“Not hurting my feelings,” she says. “They’re your glasses, after all. You used to have them fancy ones from the shop, but they broke. These are safer for us all, believe you me. The last time one of those nice ones shattered I was picking microscopic shards of glass out of my foot for— Okay, only five minutes left, get writing.”

“Shit. Yes. I’m on it.”

I’m suddenly going weirdly blank. I only have a few minutes. She’s going to watch the whole episode either way. I’ll do the end scene.

I scribble down a bit of the setting. The big rolltop desk, the ferns in the corner, the large velvet couch. The piano.

I write down the lines I remember, knowing that it might not match up completely, but hoping I can at least show a little insider’s knowledge that helps me prove myself.

It wasn’t my fault you left. That was your choice.

You couldn’t accept that you were wrong; you forced me to leave.

I blank on the rest of Kim’s line. I end it with a scrawled etc.

No.

That’s my line. Well, that’s not going to convince anyone. Why couldn’t this have been an episode with one of my many indulgent monologues, instead of it being one of the sneaky ones, which had me lurking around corners and standing with dramatic lighting at the tops of staircases for the first twenty-five minutes?

Kim’s next line: You were too damn proud to hear me, I write. That’s not quite it, but I can’t put my finger on why. I keep writing. To listen maybe? I put that too, in parentheses with a question mark.

Then me.

Proud? If there’s one thing in my life that I’ll look back on with pride, it’s this.

I write out the direction then, how I shoot her right in the chest. How Kim—or her former character—collapses against the piano. Then I walk over to her and pull off the diamond necklace.

My line.

I’ll think of you every time I wear it.

Her only line I remember for sure: You bitch.

Maniacal laughter, etc., etc.

We’ve filmed so many episodes that my brain has this—suddenly inconvenient—tendency to completely delete the past scripts to make way for the imminent new ones. It’s lucky I remember this much. I probably would have come up empty on a monologue, ending up scribbling something about revenge? as the specific lines escaped me.

“Okay, pencils down,” says Kiera, settling into the couch with her enormous bowl of chips. “Hit the kitchen light, if you will.”