# THE SECRET LANGUAGE — Beat Sheet v2 *Supersedes Part 2 of screenplay-blueprint.md. Built on the Story Bible's character floor (SECRET-LANGUAGE-BIBLE.md), which governs wherever they conflict. This is the working document for the page-one rewrite — argue with the beats here, not with the pages later.* --- ## 0. Decisions locked (July 2026) 1. **Page-one rewrite.** Draft 1 (act1–act3 PDFs) is a salvage yard, not a foundation. Keep-list in §6. 2. **Title:** *The Secret Language* (working). 3. **POV architecture: the father is the audience's eyes.** See §1 — this is the biggest structural change from draft 1. 4. **The spiral's severity is conveyed by calibration, not depiction.** See §2. 5. Secret is **she** throughout (fix the pitch's logline). The flower-painting video is the signature spectacle; no piano. 6. **Names:** real names for the family (Mary, Ted, Lisa, Spencer, Izzy) and Dr. Sullivan; school friends and everyone else fictionalized. (This document says "Dad"/"Mom" for role clarity; the script will say TED and LISA.) 7. **No romance thread.** The film ends at the June 2024 graduation. --- ## 1. The POV architecture: The Watcher and the Watched The film has two poles, and they are the two poles of the real family: - **Mary** — the direct perceiver. What without why. The camera obeys Bible §8: it never narrates her interior, never cuts to a reaction shot of inspiration, never explains her. She is wordless where she is real and verbal only in talismans. - **Dad** — the modeler. Cerebral, systematizing, and *desperate with love* for a daughter he cannot read. He is not a narrator-device; he is the second protagonist. His arc is the film's second engine. **How it works mechanically (not literal POV):** Dad is not in every scene, and Mary-and-Secret scenes play alone as they must. But the film's *questions* are his questions. When the camera watches Mary do something inexplicable and refuses to explain it, the audience is standing where Dad stands. Key Mary scenes are staged with a watcher in them (a doorway, a kitchen window, the top of a creek bank) often enough that watching-without-understanding becomes the film's grammar. The audience is never smarter than the father; they learn to read Mary at exactly the pace he does. **Dad's arc (the second spine):** - **Act 1:** He reaches for her with the only tool he has — words, reasons, questions — and we watch, over and over, the reaching land as the burn. He does everything "right" and it makes everything worse. The hallway exchange (§3, beat 1.10) is his rock bottom as much as hers. - **Act 1 turn:** Saying yes to the dog is the family's first *conditions-change* instead of interrogation — though they don't have the words for what they're doing. - **Act 2:** The autism diagnosis is a grammar book for *him* as much as her. He starts to see. The viral numbers are legible to him (his language!) and beside the point — an irony he slowly gets. - **Act 2B:** The fight against the cancer is the one stretch where the two poles work in harness: he reads the data, she reads the dog. And she is ahead of his data every single time. - **Act 3:** The payoff. On the night the spiral threatens to return, he does not ask a question. He changes a condition. The thing her training philosophy has been telling him all along, finally performed. **Voiceover: none.** The watching does the work. (If the market later demands warmth, a single bracketing device could be added, but the spec should prove it doesn't need one.) **The two-diagnosis mirror now has a third reflection:** Mary's diagnosis (relief), Secret's diagnosis (devastation), and between them Dad's own quiet diagnosis of *himself* — the night he understands that the questions were the wound. --- ## 2. The spiral: severity by calibration Reality was self-harm *and* an eating disorder, and it was dire. The screen strategy: **the audience gauges depth by watching capable, loving adults run out of moves** — not by graphic depiction. Everyone understands the not-understood teenage girl; the film's job is to communicate *an order of magnitude worse* without showing what can't be shown. Instruments of calibration: - **The parents' escalating behavior** is the barometer: counselors tried and abandoned, the confrontation that backfires, Mom quietly clearing the bathroom of anything sharp while Mary watches (neither speaks), a doctor's visit about weight where the number is never said aloud — we read it on the parents' faces. - **The meals.** Mary is physical, not vanity-driven; the eating disorder plays as her body becoming a project that is failing. Plates rearranged, not eaten. Sleeves in summer. The scale that disappears from the bathroom. - **The rage.** Per the Bible, the spiral is not quiet depression — it is unbuffered terror plus rage, at full volume at home. Izzy through the wall. Things breaking. It should be frightening. - **The one true silence.** At the very bottom, the loud house goes quiet — and the silence is scarier than the shouting, because we've learned that loud is what Mary sounds like when she's alive. The parents' "we're at the end here" scene sits inside this silence. - **One restrained image** of the self-harm (the draft's brief forearm shot is roughly the right dose), never repeated, never lingered on. --- ## 3. Beat sheet Target: **100–110 pages.** Act 1 ≈ 28 · Act 2A ≈ 25 · Act 2B ≈ 27 · Act 3 ≈ 24. ### ACT ONE — "The Wrong Planet" (pp. 1–28) **1.1 — The creek (pp. 1–3).** The Bible §9 worked example, essentially as written: nine-year-old Mary, the crayfish caught before deciding to, Izzy, "It's gross" landing nowhere, "Look at it." Then pull up the bank: **Dad at the edge of the party, watching her down there** — the film's first image of its real grammar. Another parent beside him says something admiring ("She's fearless"). Dad: "Yeah." He has no better word. He never will. **1.2 — The party (pp. 3–5).** Mary rejoins on her own current. She is *popular* — not despite her strangeness but through confidence: she says "we're going to the creek" and kids follow, because when Mary is sure the sureness comes off her like heat. Seeded cost: two girls exchange a look; Mary clocks the look — the result, never the cause. **1.3 — Home is LOUD (pp. 5–8).** Dinner at full volume. All thoughts expressed as felt: delight, outrage, hunger, an argument that flashes and vanishes without residue. Spencer correcting facts, Izzy giggling, parents riding it like weather. This is the baseline the bottom will be measured against. Embedded: **the painting beat** — Mary painting at the kitchen table, no sketch, an unidentifiable detail becoming, at the last moment, *of course, exactly that.* Dad watches the whole thing. No reaction shot of inspiration; there is no inspiration, only the next true mark. **1.4 — The gift and its price (pp. 8–10).** Compact sequence, not a montage of triumphs: skating/soccer as perception-so-fast-it's-already-knowing; the piano beat (she reproduces a voicing no one taught her; Dad, a musician, stops in the doorway — *illegible*); and the cartwheel she cannot teach Izzy — she demonstrates the same perfect form twice, and cannot understand why seeing isn't doing. The gift and the deficit shown as one fact. **1.5 — TITLE: three years later. The rules change (pp. 10–14).** Middle school. Overnight, the social world becomes performance — poses, allegiances, "who's cuter, Jake or Ethan?" / "For what?" (keep). For a girl who only knows how to be real, a world made of pretending isn't hard — it's *empty*. Critical mechanic (Bible §2.5): she runs the same failing experiment again, louder — the move that made kids follow her at nine ("come to the creek") deployed at thirteen, landing as weird, and she watches herself fail in high resolution with the cause permanently locked. **1.6 — The feed (pp. 14–15).** 2012–13, social media arrives. Scrolling the curated lives like a naturalist studying a species that has stopped making sense. Her own last post: a fish she caught, unliked. The mirror scene: examining her face and body *clinically* — a physical person whose body has become a project that is failing. **1.7 — Home curdles (pp. 15–18).** The volume at home remains — but the register changes: rage, terror, self-loathing, all expressed as felt, because home is where the governor comes off. Izzy through the wall, covers pulled up. And the family reaches in with the one tool they have: **words.** *Why did you do that. What's going on. Help us understand.* Every question lands as the burn. Stage at least one full example so the audience learns the flinch: Dad delivers a genuinely loving, genuinely reasonable talk — and we watch her recoil as if struck, and we watch him not see it. **1.8 — Calibration beats (pp. 18–20).** The instruments from §2: the meals, the sleeves, the bathroom quietly cleared, the counselor abandoned ("she went twice and said it was pointless" — keep), the one restrained image. Spencer leaves for college; the tight family is fracturing. **1.9 — The hallway (p. 20).** The two sentences that can't meet, placed as the emotional floor of the act: > MARY: I just don't know what you want me to do. > DAD: I don't want you to do anything. I just want you to understand what you did. Then Dad alone in the hallway, replaying it, certain he said the loving thing. He did. That's the tragedy. **1.10 — The true silence (pp. 20–22).** The loud house goes quiet. The bare room (keep the draft's stripped-room scene — the projects gone). The stillest, scariest scene in the film: we just sit with her. Parents at the kitchen table at 2am: *"we're at the end here."* Nothing is working because everything they try is a question. **1.11 — The video (pp. 22–23).** A dog-training video, then another, then another. Per Bible rule 2: **no reaction shot of recognition** — no dawning-hope close-up. Just: she watches. And then, for the first time in months, she is off the bed. The audience infers; the camera refuses to explain. (Cut the draft's "she understands this / the structure of the problem" narration entirely.) **1.12 — The ask (pp. 23–25).** Rewritten from the binder-pitch. At breakfast: **"I need a dog."** No rehearsed speech, no cost breakdown. The parents respond with reasons; the reasons don't land on her and her certainty doesn't budge — it comes off her like heat, the first heat they've felt in a year. The campaign is not a spreadsheet: she is *already training* — hand signals practiced on nothing, on Izzy (who sits — the film's first laugh in twenty minutes, and it aches). The parents' night argument, kept: "It's not about the dog. You know that." / "I know. But what else are we doing that's working?" — the family, without the words for it, deciding to stop interrogating her interior and change her world instead. **1.13 — Oregon (pp. 25–27).** The minivan, the rain, the all-or-nothing weight (keep the draft's drive largely intact). The breeder scene, kept: the separate puppy crossing the pen to her, leaning in and staying. "Huh. She doesn't do that." **1.14 — Secret (pp. 27–28).** The drive home. "What's her name?" / "Secret." / "Why?" — **no answer.** Not coy; there is no why to give. The parents' look: *what was that about?* Home, dusk, the lawn, breath. END OF ACT ONE. ### ACT TWO A — "The Reprieve" (pp. 28–53) **2.1 — The first reprieve (pp. 28–31).** Training begins hard: chaos, frustration, a girl still full of rage and a puppy who does everything wrong. Then the load-bearing beat, built from Bible §3: Secret does a wrong *what* — destroys something, fails, makes a mess — and Mary braces (we know the flinch by now)... **and no question comes.** The dog just looks at her. No *why*. The absence of interrogation, staged so the audience feels the missing weight. Reprieve, not softness. Never explained. **2.2 — Two animals (pp. 31–34).** The training rhythm — repetition, small failure, small success — but *systemless*: no charts, no protocol. She reads the dog's body in real time and adjusts before thought; it looks like magic because the middle is missing. **Two-poles comedy:** Dad, trying to help, prints a positive-reinforcement schedule from the internet. The dog sits for Mary and not for the schedule. He watches from the kitchen window — she is doing something he cannot parse, and it is *working*, and no one can tell him why. **2.3 — The ritual (p. 34).** Every night, Mary and Secret go out together. The family sees. They are afraid to name it in case naming it breaks it. (Keep.) **2.4 — The good loud (pp. 35–36).** Volume returns to the house — and it's the old volume, the alive kind. Dinner where Mary talks about Secret in a torrent; hold on the parents *hearing* it (the draft's "most consecutive sentences in two years" beat, played on their faces instead of narrated). **2.5 — Perfect everywhere (pp. 36–38).** "If you're going to come everywhere with me, you have to be perfect everywhere." (Keep verbatim.) Restaurants, stores, buses. The parallel process — the dog learning the human world, the girl re-entering it — shown, never stated. **2.6 — The account (pp. 38–41).** @my_aussie_gal. First posts, first hundreds of strangers who care about what she cares about. The Irish dance video — her body doing what it does best, and Secret moving with her like a shared nervous system (keep that image). It goes viral via the Irish dance channel; an old friend texts the old group: *"Mary is going viral!"* Character beat, not fame beat: the girls whose looks she could never decode are now sending a result she can read — warmth. The why is still locked. The warmth is real anyway. **2.7 — First talisman (p. 41).** Somewhere public — a commenter, a stranger at a park — Mary produces a sentence of the training philosophy ("don't ask them to do something unless you know they'll succeed"), with the faint quality of recitation: a produced object, set down to end a reaction. Establish the device; it pays off for the rest of the film. **2.8 — The word (pp. 42–46).** Mary reads about autism (the article). No lightning-bolt close-up — she just reads, and reads it again, the way she watched the training video. UW Medicine; the diagnosis lands as **relief and good news**: theory of mind delivered from outside, as language. "I'm not just bad at being a person" — placed here, meaning: *bad was never a thing I could be.* **Dad's half:** that night, Dad up at 2am reading everything — and the grammar book is landing on *him.* We hold on his face as years of scenes reorganize behind it (no flashbacks — trust the actor). He closes the laptop. Stands in her doorway. Girl and dog asleep. He doesn't wake her, doesn't say anything. First time in the film he doesn't reach for words. **2.9 — Empty classrooms (pp. 46–49).** Running Start. Mary training Secret in empty WCC classrooms at off-hours, then populated ones, then her own first class. Re-entry on her own terms, with her partner. Hard-won, ongoing, unnarrated. **2.10 — The flower (pp. 49–51).** The signature spectacle: Secret painting a flower, brush in mouth, petal by impossible petal, no plan — the bloom arriving the way Mary's paintings arrive, coherence accumulating until *of course.* One unbroken, present-tense sequence. This is the trailer, and it is also the thesis in one image: two creatures with no middle, making something that looks like magic from outside. **2.11 — Midpoint: the explosion (pp. 51–53).** Lil Wayne. 100 million views. SportsCenter. Influencer offers pouring in — and Mary doesn't care about any of it. **Dad is the one who understands the numbers** (his native language, arriving in service of something illegible to him): comedy and vertigo as he tries to explain what 100 million means. Mary: Secret needs a bath. The worry-thread the audience carries out of the midpoint: all of this — the re-entry, the joy, the whole rebuilt girl — is standing on one dog. ### ACT TWO B — "The Fight" (pp. 53–80) **2.12 — Step one (pp. 53–55).** WCC graduation as Covid arrives (light touch). The "step one / step two" device — **reassigned to Dad** (it was always modeler language): he's the one who frames her life as stages; she just does the next true thing. **2.13 — The letter (pp. 55–58).** UW: prerequisites, application, waitlist. The appeal letter: Dad offers to help structure it, and his structured draft is dead on the page; hers is unperformed and alive — the letter works *because* it can't pretend. She gets in. (Keep the kitchen phone-call beat.) **2.14 — Huskies (pp. 58–61).** Fall 2021. Mom comes for the first quarter — **Mom's conditions-change**, name it in staging not dialogue. The apartment: a small island of order. Japanese — acquired *by ear*, the way she hears ninth chords: sound-pattern perception, not grammar drills; her professor is faintly baffled (illegible competence, one more time, now in a new domain). **2.15 — The limp (pp. 61–63).** It starts small. Everyone reaches for benign whys — "she turned an ankle" — the modelers modeling. **Mary knows first**, before any test, because she reads the body. Quiet turn; no music cue; the audience learns it the way the family does: by watching Mary go still. **2.16 — The other diagnosis (pp. 63–66).** Bloodwork. Leukemia. Staged as the structural mirror of 2.8 — same shape of scene, opposite valence. Mary's delivery to the family, kept: "It's leukemia. The bloodwork is — it's bad." Then, immediately: "I'm pulling out of school. I'm coming home." No hedging, no processing on camera. *"I can't imagine what it will be like when that dog dies"* — if used, it was planted long before, in the good years, said lightly. **2.17 — The harness (pp. 66–72).** The one stretch where the two poles pull together. Dr. Sullivan — one of two vets in the country doing the transplant — *in Bellingham*, her home town. Ted's Fred Hutch thread, **leaned into**: thirty years ago he was a marrow donor for his brother Dan — one of maybe two survivors out of twenty, alive and well ever since. The father has literal skin in this exact medicine, *and he has watched it work.* For once the systematizing is useful: **Ted gets the bloodwork spreadsheet** (it was Mary's in draft 1 — systematizer error). Izzy builds the GoFundMe; tens of thousands of the strangers Mary collected show up for her. And here the film stages **the false hope as a modeler's artifact.** The family — and the audience with them — assemble the story: the one vet in her hometown, the father who has seen this exact cure save his own brother, the money arriving overnight, the universe lining up. It felt exactly like that at the time, and the film should let it feel like that. But it's a narrative — a forecast, a why-shaped hope — and **Mary doesn't live in it for a second.** Not pessimism; she simply reads the dog, today, and the dog is worse. The audience gets to feel the pull of the story and then feel the story fail — because stories about the future were never the language the film's truth lives in. Real-life stakes throughout: the hope *and* the biology pressing against it. **2.18 — Ahead of the data (pp. 72–76).** Months compressed: chemo, daily labs, the numbers in Dad's spreadsheet — and Mary reading the dog and being ahead of the numbers every time. She sees the decline before the platelets say so, and the horror is that she is never wrong. One week before the LA radiation trip. And then she sees the thing underneath: **Secret is holding on. For her.** Actively, deliberately (keep the draft's "the way a climber holds a rope"). **2.19 — "I will be okay" (pp. 76–78).** Night. The bed. Just the two of them — no watcher, for once; some things the father never sees, and the audience earns the room the family doesn't enter. She says the four words. **Camera on Secret's face when they land** (keep from blueprint). No explanation before, during, or after — the entire film has been teaching the audience to read this gesture, and the reading is theirs to do. The relief in the dog is visible. That's all. **2.20 — Morning (pp. 78–80).** Keep the draft's morning nearly verbatim: "Her hand is still on Secret's ribs. They aren't rising." Then the house — and the **silence**, the same silence from 1.10, and the parents outside her door listening to nothing, and the act's exit line is the Bible's: not *she's grieving* but *the terror is going to return.* END OF ACT TWO. ### ACT THREE — "The Water Is the Same" (pp. 80–104) **3.1 — Bracing (pp. 80–84).** The whole family — and the audience — waiting to see if she goes back down. She works instead: the foundation built from the leftover GoFundMe money, the summer job at Dr. Sullivan's clinic. "I like having somewhere to be." (Keep.) But the evenings are formless, and we've seen where formless leads. **3.2 — The night he doesn't ask (pp. 84–85).** The wobble: one night that looks exactly like the beginning of the old descent — the floor, the stillness, the bare-room echo. Dad at the door. Eight years ago he asked *why*; the question was the wound. **This time he doesn't ask anything. He changes the condition:** comes in, sits down next to her on the floor, and stays. Silence, but the other kind. This is his arc's payoff and the training ethic performed by the man it was always secretly addressed to. Maximum restraint; no dialogue if it can survive without any. *(Confirmed by Ted: invented, but rings true — the interior of the scene is both the fear of the spiral returning AND a newfound trust that Mary would figure out what she needed. His job was to support. Both must be present in the playing: he sits down because he's afraid, and he stays quiet because he trusts.)* **3.3 — The dream (pp. 85–87).** Rewritten **wordless.** Healthy Secret, the waterfront trail, magic hour. No thesis speech, no "that's what makes you work" (cut — it violates both the Bible and the eval suite). The dream's entire content: Secret walks ahead — *not away, ahead* (keep that one image from draft 1). Mary wakes. Something has shifted. She explains nothing. At breakfast: **"I'm going to Utah."** The certainty like heat — the exact rhyme of "I need a dog," and this time the parents just nod. **3.4 — Promise (pp. 87–90).** The breeder's yard. Keep draft 1's best scene bones: Mary sits, doesn't reach; one puppy crosses to her; for one second she sees Secret — and then she doesn't, and **she doesn't try to erase the difference.** She names her Promise. "Why Promise?" — and this time maybe the smallest answer, or none; the audience already knows. **3.5 — Not a reset (pp. 90–94).** Return to UW with Promise — a continuation, not a replacement. Anti-tidiness is the rule here: Promise is *not* Secret 2.0 — different personality, imperfect, still learning; some things are harder; a beat where Promise fails at something Secret owned, and Mary handles the failure the way Secret taught her the world could: no burn, no why. The skills didn't die with the dog. **3.6 — Graduation (pp. 94–98).** June 2024, Husky Stadium. Promise walks the stage with her. The cap: **"WE DID IT, SECRET."** Played inside the determinist reframe: not a victory lap but a message — a kept promise, addressed to the one who changed her conditions. The reveal lands through the family in the stands finding the cap one by one — and we hold longest on **Dad**, the one person in the stadium who now understands exactly what "did it" means, and what it doesn't. **3.7 — The creek (pp. 98–104 end).** Rhyme with the opening — now a family hike on the familiar trail (at minimum Mary and Ted; ideally Lisa and Izzy up the trail, unhurried). Mary takes Promise down the bank **to teach her to swim** — the same bank, the same water the crayfish came out of twenty years ago, a new dog learning the creek. Ted watches from the top of the bank: the film's first image, restaged — but the watching has pride in it now instead of bafflement, and this time he speaks. > TED: How's she doing? > MARY: She's doing great, Dad. Neither of them is talking about the dog, and neither of them says so. It is the healed inversion of the hallway — a question with no *why* in it, a question she can answer natively — and the answer is the promise, kept, out loud, addressed to the other person who needed to hear it. The wave/water metaphor stays unspoken (it belongs to the book; the film earns it as image: the creek, still running). Then they all walk off down the trail together. FADE OUT. --- ## 4. Threads to track across acts - **Izzy:** sidekick → terrified witness through the wall → the GoFundMe (her act of agency) → adult at the graduation. She is the sibling-scale version of the audience's arc. - **Mom:** the practical conditions-changer all along (the bathroom, the first quarter in Seattle) — her competence is quieter than Dad's questions and lands better; the film notices this even if Dad is slow to. - **Spencer:** the pure modeler, gone early; one phone-call beat in Act 2B where logic-as-comfort fails at long distance — the family pattern, miniaturized. - **Talismans:** at least three deployments (2.7, the diagnosis aftermath, one in Act 3), each with the faint recitation quality; the audience should start recognizing the device. - **The flinch:** taught in 1.7, echoed at 2.1 (its first absence), gone by Act 3. The audience should be able to track Mary's safety by whether the flinch appears. - **Silence vs. loud:** loud = alive (1.3), silence = danger (1.10, 2.20), and the third kind — chosen, companionable silence (3.2) — as the resolution of the motif. - **The two questions:** "I just want you to understand what you did" (1.9) → "How's she doing?" (3.7). The film's entire argument is the distance between those two questions — the same father, the same daughter, the same creek bank, and a question that has learned to lose its *why*. ## 5. Eval gates (run per act before Ted reads) 1. Bible §8, all ten rules — especially: no cognition-narration, no inspiration reaction-shots, wordless-where-real, home-is-loud. 2. Story-factory checks: no narrator editorializing through character (the Act 3 dream is the standing cautionary example), let discomfort sit, asymmetric attention, distinct voices (Izzy ≠ Mom ≠ Dad ≠ the girls), no tidiness bias. 3. POV check (new): is there any moment where the audience knows Mary's why before Dad could? If yes, cut or restage. 4. Calibration check (new): is the spiral's severity carried by adult desperation and absence, not depiction? ## 6. Salvage list from draft 1 (carry forward, with edits) - Breeder scene + "Huh. She doesn't do that." (act1) - Parents' argument: "It's not about the dog." / "What else are we doing that's working?" (act1) - "If you're going to come everywhere with me, you have to be perfect everywhere." (2A) - Irish dance: "moving together like they share a nervous system." (2A) - Diagnosis relief scene bones; "Everything makes sense now." (2A) - "It's leukemia. The bloodwork is — it's bad." + immediate pivot home. (2B) - "Holding on... the way a climber holds a rope." (2B) - "I will be okay" scene shape + camera-on-Secret. (2B) - "Her hand is still on Secret's ribs. They aren't rising." (2B) - "I like having somewhere to be." (act3) - Dream image: "Not away. Ahead." (act3 — image only; all dialogue cut) - Promise meeting: "she doesn't try to erase it." (act3) - Graduation cap reveal staging. (act3) - **Reassign:** "Step one. / Step two." → Dad. - **Cut:** binder pitch, rehearsed breakfast speech, "looks like code / building a system / engineering her own survival" narration, Mary's bloodwork spreadsheet (→ Dad), the dream's thesis speech, "we did it" as triumph framing. ## 7. Resolved (Ted, July 2026) 1. **Fred Hutch / Dan:** lean in. Dan was one of maybe two survivors out of twenty and is public about it. The universe-lining-up feeling was real at the time — stage the false hope fully, and stage it as antithetical to Mary (folded into 2.17). 2. **Scene 3.2:** stands. Didn't happen literally this way, but rings true — fear of the spiral plus newfound trust that Mary would figure out what she needed; his job was to support (gloss folded into the beat). 3. **"I will be okay" stays between Mary and Secret.** The family never learns it in-film; the audience alone has it. 4. **Romance excluded.** Confirmed. 5. **Names:** real for family and Dr. Sullivan; everyone else fictional. Confirmed. 6. **New ending from Ted:** the family hike / Promise learning to swim / "How's she doing?" — "She's doing great, Dad." (folded into 3.7). ## 8. Status Beat sheet under family review (Ted second read, Lisa reading). Act One draft 2 written and approved in structure; Act 2A drafting. **Standing revision notes:** 1. *(Ted, on Act One draft 2)* The early stretch leans on many short montage-like scenes; hard to picture how they're shown and what the transitions are. Tabled for the Act One revision pass — candidate fixes: merge fragments into fewer scenes that breathe, let seasons/light and (in Act 2) Secret's visible growth carry time instead of cuts. Apply the lesson prospectively from Act 2A onward.