Page 41 of Cast to be Mine

And he still believed I could do this.

I couldn’t let him down.

“Okay,” I said finally. “Let’s try it.”

His face relaxed into something that might have been relief. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.” I stood up, wiping my palms on my cargo pants. “But I probably need to get touched up first.”

Twenty minutes later, I was back on the catwalk.

The makeup artist had worked miracles, erasing all evidence of my breakdown. The crew had filtered back in. I could feel them watching, waiting to see if I’d crash and burn again.

Toby stood off camera with the script, ready to read Jack’s lines. Micah was back at the monitors, headset on, all business.

“Whenever you’re ready, Grace,” he said.

I took a deep breath. Closed my eyes. Let Elena settle into my bones the way I’d practiced a thousand times in my living room.

When I opened my eyes, I wasn’t Grace Stone anymore. I was a woman who’d been fighting for her life for three days. A woman who was terrified and exhausted and running on pure adrenaline.

“Action.”

I rounded the corner and delivered my first line. The words came out exactly right. Sharp with panic, breathless with desperation. A desperate woman needing saving. I could hear Toby reading Jack’s lines from somewhere below, but I wasn’t really listening to him. I was listening to the character in my head, the version of Jack’s character that existed in the world of the script.

“Cut! Moving on!”

We reset for the next angle. Then the next. Scene after scene, I threw myself into Elena’s world. Somewhere around the fourth setup, I became aware of a shift in the energy on set. The whispers had stopped. People were actually watching now. Not with the morbid curiosity of rubberneckers at a car crash but with genuine interest.

I stayed in the zone, stayed in Elena’s skin. When Micah called action, the rest of the world fell away. There was only the character, the story, the truth of the moment.

We finished the last setup. I could smell chicken and knew craft services had lunch ready. I stood on the catwalk, breathing hard, feeling like I’d just run a marathon.

“Let’s set the rope rappel scene,” Micah called out. “Beautiful work, everyone.”

I looked beyond the cameras to where Micah sat in his director’s chair. He was watching me with those sharp blue eyes, his fingers running gently along his jaw in what I was starting to recognize as his thinking pose.

I offered him a grateful smile. He tipped his head in a silent gesture. Just a small nod, barely perceptible to anyone who wasn’t looking for it.

But I understood exactly what it meant.

I told you that you could do this.

14

MICAH

Grace was incredible.

I watched her from my chair by the monitors, unable to tear my eyes away. Every scene, every take, she delivered exactly what I’d seen in that first audition. The fire. The vulnerability. The raw talent that had made me stake my entire career on an unknown actress with a resume that fit on an index card.

My instincts had been right. She could do this. She was doing this.

The problem wasn’t Grace Stone. The problem was that Jack Montana sucked as a scene partner.

We ran through three more setups, and each one was better than the last. Grace found nuances I hadn’t even written into the script. Little moments of hesitation, flickers of emotion that the camera absolutely loved. I found myself leaning forward, completely absorbed, forgetting for whole minutes at a time that I was supposed to be directing and not just watching.

“That’s a wrap on this setup,” I called out. “Let’s take thirty for lunch.”