“What if I ruin us?” she asked.

Bhoomika had always been good at playing parts. On stage, she was a chameleon—the wronged wife, the starry-eyed lover, the scheming seductress. But off stage, in the messy, unscripted reality of her own life, she felt like an actress who had forgotten her lines.

“I stopped acting,” she said.

“What is?”

“This. You. Me. I don’t do real anymore. Real gets rewritten. Real gets cancelled.”

“You play pain like it’s a familiar room,” he said one night after rehearsal, his voice soft.