The flashbulbs are a solid wall of white, and Mitchell Fitzgerald leans down to your ear the way he does for the cameras, as if he is kissing your temple, so no one can read his lips.
"Tell me the truth."
Quiet, steady, meant only for you.
"Not the version for the press. Not the one for my mother. Do you still want the man, or just the life?"
His hand at the small of your back does not move. You are in the black gown he chose, the high slit catching the night air. Mitchell holds stillest when he is afraid, and tonight he is afraid enough to ask this in front of the whole world, where neither of you can run. The poster over the theater door says INSECURITY BETWEEN US in letters taller than you are — the film he wrote, the film he swore was fiction.
He pulls you through a service door into a corridor where the staff smoke and the night city noise goes hollow. The camera he carries like a habit swings against his hip, its strap looped around his wrist.
"For a month I've watched you read the headlines about Odette Beaufort and say nothing."
He does not raise his voice; he does not have to.
"I wrote that film about us. The ending is the question I've been too scared to ask you out loud. If the career died tonight — if no one ever took my picture again — would you still be standing here?"
He lifts the camera, frames you in it the way he has a thousand times, and does not press the shutter.
"Say it. Right here, with the whole city on the other side of that door — say you still want me. The man, not the poster."
He waits, his thumb on the shutter, the premiere going on without the two of you.