Franz had packed and unpacked the same suitcase twice before settling on what actually needed to go, a ritual that had less to do with clothes than with delaying the moment he zipped it shut for good. Two weeks. He'd said the number to himself so many times over the past few days that it had started to sound made up, a distance too large to actually measure against a house full of people who needed him at breakfast.
He hadn't left for this long since the day they'd found out Arianne was pregnant with Lexx, the day he'd stepped back from acting without a second thought about it. Not for a location scout, not for a single meeting, nothing that pulled him out of the house overnight more than once or twice since. This was different. Two weeks of script readings and pre-production and a director who wanted him physically present for decisions Franz used to make from behind a phone, and no version of packing a suitcase made that easier to accept.
