Page 36 of Specters & Spotlights

Just… a familiar, unpleasant recognition of the pattern.

He’d watched Lark break hearts before. Quietly, efficiently. Sometimes with a smile. Sometimes without one. Cast members, crew members—people who were otherwise sensible, stable, grown adults—somehow ended up orbiting her until they burned out, then disappeared from the company with strained goodbyes and careful non-explanations.

Graham had learned to keep out of her way. To stay on her good side the way you stayed on the good side of a temperamental director: polite, neutral, useful. Sterile coworkers.

It had worked. Mostly.

But Elise didn’t know the rules yet.

There were rumors about Lark. Things people said half as jokes and half as warnings. That she was a witch. Or a practitioner. Or… something. Graham had never known the right term, and he wasn’t sure he believed in any of it. Not really. Not in the sense of candles and spells and forces you could shape with intention.

Still. Lark had an uncanny ability to bend people and situations to her will, and whether that was magic or charisma barely mattered in the end.

And she was predictable. She had a type.

Attractive women who reminded her of herself.

Graham had noticed how similar Ellen and Lark were—of course he had. They were cast in the same role, two versions of the same face. And then Elise had arrived, fitting the same mold in a different key: a different kind of beauty, but still unmistakably the kind Lark collected.

The thought made him uneasy in a way he didn’t want to examine too closely.

He wasn’t even sure Elise had clocked Lark’s attraction, much less returned it. Elise seemed… warm. Easy with people. The sort of person who could be kind without it meaning anything more than kindness. It was possible Lark was reading too much into it. It was possible Elise was.

And none of it was his business.

He told himself that firmly, like a line he’d practiced.

Probably for the best. He’d gotten used to staying removed from the company. Safer on the edges. Predictable. Controlled. He missed connection sometimes—he wasn’t made of stone—but connection was complicated. Connection asked things of you. It made you visible.

Graham exhaled once, slow, and looked back down at the book as if it could rescue him.

A knock landed against the doorframe—light, but confident.

His reflex was immediate. He slid Pride and Prejudice off his knee and tucked it beneath a folded hoodie on the chair beside him, as if the book had never been there. The dressing room door was rarely closed—just an open threshold and the shared understanding that most people didn’t wander in unless they had a reason.

Apparently, Nick had found one.

Nick leaned into the doorway a beat later, bright and easy. “Hey,” he said. “You in here brooding, or just rehearsing your mysterious leading-man aura?”

Graham straightened, willing his expression into something unreadable. Nick’s eyes flicked toward where the book had disappeared under the hoodie on the chair, and then back to Graham without comment. If he noticed, he didn’t dignify it with teasing. Nick had always had that peculiar persistence: he reached for friendship the way he reached for a harmony line—confident it existed, even if the other person wasn’t giving it to him yet.

Graham respected him for it. Quietly. From a safe distance.

Nick stepped fully into the room, hands in his pockets, taking in Graham’s jacket, his posture, the careful neutrality. “Just doing my rounds,” he said. “Making sure you’re not planning to vanish the second the curtain goes down tonight.”

Graham’s mouth tightened a fraction. “I wasn’t planning to vanish.”

“That’s not a no.”

“It’s… a long day,” Graham said.

Nick made a humming sound, the universal language of I’m not buying it, but I’ll let you pretend. “It’s the cast party,” he said, like he was reminding Graham of a scheduled dentist appointment. “You know. The thing where we pretend we’re normal humans who can socialize without stage directions.”

Graham’s stomach gave a small, ill-timed drop.

The memory came again, uninvited: the last cast party. The sticky heat of a crowded bar. Someone’s hand on his arm. The previous wig mistress—what was her name again? Laughing too loudly, too close—then suddenly earnest, eyes shining with something Graham hadn’t known what to do with.

“I’m in love with you,” she’d said. Into the mic. In front of everyone.