The greenroom air smells like hairspray, coffee, and nerves.
I sit in a tall chair facing a mirror ringed with bulbs, watching a more rested version of myself emerge in real time. A makeup artist pats a damp sponge under my eyes, tapping in concealer. Another smooths stray hairs back into place, spritzing something floral that cuts through the burnt-coffee tang drifting in from the hallway.
“Close,” the first one says, and I obey, letting my lids drop.
Powder brushes whisper across my skin. The chair creaks when I shift. The air conditioner hums too hard for such a small room, pumping out studio-cold air that never reaches the sweat at the back of my knees. My phone rests in my lap, screen facing up, still unlocked.
Rhea’s face stares back at me.
It’s a fan edit—one of the ones I told myself I would stop watching. Three clips in a row: her laughing with her harness on, throwing a thumbs-up to camera; her mid-air, body strong, controlled; a still photo of a memorial table covered in candles and a printed headshot. The audio is some melancholy pop ballad, volume low enough that it just barely leaks out of the tiny speaker.
“You can blink now,” the artist says.
I do, and my lashes feel heavier.
My thumb hovers over the screen. I drag the video down, scrolling through the rest of my feed. Promo stills from Second Chances. A tagged post from the talk show’s account with a boomerang of tonight’s guests. A screenshot of Quinn’s podcast page, someone captioning it: She’s going on national TV while this drops new episodes. The timing is wild.
There’s a new notification dot on Quinn’s profile picture. Live tweets.
“You okay on water?” the hair stylist asks, stepping back to inspect me. “You want a coffee, tea, green juice?”
“Water’s good,” I say. My voice comes out even, the practiced neutral of long press days.
My publicist’s assistant, Malia, materializes in the doorway holding a branded mug and a stack of blue notecards.
“Ten minutes,” she says. “They’re wrapping the sketch. Marcus asked me to remind you about the phrasing on the ‘wild child’ thing.”
I smile in the mirror, teeth perfectly aligned. “He’ll be watching from his cloud?”
“Greenroom,” she says, amused. “But close enough.”
She hands me the cards. Bullet points in Marcus’s neat block letters stare up at me.
- TEEN MISCHIEF, NOT VIOLENCE
- OWN IT, THEN PIVOT TO GROWTH
- NO SPECIFICS ABOUT MILL / LEGAL
- RHEA: EMPATHY + SYSTEMIC LANGUAGE, NO BLAME
The words blur for a second, overlapping with the caption under the Rhea edit:
She trusted them. They killed her.
I lick my bottom lip. The taste of foundation dust and lip balm mixes with a phantom hint of chlorine from last night’s swim. “Can you give us a sec?” I ask the glam team.
They exchange a quick look. “Of course,” one says, already gathering brushes.
When the door clicks shut, the room feels smaller. Malia hovers near the side table piled with half-eaten fruit plates and crinkled snack wrappers.
“You’ve got this,” she says. “You always kill talk shows. This is home turf.”
“Home turf,” I repeat. I glance down at my phone again, thumb already pulling down to refresh. My name sits at the top of the trending column, just under Rhea’s hashtag. #NoraOnLateNight. #JusticeForRhea.
A new tweet from Quinn slides into view near the middle of the feed, already climbing.
@SecondTakeQuinn
Watching pre-show chatter about “wild child rumors” and wondering who decides which ‘wild’ gets to be adorable and which gets you buried.
My skin tightens across my face, the makeup stretching with it.
Malia tracks my gaze. “Hey,” she says gently, “maybe stay off Twitter till after?”
“I’m just—” I catch myself and swap out the real answer. “I want to know what I’m walking into.”
“You’re walking into your own show,” she says. “They love you. They’re excited. You tell your funny story, you talk about the new series, you say something sweet about Rhea, boom. Clip goes viral for the right reasons.”
“Right,” I say. “The right reasons.”
A stagehand with a headset pokes his head in. “Nora? We’re ready to pre-set you. Two minutes to commercial.”
I pocket my phone, tuck the notecards under my arm, and stand. My heels click against the linoleum. The mirror floods with my full image now—dress sleek and camera-friendly, hair blown into soft waves, eyes framed in warmth and light. I look like a person whose life makes sense.
I press my tongue to the back of my teeth, checking for lipstick. My smile slips into place with muscle memory.
“Let’s go,” I say.
The hallway from the greenroom to the stage smells like hot metal and old coffee. Posters from past shows line the walls—faded photos of comedians, actors, bands. Some of them look younger than I did when everything started.
A PA leads me to the side of the stage. From here, I can see the edge of the set: the host’s desk with its shiny wood and little plant, the couch where I’ll sit, the backdrop of a fake city skyline. The studio lights beat down on everything, harsh and white, flattening color the way the Stage 14 lights flatten faces.
The applause sign glows red. The audience roars for someone I can’t see yet, a comedian finishing a bit about airline food. His voice rolls over the speakers, then cuts as they toss to commercial. The applause swells again, then dips into a murmur.
The host strides backstage, all cologne and teeth.
“There she is,” he says when he spots me. “America’s current obsession. How we doing, Nora?”
I give him the smile I practiced last night in the dark. “Running on fumes and caffeine like everyone else.”
He laughs. “You look fantastic. We’ll bring you out right after the band stinger. They’re hyped. You’ll hear me do the intro, then you walk when they point. Just be ready for me to poke a little fun at those youthful hijinks, okay?”
“If you weren’t, I’d be offended,” I say.
He flashes a thumbs-up and disappears back into the glow.
I take a breath. The air here tastes dryer, warmed by bulbs and bodies. My palm is damp against the notecards. I tuck them into the back of the couch in my mind, exactly where I can reach them if my brain blanks.
“Thirty seconds!” the floor manager calls.
The band kicks in, brass and drums, a jolt straight up my spine. The host’s voice booms toward the audience, smooth and practiced.
“My next guest is a Golden Globe–winning actress you know from Meet Me at Midnight, Five Summers, and now the critically acclaimed Second Chances…”
The crowd cheers on cue. I straighten my shoulders, angling them toward the gap in the curtain.
”…please welcome Nora Hayes!”
The band hits a brighter riff. A PA waves me forward.
I walk into the light.
For a heartbeat, the brightness blinds me. Warmth slams into my skin, and the audience becomes a mass of silhouettes and sound. Then my eyes adjust, and everything sharpens into set pieces I know by heart.
I wave, teeth bared just enough, and cross to the host. We hug, the kind where your upper bodies touch and your lower halves keep a respectful distance. He smells like expensive soap and studio air.
We settle—him behind the desk, me on the couch, the mug with the show’s logo on the table between us. The backdrop city twinkles behind his shoulder, another fake LA pressed against the real one.
“Nora Hayes, everybody!” he crows. “You’re having a moment.”
I laugh. “I wore my ‘having a moment’ dress just for you.”
The audience laughs with me. My body hums on the sound.
“We have to talk about Second Chances,” he says, “which is incredible and heavy and spooky in this way that I love, but first we have to address something very important.”
He flips through his blue cards with theatrical seriousness. “We have heard rumors—shocking rumors—that once upon a time, you were kind of a wild child.”
The crowd whoops. He holds up a hand, milking it.
I press my palm to my chest. “I deny everything.”
More laughter. I let it wash over me and then lean forward, like I’m letting them in on a secret.
“Look,” I say, “I grew up in a town where the most exciting thing was an abandoned textile mill and a diner that stayed open until midnight. You either got weird or you got bored.”
“Ah, yes,” he says. “The infamous mill. We did our research. There is an online legend that young Nora Hayes used to break into this place.”
My tongue sticks for a second. I smile through it.
“Trespass is a harsh word,” I say. “We preferred ‘location scouting.’”
The audience laughs again, big and satisfied. My heart knocks once against my ribs, hard enough to make my breath stutter. I picture rusted rails, wet stairs, the way Lila’s feet slid out from under her.
“No, I definitely did the dumb teenager thing,” I continue, hitting the beats. “There might have been a night where some of us snuck in with flashlights, took moody Polaroids, tried to do our own stunts.”
“Your own stunts,” he repeats. “You were doing your own stunts before you were even allowed to drive.”
“Which I do not recommend,” I say, wagging a finger. “Do not try this at home, kids. I was lucky. I had people around me who pulled me back when I pushed the line. Nobody got seriously hurt, but—”
The word lands like a stone in my mouth. I swallow it and keep going.
“—but it definitely taught me respect for safety teams and professionals. I joke about being a wild child, but, you know, I learned my lesson.”
The audience gives a little sympathetic murmur. He nods at me.
“Well, speaking of respect for safety teams,” he says, and the air tightens. “We do have to say, our hearts go out to your stunt double Rhea’s family. That was big news when it happened. How are you doing, and how is the set doing?”
I let my face soften. I know exactly how far to let my features fall. I rehearsed this in the dark, in the pool, over and over.
“It’s been devastating,” I say quietly. The room leans in. “Rhea was… she was brilliant. She was fearless in all the right ways. She was also the one always reminding everyone to stretch, to hydrate, to speak up if something felt off.”
Images flash in my head: Rhea laughing with a coffee in hand, Rhea checking my harness, Rhea on the mat, limbs at wrong angles.
“I trusted the system that was supposed to keep her safe,” I say. “We all did. That system failed.”
A little silence opens up. The host lets it sit for exactly three seconds—earnest, tasteful grief—before he nods again.
“And you’ve been vocal about wanting change,” he says.
I nod. “I’ve been in conversations with the studio, the union, stunt coordinators. I’m not a safety expert, I’m an actor, but I am someone whose name is on the call sheet, and I think that comes with responsibility. I don’t want her death to be a headline for a week and then nothing changes.”
The audience applauds, a softer, approving sound. My throat tightens around the elegant anger in my voice. I’m talking about systems because it’s true and also because it keeps me far away from saying, I saw the tape over the emergency stop. I saw the cut rope. I chose my career each time the pattern repeated.
The applause sign keeps blinking, and the sound keeps coming.
I ride it.
For a second, buoyed by the warmth of the lights and the validation in the room, I let myself believe this is enough—that saying the right words on the right couch can balance a body count.
The host pivots back to jokes. We talk about my co-star’s terrible cooking, about an on-set prank with fake blood that went wrong, about how strange it is to see my own face plastered on LA billboards. I gesture, I laugh, I tease. The mug’s glossy surface reflects a tiny, distorted me raising my eyebrows.
We go to commercial on a big laugh. The band swells. As the applause fades and the cameras cut, the host turns to me with his mic already being unhooked.
“That was great,” he says under his breath. “You nailed it.”
“Thanks,” I say. My cheeks ache.
I glance toward the far corner of the studio, where a monitor shows delayed playback of the show. My segment starts to roll: me walking out, smiling in slow motion, the audience rising to clap. The image is slightly desaturated on the feed, my dress a softer shade, my face smoother.
I watch myself laugh about the mill.
The floor manager touches my arm. “We’ll walk you out during the next break,” she says. “You’re clear.”
I nod and stand, my legs prickling as blood remembers they exist.
Backstage in the corridor, the air feels cooler again, the sounds muted. I’m halfway to the greenroom when Marcus materializes, suit jacket sharp, phone already in his hand.
“You were perfect,” he says, leaning in to kiss my cheek. His cologne hits my nose, all cedar and control. “Clips are already going up. The ‘wild child’ bit? Gold. The safety stuff? Chef’s kiss. You threaded that needle like a pro.”
“Good,” I say. My voice sounds far away to my own ears. “I’m glad we gave them something to cut.”
“Wait ‘til you see this,” he says, eyes bright. “You’re going to be trending in three different verticals.”
He lifts his phone to show me, but before I can focus, another PA walks by with her own phone out.
“Nora, have you seen this?” she asks, eyes wide. “It’s… people are already making edits.”
I take her phone because my hands don’t want Marcus’s yet.
The screen shows a split-screen video. On the left: me on the couch, laughing, saying, We preferred ‘location scouting’. On the right: a still image of a rusted staircase, metal slick with something dark. It’s cropped just enough that Lila’s face is blurred by distance, but there’s no mistaking the angle of the railing or the smear on the concrete.
The caption reads: “Nobody got seriously hurt” —Nora Hayes.
The comments roll too fast to read. Fire emojis, clown emojis, whole paragraphs of thinkpieces condensed into 240 characters. I scroll down without meaning to.
A quote-tweet from Quinn sits near the top of the thread, boosted to the front by the app’s algorithm.
@SecondTakeQuinn
Hearing “teen mischief” and “nobody got seriously hurt” next to accounts from people who saw blood on those stair rails and a body on a stretcher. Which version gets syndication?
The view count under her tweet ticks up as I watch. The number looks unreal, just a string of digits with a K at the end.
My stomach gives a small, traitorous lurch.
I hand the phone back too fast. “I shouldn’t—” I start.
Marcus steps between me and the moving feed like he can physically block it. “Do not doom-scroll right now,” he says firmly. “You just won the room. Let the noise be noise.”
Over his shoulder, another monitor down the hall shows the live broadcast on a slight delay. The host leans in toward the camera, all sincerity, while the chyron under my name reads: NORA HAYES ON FAME, GRIEF & GROWTH.
On the screen, I say, I trusted the system. At the same time, my actual phone buzzes in my hand, vibrating against my palm.
I glance down.
A notification from the social app pops up: “@SecondTakeQuinn and others are tweeting about you.”
The glass of the screen reflects my face, pale under all the carefully warmed-up makeup. For a second, the reflection doubles—me in the phone, me in the framed photo on the greenroom wall behind me from an earlier appearance, both of us smiling on cue.
“Nora,” Marcus says, softer now. “Don’t give them more than they deserve.”
I thumb the notification anyway.
The app opens to a trending page relentlessly organized around my image. Official show clips. Gif sets of me laughing. Below them, Quinn’s thread unspools in real time, each tweet stitched to a fan-made graphic.
One has the show’s logo on the left and Quinn’s podcast cover art on the right. In the middle, they’ve placed that uncropped still of the mill staircase from years ago, the one I couldn’t stop seeing after it hit my DMs. The caption reads: Two narratives enter, one leaves.
Another edit juxtaposes my line—I don’t want her death to be a headline for a week and then nothing changes—with a screenshot of the leaked call sheet, red circles around the compressed stunt schedule, Quinn’s earlier episode title underneath: The Pattern Is the Point.
“I need a minute,” I say, my throat tight. “I need—”
“Take all the minutes,” Marcus says quickly. “We’re done here. Car’s waiting. We’ll regroup tomorrow.”
I nod, but my feet don’t move.
I watch one more clip autoplay: me on the couch, smiling through perfect lipstick, telling the host, Nobody got seriously hurt, but it taught me respect for safety.
Someone has slowed the footage down just enough that my smile looks unnatural, stretched, the skin at the corners of my eyes not quite keeping up. Underneath, they’ve laid audio from Quinn’s podcast, her voice low but clear:
They told us the girl fell. They told us the system worked. They told us to move on.
The video freezes on my frozen talk show grin. A loading wheel spins in the corner, waiting to buffer the next angle of me.
For the first time, I watch myself the way everyone else does—split-screened, annotated, surrounded by receipts—and I can’t tell which hurts more: the lies I rehearsed or how good I am at selling them.