The final days of production. The routine I’ve built. The certainty that work was the one place nobody saw anything except my competence.
Maya-the-production-coordinator. Steady. Reliable. Safe inside the role she worked so hard to earn.
It’s supposedly not gone. James said I’d be welcomed back for future productions. That the door is open.
But something fundamental has shifted. The career I love now has conditions it didn’t have two weeks ago, and the weight of that conditional acceptance sits cold in my stomach as the city passes outside the window.
Elias drives, letting the silence settle between us. He doesn’t try to fill it with platitudes or empty reassurances. Instead, he keeps one hand on the wheel and the other resting on the center console, close enough that I could reach for it if I wanted to.
I don’t. Not yet.
“This production doesn’t define your future,” he says after a while. His voice is quiet. “None of this changes your talent. Your career isn’t over because one director made a call he thought was protective.”
I nod. Don’t trust myself to speak.
“You’re good at what you do. That doesn’t change because your body is changing. Anyone who can’t see that isn’t worth working for anyway.”
The simplicity of the statement cuts through the noise in my head. It’s not a grand reassurance or a dramatic promise, justa fact delivered in Elias’s particular way: clean, precise, and without wasted words.
I turn toward the window and watch the city slide past—intersections, storefronts, the landscape of a place I’ve lived in long enough to stop noticing.
The grief is still there. The hurt is still there.
But beneath it, another realization takes shape.
When everything fell apart, I didn't ask Elias to take me home.
I asked to go to them.
Not my apartment. Not Nadia’s. Not anywhere neutral.
Their house.
I wanted to be where they were. With them. Surrounded by amber and cedar and bergamot and stone, the familiar combination of scents that has become, against every rational argument I’ve made to myself, the place I feel safest.
Chapter 25
Adrian
The call drops.
I still have the phone pressed flat against my palm, screen already dark. The trailer hums around me. The AC unit near the door pushes recycled air through the small space, and somewhere outside, I can hear a dolly being moved across the lot, the familiar scrape and roll of production still running without her.
Bash hasn’t moved. He’s across the narrow room with one arm resting on the back of the chair, watching me. Not saying anything yet. Giving me exactly two seconds to process before he decides whether to let me have more.
I put the phone down on the table without looking at where it lands. “They had no right.”
Bash exhales heavily through his nose. His way of acknowledging that he’s heard my words.
“She solved the prop continuity issue this morning before eight o’clock,” I say. “Two days ago, she caught a scheduling overlap that would have cost us four hours of setup time, and she caught it in a thirty-second scan of the call sheet. She’s been running three problems at once all week while her body is doing things that would have most people flat on their backs, and they called it asituation.” I hear how even my voice still sounds, and that makes it worse somehow. “They called ither situation. And theywere kind about it, apparently. Very kind. While they threw her out.”
“I know,” Bash says.
“She asked us not to intervene,” I say. “But what if she only asked that because she was overwhelmed? Because she was still processing and she didn’t want to make more of a scene in the moment? That’s not the same as her actually wanting us to stand back and let this happen.”
“Adrian.” Bash’s voice is flat. It’s the tone he uses when he needs me to stop and actually hear what he’s saying. “Walk me through what happens if we go to the director tonight.”
I don’t answer.
