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wonderful too if you didn’t scare me half to death!
    Her mother started to go on and on about the promotion.
    â€œMom, I really can’t talk right now. We’re doing a night shoot, and I have to get back to the set.”
    â€œI just wanted to give you the good news and ask if you got my e-mail,” her mother said.
    The e-mail sat unread in her in-box, but there was a good chance it had to do either with her brother’s great accomplishments or with MS. Since her mother had chosen to tell her about James’s promotion on the phone, that left option number two. “The one about the MS health advice?”
    â€œYes.”
    Bingo. Jill halfheartedly listened to her mother’s monologue about acupuncture, bee sting venom, and pH balance, all of which she was supposed to try out. Shaking her head, she thumped the steering wheel with her free hand. Since she’d finally told her parents about the MS last year, she’d stopped being their daughter and started being the family patient. Her mother hadn’t even asked how the shooting of Shaken to the Core was going.
    â€œMom, I need to go,” she said when her mother started talking about some aloe vera drink. She hung up, threw the phone onto the passenger seat, and closed her eyes for a moment.

    When Crash started to shiver in the cool night air, she slipped her leather jacket over her costume, not caring how ridiculous it might look.
    It seemed to take forever until the cameras and the rest of the equipment had been set up. Why was it that everything always seemed to take twice as long on night shoots?
    Spotlights cut through the darkness, illuminating a sea of tents that, in the movie, housed the injured and sick after the hospital had burned down.
    When her colleague who would play the looter breaking into the makeshift hospital arrived, she went over the fight choreography with him.
    After two run-throughs, both she and Ben were satisfied that all would go smoothly.
    â€œOkay, let’s get this over with so we can finally go home and get some sleep,” Ben said. He looked around. “Where’s Jill?”
    Crash peered around too but couldn’t locate her anywhere. Come to think of it, she hadn’t seen her for the last half hour.
    â€œI think she headed to her car to get a jacket,” one of the PAs said.
    Crash looked over to the parking lot, but everything was pitch-dark over there. A hint of worry skittered down her spine. Why was it taking Jill so long to get her jacket?
    Ben let out a sigh. “Can someone go and get her? We’re losing time here, people!”
    â€œI’ll go,” Crash said before anyone else could volunteer. Maybe this would give her the opportunity to apologize again.
    In the last two days, she’d had a lot of time to watch Jill while she waited for her next stunt. It hadn’t taken her long to figure out that Jill was not the difficult diva she’d first thought her to be. Even after half a dozen takes, Jill was always ready to repeat a shot as often as it took to get it right. She never complained, and she never treated any member of the crew with disrespect.
    Crash jogged toward the parking lot. Once she’d left the circle of light on the set, she couldn’t see much.
    Voices drifted over from the edge of the parking lot. When her eyes adjusted to the near darkness, she could make out two members of the sound crew who’d wandered off for a smoke.
    Crash continued on her way. She’d seen Jill arrive in a cute Beetle convertible this morning, and she tried to remember where Jill had parked it.
    Finally, she made out the Beetle across the parking lot. Gravel crunched under her ankle-high costume boots as she strode over.
    Someone was sitting in the car.
    Crash bent and peered through the window.
    Jill sat behind the wheel, her head leaned back and her eyes closed. She was wearing the same historic underwear that Crash had on, but she looked much