The Understudy's Chance

Naomi Price had understudied Vivienne Laurent for eleven months without ever once believing she would go on, because Vivienne Laurent had not missed a performance in the eleven years Naomi had been following her career, and did not seem, by any account, to be the kind of star who ever would.

Then, three days before the biggest opening night Naomi's career had ever brushed against, Vivienne simply didn't show up for the final dress rehearsal, and didn't answer her phone, and wasn't at her apartment when the stage manager sent someone to check, and by the time the producers gathered the company on stage at midnight to explain that the role of Isadora in The Gilded Hour would open in seventy-two hours with an understudy in the lead, Naomi Price understood that the biggest night of her life was going to arrive wrapped entirely in someone else's disaster.

"We don't know anything yet," the director said, in the careful, controlled voice of a man trying to keep three hundred crew members and cast from panicking four days before a nine-million-dollar opening. "Vivienne may resurface. She may have a personal emergency we're not aware of. But we cannot delay opening night, and Naomi has been letter-perfect in this role for eleven months, and I need her ready to go on Thursday like her life depends on it."

Naomi went home that night and did not sleep, running lines in the dark, half from excitement and half from a guilt she couldn't fully name — the guilt of wanting, so badly, for even one more day, that Vivienne Laurent simply not come back.

The first note arrived the next morning, tucked under the door of the dressing room that had been Vivienne's for eleven months and was now, with jarring speed, being repainted with Naomi's name on the star.

It was handwritten, on plain cream paper, no signature.

You have to tell them where she really went. Before Thursday. Before it's too late for both of you.

Naomi read it four times before her hands stopped shaking enough to set it down. She checked the door — locked, as it had been all morning, the stage door guard swearing nobody unfamiliar had come through. She checked the room itself, the vents, the old mirror with its ring of bare bulbs, looking for some rational explanation that didn't require believing a stranger had somehow slipped a note into a locked dressing room in a building with security guards at every entrance.

She should have taken it straight to the stage manager. She knew that, even as she folded the note into her script binder instead of handing it over, telling herself she needed more information first, telling herself the production couldn't afford one more crisis four days before opening, telling herself — the truth she wouldn't admit even to herself until much later — that some part of her was afraid that reporting the note meant admitting she might not get to keep the role after all.

The second note came two hours later, tucked into the pocket of the costume that had been altered, that very morning, to fit Naomi's frame instead of Vivienne's.

She knew something about the money. That's why she's gone. Ask yourself who benefits most from you standing in her spot.

Naomi sat very still in the dressing room chair, script binder trembling slightly in her lap, and understood that whoever was writing these notes knew things about Vivienne Laurent's disappearance that the police, the producers, and the entire company of The Gilded Hour did not yet know at all.

And they had chosen, for reasons she could not yet guess, to tell only her.