Third Floor, Second Life

I regret not stealing the necklace when I had the chance.

The real one, I mean. Not the paste-stone copy they made me wear in The Widow’s Hour. No, the real one was kept in a locked drawer in the producer’s office, behind a painting of a lake no one ever remembered the name of. He said it was insurance. I said it was bait. We both were right.

But I didn’t take it. Someone else did. And for thirty years, the headlines blamed me because I’d walked off set the same night it went missing. Which is how I became Ivy Castell: disgraced actress, tabloid cautionary tale, and now, resident of Flat 3A at Whitmore Row.

I arrived on a rainy Tuesday with two battered trunks and a large sunhat that hadn’t seen sunlight since Cannes. The stairwell creaked like it remembered better days. I rather liked that about it. The walls were the same colour as aged clotted cream, and my flat smelled faintly of fig preserves. Someone had left a potted geranium on the sill. Kind, if presumptive.

The building suited me. Quiet, a little secretive. The sort of place where someone like me might be left alone to sip tea and remember a time when my name was in lights rather than crossword clues.

But last night, I saw him.

Not clearly—just a shape at the back of the community theatre on Marigold Street, watching our final dress rehearsal with the stillness of someone deciding something. It was the coat that gave him away. Tweed. Unfashionable. Unmistakably Alistair Harring.

He was the understudy, though not for my role. The director reworked the story to give me center stage, and Alistair never forgave me for stealing the spotlight.

He was also the only other person who had a key to the producer’s office the night the necklace disappeared.

So what was he doing in Whitmore?

Was he here to clear his conscience—or bury mine all over again?

This morning, I called maintenance. Told them my closet door was stuck. It wasn’t. But I wanted an excuse to see if Len Ardley still worked the building. He did.

Len came up with his toolbox and a look that said he didn’t believe a word of my story. He was kind enough not to say so. As he jimmied the hinge with the grace of someone who knew every squeak in the building, he said, “Didn’t I see you once in something? Black-and-white, all shouting and secrets.”

“I did my best work in whispers,” I replied.

He chuckled. “So what brings you to Whitmore Row, Miss Castell?”

“A need for shadows,” I said. Then, softening, “And maybe a second act.”

He nodded once. “Plenty of those around here.”

He left me with a fixed door and a fig cutting. “From the tree downstairs,” he said. “Someone planted it last spring.”

Later that afternoon, I passed an older gentleman locking the door to Flat 2B. He was holding a worn leather duffel and a book with a fig tree on the cover. I recognised him from the staircase and the way he moved like someone unlearning grief. He looked up, and for a moment, I saw in his face the ghost of someone who had once been full of story.

"You're Ivy Castell, aren't you?" he asked. "My wife adored The Widow’s Hour. She said you blinked with more expression than most people act with."

I smiled, genuinely. “That was a long time ago.”

He hesitated. “Doesn’t make it less true.” He shifted his bag, looked like he was about to say goodbye, but instead added, “If I may offer some advice... whatever role you're playing now, make sure it lets you forgive yourself.”

He tipped his head and descended the stairs. I didn’t ask his name, but I found a pressed fig leaf tucked into my mailbox that evening, and somehow, I knew.

That night, I stared at the trunk in the corner. I’d moved it three times since arriving. I’d almost left it on the pavement back in Brighton.

Now, I stood before it, hands trembling. A ghost of sandalwood clung to the old leather straps. The scent of dressing rooms, of powder compacts and crushed roses. I hesitated.

What if I opened it and found nothing of value? What if I’d rewritten the past into something cleaner than it was?

Inside, wrapped in stage makeup rags and yellowed press clippings, was the original script from The Widow’s Hour. My copy. Annotated, dog-eared, mine.

Tucked between Act II and Act III was a page I hadn’t marked.

“She knows. She always knew. And if she speaks—well, let her. I’ll deny it as easily as I lie about love.”

It wasn’t in my handwriting.

Alistair’s.

The same words he’d ad-libbed in our final rehearsal—never meant to be heard, never meant to linger.

He had been in the office. He’d left the script behind. And someone—me—had taken the blame.

But now, doubt seeped in. What if he hadn't meant to incriminate me? What if he’d left the line there as a warning? Or a confession? Was I clinging to guilt simply because it had given me something to hold onto?

FLASHBACK

Backstage, 1992.

The greenroom hummed with cheap champagne and half-hearted congratulations. I was still in costume—beads at the throat, satin gloves damp with nerves. The necklace wasn’t around my neck. That had been whisked off by a production assistant and placed, I was told, in the locked drawer behind the lake painting.

Alistair leaned against the doorway, drink in hand. “Stole the scene, darling. You always do.”

I lit a cigarette. “You’ll get your chance.”

“Not if the producer keeps kissing your hand like it’s gold-plated.”

I turned to him. “You’re not angry because I got the part. You’re angry because I earned it.”

He smiled then. Tight. Crooked.

“You were always his favourite,” Alistair said, eyes cold. “He rewrote the ending for you, cut three of my scenes. Don’t act like you didn’t know.”

I never saw the necklace again.

Inside the trunk was also a slim envelope addressed to ‘Castell, Ivy’. Postmarked 1994. I opened it with trembling fingers.

Dearest Ivy,

I don’t believe what they say. Not for a moment. You were magnificent, and you always will be. I wore pearls to school because of you. Please don’t disappear like they want you to. Some of us remember the truth.

Yours in the wings,

Emilia P.

The edges of the paper had frayed, but the ink had not faded. I pressed it flat and placed it beside the fig cutting.

I returned to the Marigold Theatre the next night.

Alistair was there. In the second row. I walked on stage, lit only by the overhead ghost light, and stared right at him.

“This one,” I told the director, “goes out to an old friend.”

We performed a chamber piece about loss and revision. I said my lines as if they were confessions. When I left the stage, he was gone.

But that night, in my letterbox, was a slip of folded paper:

Ivy,

It should have been you who took the bow. I was a coward then. And again now.

But you wore it better than I ever would have.

No name. But I didn’t need one.

I keep the note beside the fig cutting now, which is thriving despite my poor care. Sometimes I wonder what I might have become if I—or he—had told the truth. But neither of us did.”

That afternoon, I took an old theatre playbill—creased at the corners, ink faded to lavender—and folded it into quarters. I tucked it into the fig pot, beneath the soil.

Then I stood by the window and said a line from The Widow’s Hour aloud. Just one. “The truth doth cling not to the tongue that speaks, but to the soul that hath endured.”

And somewhere far off, or perhaps only in my mind, I heard a round of applause.

So I brew my tea. I read my lines. And I wait.

For the third act.

For the final cue.

Not for someone else to remember the light I once stood in—but for me to step into it again, uninvited if I must.

There is no waiting now. No hoping for a role to be handed back. I’ve earned my voice, my presence, my place.

And if I must, I’ll write the next act myself—

With no understudy.

And all the lights on me.