All Chapters of The wife I forgot to love: Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

220 Chapters

Chapter Sixty One The Live

Helena was on her couch with her Markov script when Jordan called at eight fifty three.She picked up on the second ring.Jordan said two words.It is live.That was all. Helena said okay. Jordan said she would be watching from home and not to call her for two hours. Then she ended the call.Helena sat with her phone in her lap for a moment.Then she opened her laptop.The platform loaded. The thumbnail was a still from the third episode. Her face. An expression she did not remember making but recognised immediately as true. Jordan had chosen it deliberately. She would have.Helena looked at it for a long moment.Then she pressed play.She had seen cuts before. Scenes in isolation. She had seen the full thing once at the premiere with four hundred people and the weight of the room around her. That night she had been too inside the experience of being watched to actually watch.Tonight it was just her.Her apartment. Her couch. The rosemary jar on the windowsill catching the lamp light

Sixty Two The Morning After

Helena woke up at six fourteen.She had not set an alarm. Her body just woke her the way it did when something significant was waiting on the other side of sleep.She lay still for a moment looking at the ceiling.Then she picked up her phone.The numbers had not stopped.She sat up slowly and looked at them properly. Not the way she had looked at them last night when they were still arriving and she had not known what to do with them. This was the morning version. The settled version. The version where you looked at a thing in daylight and it was still true.It was still true.She put the phone down on the bed and sat with it for a moment.Then she opened her notifications.There were too many to count. Comments and shares and messages from people she did not know saying her name in ways she had never heard it said before. Not Helena Graves the ex wife. Not Helena Graves the woman whose marriage ended. Just Helena. Just her name attached to the thing she had put on screen and what it

Chapter Sixty Three Loud

Elena Markov did not care that Helena Graves was trending.She made that clear at eight fifty when Helena walked onto set with her phone still buzzing in her bag and Dana's last message still open on her screen from the car ride over.Elena looked at her once. Whatever is happening out there does not exist in here. You understand me.Yes. Helena said.Good. Elena said. Because I need the woman from that stream today. Not the woman the world is talking about. The real one. She turned back to her monitor. Five minutes.Helena put her phone in her bag and left it there.The morning ran hard. Elena was in that particular mode she got into when she could feel a scene was close to something true and was not going to stop until she found it. She pushed Helena through four takes of the kitchen confrontation. The scene was between Helena's character and the woman she had spent three years pretending everything was fine for. It required Helena to stop pretending. In front of the camera and in f

Chapter Sixty Four Weight

The scene Elena had scheduled for Thursday morning was the hardest one in the script.Helena had known that since she first read it. Page forty two. The confrontation between her character and the man she had spent seven years building a life with. The moment where she finally said the thing she had been holding in her chest for so long it had started to feel like part of her.She had been preparing for it all week.Thomas was already on set when she arrived. He was standing near the window of the dressed apartment set with his coffee and his script and the particular stillness of an actor who had already found where he needed to be before the camera started rolling.He looked up when she walked in.Ready. He said.She looked at the set. At the dressed kitchen. At the table with two chairs and two cups and the particular staging of a life that used to be something and was not anymore.Yes. She said.Elena arrived at eight fifty five and walked straight to the monitor without greeting

Chapter Sixty Five The Contract

He mentioned it on a Tuesday.They were on the phone. It was the end of a longer conversation about something else entirely. She had been telling him about a note Elena had given her that morning and he had been listening the way he listened and then there was a natural pause and he said it the way you said things that did not require a particular moment.I got the contract confirmed today. He said. The new film. Starts in four months.Helena was standing at her kitchen counter with her notes from the day still open in the cream notebook.That is good. She said. Which one.He told her. It was a significant project. The kind that came to actors who had done the right work in the right rooms. She knew enough about the industry now to understand what it meant for him.Adrian. That is a real thing. She said.He made a sound that was not quite modesty and not quite agreement. Just the sound of a person receiving something they had been working toward for a long time.Where is it filming. S

Chapter Sixty Six Watching

Thomas found her at the water table between setups on Friday morning.He poured himself a cup and stood beside her and did not say anything for a moment. That was one of the things about Thomas. He did not fill silence just because it was there.Can I ask you something. He said.You can try. She said.Are you happy. He said. Not the work. You.Helena looked at him.Why are you asking me that. She said.Because I watch you work every day and you are extraordinary in there and then I watch you walk off the mark and something closes. He looked at her directly. I am just asking what is on the other side of the closing.Helena was quiet for a moment.I am building something. She said. I think that is the closest answer I have right now.Thomas nodded slowly.Is it enough. He said. Building something.She looked at the cup in her hand.Today it is. She said.He was quiet for a moment.What about tomorrow. He said.She looked at him. Ask me tomorrow. She said.He smiled at that. Not pushing

Chapter Sixty Seven Trying

Helena called Adrian on Saturday afternoon from her kitchen.She had been going over her Markov notes and found something she wanted to talk through and he was the person she called when she wanted to talk through things.He picked up on the second ring. Helena.I have a question about the second act. She said. The scene where she finds the letters. I keep thinking Elena wants something underneath the anger but I cannot find the word for it.Grief. He said. Not for the person. For the version of them she thought existed.Helena was quiet for a moment.Yes. She said. That is exactly it.It is always grief underneath the anger. He said. The anger is just louder.She wrote it in the notebook. The cream pages already filling with her handwriting.How is your film going. She said.Good. He said. Different from Jordan's set. Bigger. More moving pieces. But good.Do you miss the wall. She said.A pause. What wall. He said.The wall outside the warehouse. She said. Where we used to eat lunch.

Chapter Sixty Eight The Coast

Helena spent Saturday morning at home with her Markov script and her notebook and the particular quiet of a weekend that belonged entirely to herself.She had three scenes to prepare for Monday. All of them demanding. Elena had left notes from the previous week that Helena was still working through. Good notes. The kind that opened things up rather than closing them down.She made coffee and sat at the kitchen table with the notebook open and worked through the first scene slowly. Writing things down. Crossing things out. Writing them differently. The cream pages filling up the way they had been filling up since Adrian left the notebook outside her door.She thought about the phone call yesterday. About grief not for the person but for the version of them she thought existed. She wrote it in the margin of the second scene notes because it applied there too. Maybe more than the first scene.She sat with her coffee and her notes and the city outside the window doing its Saturday things

Chapter Sixty Nine The Water

Sunday morning came in grey and quiet.Damian was up before Camila. He made coffee from the small machine in the room and took it out to the terrace and stood at the railing and looked at the water.The sea was flat. No wind. Just grey water and grey sky and the sound of it moving against the rocks below.He had not slept well.He had lain in the dark thinking about the phone buzzing in his coat pocket on the cliff path. About the name on the screen he had not answered. About what it said about him that his first instinct had been to put it away before Camila saw it.He drank his coffee.Behind him the door opened.Camila came out with her own cup. She was in the hotel robe. Her hair down. She looked at the water and then at him.You were up early. She said.Could not sleep. He said.She stood beside him at the railing and did not ask why.They stood there for a while. The water below them moving slowly. The hotel behind them still quiet.It is beautiful here. She said.Yes. He said.

Chapter Seventy Paying Attention

Camila came home from the coast and did three things.She unpacked. She made coffee. And she called Damian into the kitchen and told him something about Helena.Not a lie. That was the thing about Camila's best moves. They were never lies.She had heard something. From someone in the industry. A concern being passed around quietly about Helena's state of mind going into the final stages of the Markov shoot. The pressure of the documentary alongside the film. Someone who had worked with Sione before saying he pushed his subjects hard. That the process was not always gentle.She told Damian this the way you told someone something you thought they should know. Warmly. Without agenda on the surface.I just thought you should know. She said. Given everything. I know you still care about how she is doing.Damian looked at her.Where did you hear that. He said.Someone at the platform. She said. It is probably nothing. I just did not want you to not know and then find out later that somethin

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