“Good,” the trainer said in a bored voice. “Ready to hit the treadmill?”
Even though she felt ready to pass out and sleep for twelve hours, Jasmine only grabbed her water bottle and towel and smiled bigger. “Let’s do it.”
She’d spent the day before resting and prepping for today’s fitness test as much as possible. She’d made sure to not push herself in her workouts over the last week, and she’d gone to bed early last night after a visit with her new physical therapist.
She was doing everything she could to keep herself functioning. She also knew that even everything might not be enough.
The treadmill was the last station, and she got on it and tried to ignore the thin ache threading up through her lower back. She thought about the character Taylor Hartner. She thought about what it would feel like to stand on a set in that costume andknow the part was hers. She thought about her mother’s voice on the phone and ran toward it like it was a finish line she could actually see.
When it was over, the trainer made notes on his clipboard and said he’d pass his findings to the production doctor, who would be in touch. His face gave away nothing. He had the practiced blankness of someone who’d learned that hope was not his department.
Jasmine thanked him and walked to her car on legs that felt weak from exertion.
In the driver’s seat, she sat with the air conditioning running, her head tipped back, and her eyes closed. She’d done it. She’d gotten through all of it. Whether she’d done enough, whether her body had given them what they were looking for or whether the doctor’s report would find something in the numbers that she couldn’t charm her way past, that she didn’t know. That part was out of her hands now, which was either a relief or the most terrifying thing she’d encountered all week.
She thought about calling her mom, but she only picked up the phone and put it back down. She didn’t want to say the words out loud yet, didn’t want to give the hope weight before she knew whether it was going to hold. Her mom would hear everything in her voice. The wanting, the fear underneath it, and she would spend the rest of the day worrying, and Jasmine had given her enough to worry about lately.
Instead, she sat in the quiet of the car a little longer, letting her heart rate come down, letting the post-exertion shakiness move through her hands and out the other side. Outside the windshield, the studio lot hummed with its usual Thursday afternoon energy. A golf cart puttered past. Two crew memberscrossed in front of her, deep in conversation, neither of them looking up. The ordinary machinery of it, the working world turning on its axis like nothing significant had just happened in that gym, settled something in her. Whatever the answer was, it would come when it came. In the meantime, she had a life to get back to.
She drove back to Nate’s house on autopilot, the city sliding past her in the flat afternoon light. By the time she turned up the long driveway, her whole body was complaining in full, and she was calculating exactly how quickly she could get out of her workout clothes and into the bath when she noticed Nate’s car parked outside the garage.
He was home early. She hadn’t expected that.
In fact, he’d been spending more time at the house than she’d expected he would.
She found him in the kitchen, jacket off, sleeves rolled, a coffee in one hand and his laptop open on the island. He looked up when she came in and took in her appearance. The gym bag, the ponytail, her face that probably looked exhausted.
“How’d it go?” he asked.
“Fine,” she said, which was what she said about everything she wasn’t sure about yet. She dropped her bag by the door and went to the fridge for water.
“You look like you ran a marathon.”
“I basically did.” She closed the fridge and leaned against the counter.
He looked like he had something to say about that and decided against it, which she was grateful for. He didn’t know anythingabout her fibromyalgia diagnosis, and she’d done her best to not let her symptoms show. But did he suspect something wasn’t right with her health?
The thought scared her. If Nate suspected something, it meant other people would as well.
She pushed off the counter and was heading for her wing when her phone rang.
Marco.
She stopped walking, her pulse picking up.
Nate glanced up from his laptop.
She answered. “Hey, Marco.”
“Sit down,” he said, and she could hear it in his voice before the next word came, the brightness he tried to tamp down and never quite managed. “Are you sitting down?”
“Tell me.” Her voice came out barely above a whisper.
“It’s yours, sweetheart. They called just now. Taylor Hartner is yours.”
The sound that came out of her was embarrassing. Half laugh, half something that threatened to become tears. She put her hand over her mouth and soaked it all in.
Marco was talking, saying words about contracts and dates and the director wanting to call personally, and she heard all of it from a long way away because the rest of her was busy with the enormous, flooding relief of it. The months of doctors and tests and quiet dread. The fitness test she’d just dragged her aching body through. The thing she’d wanted so badly that she hadn’tlet herself say it out loud. All of it releasing at once, like a fist that had been clenched for a very long time finally opening.
