there?” Elle.
Relief and a new spike of fear collide so fast my hands shake. I swallow, forcing sound out. “Yes! The door—something’s wrong, it’s jammed—”
The handle rattles from her side, pried back and forth with patience, then more force. A click I can feel in my teeth shudders through the metal. The door swings inward, bringing blinding daylight with it.
I stumble forward into her, the flashlight beam jerking across her chest before my phone slips from my hand and clatters to the steps. Her arms come up instinctively, solid around my shoulders, grounding me against the spin of the lot.
“Hey, hey,” she says, low and steady. “I’ve got you. Easy.”
The sun behind her outlines her in a halo of white, but her features stay sharp: dark eyes, hair pulled back, soft lines bracketed around her mouth from years of bracing people through worse than this. Her T-shirt smells like detergent and a trace of smoke machine fluid.
“The door locked,” I say. My voice sounds wrong to my own ears, too high, too thin. “I didn’t touch the bolt. The lights went out, and, and—”
I half-turn, dragging her with me. Inside the trailer, the overhead bulbs flicker back to life, humming innocently. The Polaroid on the mirror still hangs there. The others still spot the walls like mildew.
Elle’s eyes land on the one over the mirror first. A tiny pulse jumps in her jaw. “What’s all that?” she asks.
“You tell me,” I snap, more bite than I plan. “Were these here when wardrobe loaded in this morning? Did you clear this with safety?”
My hand shakes when I march back up the steps and rip the Lila Polaroid from the glass. The tape pulls a faint squeal out of the mirror. I thrust the photo toward her.
She takes it carefully, by the edges, like it’s evidence that might smudge. Her gaze flicks over the image, then back to my face.
“That’s the mill, right?” she says. “From your old show?”
“You know exactly what it is,” I say. My heartbeat pounds in my ears. “This is Lila. This is the staircase. This is—”
“Nora.” Her voice dips, a warning wrapped in concern. She steps up into the trailer with me now, Polaroid still in hand, and nudges the door wider with her hip. “I’m not playing dumb. I know what I’m looking at. I’m asking what it’s doing here.”
The open doorway bleeds hot air into the trailer, but I still feel cold. I sweep my arm around at the other photos. “They didn’t grow here. Somebody got into a locked trailer, when I was on set, and wallpapered the place with my worst night.”
Elle studies the nearest cluster: rail close-up, fog on the river, the cracked mill window. Her expression stays careful, neutral in that way intimacy coordinators learn, the way therapists on TV look at people who confess on camera.
“Did you touch anything besides this one?” she asks, lifting the Lila shot a fraction.
“I picked up one from the floor,” I say. “I stepped on it. I don’t know which. Does that matter?”
“Might,” she says. “Fingerprints, chain of custody. If we decide to treat this like a real threat instead of just a sick joke.”
The word we catches me off guard. I latch onto it even as my stomach twists. “So you believe me now? About someone targeting the set?”
Her eyes meet mine, and for a heartbeat something raw flickers there—rage, maybe, or grief, or both braided together. Then her lashes drop, hiding it.
“I believed you enough to get hired,” she says. “The rest of them needed a near-fire. I believe that somebody with access and an agenda put these here and locked you in with them. I also believe that if you tell Marcus about this without a plan, he’ll spin it into ‘actress has panic episode,’ and that won’t help you.”
“So what do you suggest?” My laugh sounds brittle. “That I just… add it to the scrapbook of accidents and call it a day?”
“I suggest,” she says quietly, “that you let me document this properly, off the record. Photos of the photos, date, time, who unlocks which doors. And I suggest you don’t change alone anymore. Not until we know how anyone slid that bolt.”
Privacy again; the thing that keeps me standing and the thing weaponized against me. I look at the Polaroid in her hand, Lila’s defiant stare crossed by the shadow of Elle’s fingers.
“You really didn’t know about these?” I ask. “You walked up at the exact right second. You had the key, you opened the door, you say all the right safety words. How do I know you didn’t orchestrate both the fear and the rescue?”
The question hangs in the cramped space, louder than any of my shouts.
Elle doesn’t flinch. “You don’t,” she says. “Not yet. Same way I don’t know you didn’t put these up yourself to make the press tour more dramatic.”
The suggestion stings, painfully close to the narratives I’ve curated. I grip the trailer’s doorframe until my fingers ache.
“I didn’t,” I say.
“Then we’re both trusting that the other person is telling the truth about the worst thing we could do,” she replies. “That’s a start.”
Outside, a PA yells for first team. The lot surges back into motion. Inside the wardrobe trailer, Lila’s grainy face watches us from a dozen angles, trapped in old emulsion.
I nod, once. “Fine. Document it. Stay close. But if you’re the one tightening the screws on my life, standing next to me won’t save you when it all breaks.”
Her mouth curls at one corner, not quite a smile, not friendly. “Good,” she says. “I’d hate to be out of frame when the real story finally hits the light.”
She steps past me onto the hot metal steps, my rescuer and my prime suspect in one compact body. I follow her out, leaving the Polaroids still taped inside, their images pressed against the thin walls of the trailer like a second skin.
The sun flashes off the soundstage windows across the lot, hard and bright, turning the glass into mirrors. For one sick moment, I can’t tell where the set ends and the mill begins—or whose hand is on the railing this time: my saboteur’s, Lila’s, or my own.