The audition was not an audition. It was a reckoning.
But she couldn’t. Because the real pain was not on the screen. The real pain was sitting in a van full of lavender cuttings, drinking warm Orangina, and realizing that she had spent five years learning to cry on command, but she had forgotten how to cry for herself.
She went back to Paris the next morning. She shot a scene that afternoon—a woman waiting by a window for a lover who would never arrive. The director yelled, “Cut! Perfect. That’s the real pain, Tabatha. Hold onto that.”
“Don’t you get lonely?” she asked.