The conference room smells like cold coffee and dry-erase markers, sharp and stale under the recycled chill of the AC.
I sit at the long white table with my bruised shoulder closest to the door, an old reflex that makes no tactical sense and comforts me anyway. If something falls this time, I want an exit within arm’s reach. The glass wall in front of me looks out over the lot: sun blasting off the asphalt, a golf cart gliding past Stage 14, palm trees waving like they’re in a separate, happier show.
The hum of air conditioning fills the silences between keystrokes and chair squeaks. No one mentions the hospital. No one mentions the cut rope.
“Thank you for coming in on short notice,” the showrunner says, sliding into the head chair with a clatter of bracelets. “I know you’re still…processing.”
I press my fingertips against the underside of the table so I don’t rub my shoulder. The bruise throbs under my blouse, a private pulse.
“Of course,” I say. “I’m glad we’re talking about it.”
I mean safety. I mean the catwalk. I mean whoever was up there.
The head writer clicks their pen, a tiny metallic stutter, and pushes a printed packet down the table toward me. Draft pages. My name is on the cover in all caps: NORA HAYES – PROPOSED STORY ADJUSTMENTS.
My stomach drops an inch.
“So,” the showrunner says, leaning forward, “we’ve all been thinking about how to honor what happened on Stage 14 without pretending it didn’t happen. Audiences are savvier than ever. They Google. They read crew tweets. We’d rather be ahead of the narrative.”
The word “narrative” hangs in the air like a stage light.
“Right,” I say carefully. “And safety? Who’s handling—”
“Production is on that,” she cuts in, easy and smooth. “Risk management, stunts, all of it. This is about story. About you. About her.”
She taps the packet with a manicured finger, nail flashing pale pink.
I slide the pages closer. The paper is still warm from the copier, the faint chemical scent rising up, mixing with the sugary smell of the untouched donuts in the center of the table.
“We keep talking about authenticity,” the head writer says. “Your whole brand. Your comeback. This accident—” they pause, searching for a gentler noun and failing, “—this moment can deepen Claire.”
Claire. The character I play who is not me, except when she is.
“How?” I ask. My voice sounds flat in my own ears.
“We want to give her a history with workplace injury,” another writer says, twirling a pen between their fingers. “Not just in a vague ‘tough childhood’ way. Something specific and embodied. A near miss. She was hurt before, early in her career, and nobody listened. Now she refuses to stay silent when she sees it happening again.”
The language is good. It’s always good.
I flip to the first page, black ink marching across white in Courier. Scene numbers, INT. SUBURBAN KITCHEN SET – NIGHT. Claire stands at a stove, telling a younger actress about the accident that “changed everything.” I skim the dialogue, my eyes catching on highlighted lines.
“I kept hearing it all night,” Claire says on the page. “That thud. I couldn’t get the sound out of my head.”
My fingers curl involuntarily. I taste hospital antiseptic on my tongue, even though I never made it past the hallway. I hear the sandbag hitting flesh and floor in my own skull, the way I described it to Marcus in the car, voice shaking, cheeks sticky with leftover stage makeup and dried fake blood.
I can still hear it, I told him. The sound when it hit her. It keeps…looping.
“We really wanted to use your words,” the head writer says, brightening, as if they’ve handed me a prize. “Marcus called me last night, he said you described hearing ‘the thud’ over and over. That’s just…that’s the stuff. That’s honest.”
My jaw locks before I can soften it.
“He told you that?” I ask.
“He was excited,” they say. “In a, you know, protective way. Turning pain into purpose, all that.”
Protective. I picture Marcus pacing my glass-walled living room with a phone at his ear, the city glittering below us like spilled sequins. I thought he was calling the studio lawyer. I didn’t think about who he’d quote me to.
The showrunner leans back, chair groaning.
“Look, Nora,” she says. “We can’t control that something happened. But we can control whether it gets flattened into a joke on late night, or whether we make it part of something meaningful. We’d rather lean in and frame Claire as someone who went through real on-set danger and came out stronger. That’s powerful.”
My hand drifts to my shoulder despite myself. The bruise responds with a sharp ache, like it knows it’s being drafted into a logline.
“What about the extra?” I ask. “The one who got hurt. Does she show up in this?”
“We’re not basing anything on…specific individuals,” the head writer says quickly. “Legally, we can’t. This is inspired by, not adapted from. Composite experience.”
Composite experience. The phrase tastes like sawdust.
I flip another page. In a later scene, Claire stands under blinking exit signs in the set hallway, telling the show’s grizzled male lead, “I signed the paper when I was nineteen because everyone told me it was normal. ‘Don’t be dramatic, accidents happen, just be grateful you’re here.’ I thought if I kept quiet, I’d get to keep my job. Turns out silence has a body count.”
My throat tightens. At nineteen, I sat in a different conference room with a crisis manager who smelled like expensive soap, signing papers about the mill in a damp Pennsylvania river town while my mother clutched her purse so hard it left red marks on her skin. Don’t make waves, they said. You’ll lose everything. We’ll take care of the rest.
No one filmed that scene.
“Obviously we’ll tweak the specifics with legal,” the showrunner adds, misreading my silence as concern about liability instead of the way my chest is squeezing. “We won’t mention a mill or a staircase. We’re not insane.”
A flash of rusted railings flashes behind my eyes anyway, the cold metal smell of wet iron from my hometown, layered over the chemical tang of our fake smoke on Stage 14. Two mills, one real, one constructed, overlapping like a bad composite shot.
I set the pages down, palms flat, and look up.
“So Claire’s survivor backstory is going to echo what just happened on our set,” I say. “Is that the idea?”
“We’d frame it as something from years ago,” the head writer says. “We can seed hints with her therapist in earlier episodes, then pay it off later in the season. Viewers will feel the resonance without it being, you know, ripped from the headlines.”
“It will be ripped from the headlines,” another writer says, then laughs when everyone shoots them a look. “What? It will. In a good way. Think thinkpieces about on-set safety, R29 essays about how we’re finally talking about labor conditions in prestige TV.”
The showrunner points at them with her pen.
“Exactly,” she says. “We’re doing what art does—taking real issues and dramatizing them. We’ll consult with stunt coordinators, intimacy coordinators, whoever we need. It’ll be respectful. Brave, even.”
Brave. I remember the extra’s face in the hospital bed, pale against coarse linens, the monitor beeping behind her like an accusing metronome. She whispered that she’d heard someone on the catwalk before the drop. I remember her pen hovering over the NDA line, the way my own hand hovered years ago.
“I mean, we could not use what we’ve been given,” the showrunner continues. “We could pretend nothing happened, keep Claire’s trauma more generic. But then the story rings false, and everyone calls it inauthentic. They’re already saying your performance on the staircase was ‘eerily real.’ We’d be idiots not to build on that.”
My eyes flick to the glass wall. Outside, a group of PAs crosses the lot, hauling coils of cable under LA sun. Their T-shirts are damp with sweat, movements quick but unspectacular. No one is rewriting their backstory.
“What do you need from me?” I ask.
The head writer brightens.
“Gut checks,” they say. “We’ll send pages to you directly before they go to the network. You tell us if anything feels false, or…exploitative.”
I suppress a bitter laugh. They want notes on how best to exploit me.
“We also wondered,” another says, “if you’d be comfortable speaking publicly about this aspect of Claire once we’re closer to air. Not naming specifics, just acknowledging that you relate to her journey with unsafe sets. There’s a huge push right now around visibility. It could be really healing for people.”
Healing. I picture viewers curled up on couches in fog-prone towns like the one I left, sipping bottomless diner coffee in living rooms instead, tweeting that they feel seen. I wonder if Lila ever watched any of my performances after the mill, or if seeing my face on glass screens felt like acid.
“I don’t know how much I want to get into my own history,” I say.
“Totally,” the showrunner says quickly. “We’ll craft something together. A talking point. ‘I’ve seen things on sets that scared me, and I’m grateful this show is engaging honestly with that.’ You don’t have to say more than that unless you want to.”
The careful wording hits my ear with the same rhythm as every NDAd statement I’ve signed. I imagine Marcus scribbling a note in the margin of his mental binder: POSSIBLE VARIATION ON PREVIOUS CRISIS LINE.
I swallow, mouth dry.
“I’m glad we’re talking about safety,” I try again. “I just want to make sure this isn’t only about story. The rope was cut. That’s not…an accident you write around. Has anyone actually investigated who was up there?”
For the first time, a sliver of discomfort cracks the room.
“Props and safety are on it,” the showrunner says, eyes dropping to her notes. “The studio takes this seriously. We’re not ignoring it.”
“We had a safety walkthrough this morning,” the head writer adds. “They’re updating signage on the catwalks.”
Signage. A new laminated warning while someone walks free with a knife or whatever they used, maybe listening to this conversation through the glass.
“In the meantime,” the showrunner says, tone brightening again, “we have an obligation to tell the best story we can. And your fear, your vulnerability—those are invaluable tools.”
Tools.
My spine stiffens. I feel my face rearrange itself into something photogenic: grateful, thoughtful, the good collaborator who knows how the machine works.
“I want the show to be good,” I say. “I want Claire to feel real. And if my experience can help that…then okay.”
The words scrape the back of my throat as they leave, but they land soft in the room, exactly what everyone wants to hear.
“Amazing,” the showrunner says. “You’re a pro, Nora. This is why this role belongs to you.”
The writers smile, tension easing, and the pen clicking rises again, little bursts of approval.
They dive back into the pitch, energized now that they have my reluctant blessing. They toss out ideas: a flashback episode with Claire on a rickety set, a quiet scene where she admits she once signed a “piece of paper” to keep working, a confrontation with a showrunner character who tells her to be grateful.
I listen to them build a fictional showrunner who looks nothing like the woman in front of me and exactly like everyone who ever told Lila and me to swallow it.
“We could stage the flashback in a small-town factory,” one writer says. “Give it that rust-belt flavor. Really lean into the geography. It would differentiate it from the glossy LA aesthetic of the current storyline.”
My pulse spikes.
“We actually have a location scout heading east next week,” the showrunner says, flipping through her notes. “There’s a mill town near where you grew up, right, Nora? Rivers, brick, fog—very cinematic. If we can get permission, maybe we fold that into episode ten. Put Claire back where she came from. Authenticity.”
The table blurs for a second. I force my breathing slow, air cold in my nose, then hot leaving my mouth.
“My hometown’s not a location,” I say quietly.
“Of course,” she says, missing half of it. “We just want the texture. We can fake most of it on Stage 14. But having real plates to cut to—that’s the kind of detail that elevates a show. And hey, if we can bring you along for a day, maybe there’s a promo angle. ‘Nora Hayes Returns to Her Roots.’”
Glass walls, glass house, glass screen. Every surface reflective, none of them protective.
I nod once, small enough that it could be mistaken for a twitch.
“You’ll loop me in,” I say. “Before anything’s locked.”
“Absolutely,” she says. “You’re central to this. We don’t move without you signing off.”
I smile at that, because I know it’s technically true on paper. My contract gives me consultation power on scripts that use my likeness. In practice, the machine moves with or without my consent; my approval just makes it smoother.
The meeting winds down with talk of page deadlines and network notes. Someone finally grabs a donut, the glaze cracking under their fingers, releasing a puff of yeasty sweetness into the room. I stand when everyone else does, the chair legs scraping lightly against the floor.
“You okay?” the head writer murmurs as they gather their pages, low enough that it doesn’t carry.
I adjust the strap of my bag on my sore shoulder, feeling the familiar weight of my phone, my NDA, my career.
“I’m good,” I say, the lie polished from years of use. “I’ll send thoughts once I’ve read it properly.”
In the hallway, the hum of the AC from Stage 14 bleeds into this building’s system, a single continuous drone that follows me wherever I go on the lot. I glance through the glass at the conference room I just left, at my reflection double-exposed with the empty chairs and abandoned donuts.
For a second, I can’t tell whether I’m watching the show or watching the making of it.
I turn away and walk toward the soundstage, script packet pressed to my chest like a shield, wondering how many rewrites it takes before I stop recognizing which parts of the story were ever mine.