But in that silence, Clara drew on everything. She drew on the memory of her own children leaving for college. She drew on the thirty years she had spent navigating a male-dominated industry that tried to put an expiration date on her talent. She drew on the quiet, fierce power that comes only when a woman stops asking for permission to take up space.

Clara stood up, smoothing the linen of her character’s trousers. She didn’t check the mirror. She knew what was there.

Clara walked back to her trailer in the fading light. She looked at her reflection in the window of the grip truck. The lighting was terrible, the shadows deep. She looked exactly like a fifty-eight-year-old woman who had just done a magnificent day's work.