And tonight he’s driving her home from a production that just made her feel like a liability.
I start moving before I realize I’ve made a decision, grabbing my jacket from the chair by the door.
“Adrian.” Bash is on his feet too, watching me. “Where—“
“I need to leave,” I say. “I need to get out of this trailer.”
“Okay.” He moves toward his own jacket without drama. “Then we leave.”
“I’m not going to the director—“
“I know.” He pulls the jacket on. “We’re going home.”
He says it like it’s obvious. Like there’s never been any other version of the answer. And he’s right, there hasn’t been.
“She’s waiting,” Bash says. His tone has shifted into something determined now, the contained anger still present but organized around a single point. “She asked us not to fight for her in the way that would cost her something. That doesn’t mean we stand here talking about it. It means we go home and be there for her.That’s what she actually needs right now. Not this.” He nods toward the space we’ve been occupying for the last few minutes.
I stop at the door, and he stops beside me, and for a second we’re both just standing there, the anger still sitting unresolved in my chest.
“She already feels like home,” I say.
Bash looks at me for a beat. “Yeah,” he says. “She does.”
He pushes the door open. Cool evening air rushes into the trailer, carrying the familiar scent of the lot. The production is still running without her.
He steps through first, and I follow.
The anger is still there, burning steadily beneath everything else. But Maya is already at the house waiting for us, and getting back to her matters more than anything happening here.
Chapter 26
Maya
The engine is off. I don’t remember Elias turning it off, but it’s quiet now, just the faint tick of cooling metal and the sound of my own breathing in the small space. We are parked in front of Adrian and Elias’s house, waiting for them. My hands are sitting in my lap, and I haven’t moved them in a while. I keep replaying the director’s voice. He wasn’t trying to be cruel. That’s the part I can’t seem to move past. He wasn’t trying to be cruel, and yet it still didn’t matter because the outcome was the same.
Your situation.He called it. Like I was a variable that had become inconvenient. Like months of my work on that production meant nothing.
Elias hasn’t spoken since we parked. He’s sitting silently beside me. Giving me space to process. The cool stone-and-dark-musk smell of him fills the car in a way that doesn’t help calm me as much as it usually does, which tells me something about how far past my limit I actually am right now.
I pull out my phone on autopilot. My hands shake slightly as I unlock my phone and call the person I have for years when shit hits the fan. Getting dismissed from my dream job definitely qualifies.
Nadia picks up on the second ring.
“Nadia”, my voice breaks on her name.
“Hey, I was just thinking about you, there’s this—“ She stops. A beat of silence, the kind that comes from reading a voice in half a second. “What happened?”
I open my mouth to try to speak again and close it again.
Beside me, Elias reads whatever’s on my face and opens the driver’s door without a word. He steps out into the evening air, pulling it almost fully shut behind him. Through the windshield, I can see him move to the front of the car and stop there, hands in his pockets, facing away toward the street. Far enough that my voice won’t carry. Close enough that I can still see him.
“Maya.” Nadia’s voice comes through the phone with a firm edge. “Talk to me.”
So I do.
I tell her about the meeting. The way the director sat across from me like someone preparing for a difficult conversation and delivered a speech that sounded rehearsed from beginning to end. I tell her about “the best interests of everyone involved,” how my responsibilities are being redistributed because there’s enough “material to complete the film,” and how I was told to rest, recover, and come back to future projects. I tell her how I held my composure through the meeting and as I left the building.
The silence on her end is the particular kind that means she’s furious. I’ve known Nadia long enough to know the difference between her thinking silences and her angry ones. This is the second kind.
