It’s only when I do it that I notice that the room is slung with twinkling fairy lights. Behind the books on the bookshelf, with the tchotchkes, even in the kitchen. I used to decorate with them when I was a teenager. And it does make a room cozy. I’d never do that now. Grayson’s house is all expensive lamps from Rove Concepts and retro-inspired, brand-new pendants from Schoolhouse. The mood lighting is mostly smart bulbs that are set to very specific timers and have very specific routines. He got a guy who does the Hollywood Bowl to do the lighting design. Sometimes they don’t work, for some unknown reason, and I end up moving through complete darkness until I find a blessedly analog lamp.

I sit down on the couch. I’m actually excited to see the episode. Or maybe nervous is a better word. It seems unimaginable that it exists without me. Not because they can’t or shouldn’t make the show without me, but because I’ve been on it since day one. There’s never been an episode of Brilliance that I wasn’t on. Even those few episodes where I had no lines and only sat staring catatonically out a hospital window because I fell off of a sliding library ladder at the Montgomery mansion, only a white bandage wrapped just so around my perfectly curled hair to indicate some sort of injury. Kind of like now, where I have only an entire other life to indicate that something is wrong, but I seem generally fine. I don’t even have a bandage.

The episode plays out now basically how I remember, but with some strange differences. It’s Bizarro World Brilliance.

There’s the first scene at the coffee shop with the teenage characters having their homework and hot chocolate flirtation. The character who plays my sister shows up at her husband’s office and confronts him about an affair. Daphne—now played by Kim instead of me—stands in a hall, eavesdropping to hear her grandfather saying that the money is all gone. Daphne then runs off to tell her lover about the money when she overhears a conversation between him and her sister, who are having their own affair.

Then there are the filler scenes. The Downton Abbey–esque subplot with the middle-aged butler and his younger protégé and would-be lover, where they clean the tires of the vintage Rolls-Royce and try not to give in to temptation. The scene between the server and her boss, who both want the same woman but are also fighting temptation between each other.

The scene at the bank where the teller removes a safe-deposit box and admires the handful of diamonds within it before glancing surreptitiously around and putting them away again. I said that scene was stupid and served no purpose but to ham-fistedly remind the audience that there are diamonds at the bank, but I was overruled.