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tradition. The only way to calm his nerves—or at least go unconscious before morning. He could write the script and raise the money, but the pressure of directing never hit until the night before, robbing him of sleep.
    He shouldered a new black backpack and trudged across the lot, rubbing his forehead to ease the pounding. His tongue felt like new-laid asphalt. Dawn broke as he approached the set of the hero Blake’s childhood home, an enormous house with bay win-dows and a sun porch. Adrenaline spiked through his veins. His set. He had daydreamed this house, drawn it on cocktail napkins, seen the blueprints, and here it was.
    The porch stairs creaked as the screen door slammed behind him. Inside, the set was a mixture of real and sham. Tiny accuracies abounded: antique glass doorknobs and yellowed wall-paper, so that when he lifted a picture from the wall it exposed a square of brighter pattern underneath. But closet doors opened onto blank walls, and the ceilings and walls were breakaway. Dolly tracks for the camera snaked across the floor.
    In the dining room, he took out his sketchpad and reclined in the window seat as the sunrise warmed his back. Streaks of light began their incremental slide down the rose-patterned wallpaper on the opposite side of the room. Just like the first day of school: waxed floorboards, a backpack full of new sketchpads and note -books. The sigh of air moving in an empty room, the whisper of anticipation in his ears.
    A surge of vertigo, cold as saltwater, washed through him. Today he began directing a Hollywood feature. He knew the odds; for every thousand budding directors in film school, maybe two would work on their own projects. He also knew that he would have withered and died if he had had to go back home to Skagway a failure. To clerk in a shop selling Gold Rush mugs and Soapy Smith T-shirts to cruise ship tourists.
    Here. The first flashback sequence would be shot here. Version one would be from the hero’s point of view: his parents presiding over Sunday dinner while everything—from the roast chicken to the dining room chairs to his parents themselves, bloomed into flame—as his mother said grace and his father passed the potatoes. Version two would be shot first: the hero, haloed by the blaze, sitting at an empty table.
    Simon took a swig of bottled water. His storyboard sketch of a man seated in a burning room turned to a mush of lines under his pencil. The paper clung to his spread fingers and crumpled in his palm as he ripped it free of the pad. He stood and paced.
    Yes, do the first take in a wide shot, then shoot coverage against Walls A and B to save time on the lighting setups and set changes. Basic economy, no reason to change that habit, even with the huge below-the-line budget granted for this film. In a few days, crew would replace the windows of this room with sheets of clear rock candy, so when the stunt man was blown through them in the dream sequence, he would not be hurt. Simon had changed the script so that the house would be destroyed in an explosion, and he planned to not film one second more than necessary. Then Fran and Paul could not make him reshoot any flashback scenes—nor could they rework his film during editing.
    Paul the associate producer had turned out to be Nadia’s friend from the film festival party. Off on the wrong foot with that relationship. But only one thing mattered now.
    After six months of preproduction, it was day one of filming.
    Not just filming— shooting .
    Shooting had its own rhythm. The hot wash of it, the raw sting of emotion and whirl of ideas rising, after months of planning. Preparation, negotiations, contracts, rights. The schedule and call sheets started the flow, the suck and pulse that drew out everything he had. The living stuff of the story would materialize as actors, prop masters, lighting technicians. If he could create the right environment, when he invoked Julia, she would appear. Not just to him but to