The Prompt Book

Sloane had stage-managed forty-one productions in this building, and she could still recite, without looking, every cue in Act Two of the one she had never officially been in charge of.

That had been eleven years ago, the night Vivienne Ashworth lost her voice three hours before curtain and the twenty-four-year-old understudy nobody expected to use was told to get dressed. Sloane went on. She said every line, hit every mark, and by the time the curtain came down she had already decided never to mention how it felt, mostly because no one asked.

What she had never told anyone — not the director, not her husband, not Vivienne herself — was that she still owned the prompt book from that single performance. Its margins were so dense with her own handwriting that the printed script beneath was barely visible. She had photocopied the official one before returning it and kept her copy folded inside a drawer she rarely opened. Rarely had she needed to; she knew the marginal notes by heart. Breathe here. She would have paused here. Don't rush the silence.

Tonight was Vivienne's last performance before retiring, and Sloane was calling the show from the booth for the final time in this production's run. Through the headset she gave the cues in her usual flat, competent voice — lights, fly, sound cue forty. Underneath it ran another voice, one that belonged only to her: this is where I would have turned upstage instead.

Had Vivienne never recovered her voice that season, Sloane thought, she might have gone on again, and again after that, until the part had genuinely become hers rather than borrowed for a single Tuesday. It hadn't happened that way, and she had made her peace with it years ago, or believed she had, which she was no longer certain was the same thing.

After the curtain call, having coiled her headset and signed off the deck, Sloane found herself outside Vivienne's dressing room. Flowers already crowded the narrow table, and a stagehand was unscrewing the star on the door. Vivienne caught her eye in the mirror.

"You called a clean show," Vivienne said. "You always do."

"Thank you." Sloane hesitated, one hand still on the door frame. "There's a pause you take in the letter scene. Right before you say his name. I've always—" She stopped.

"You've always what?"

Sloane considered, for one unhurried moment, telling her everything: the folded prompt book, the handwriting, the version of the letter scene that only existed in a drawer at home. Whatever she might have said next would not have changed the run, which had already closed, or the part, which was no longer being cast. It would only have been true.

"I've always thought it was the best moment in the show," she said instead.

Vivienne smiled, already half turned back to the mirror, and said something about the flowers that Sloane didn't quite catch. Sloane nodded, stepped back into the corridor, and let the door swing shut behind her, the prompt book at home no less full for having stayed unmentioned.