Page 90 of Specters & Spotlights

He folded his arms around her, and she let herself lean in. Her breath hitched once, twice—then began to slow. She closed her eyes, let the familiar smell of backstage and Graham and something faintly cedar-scented anchor her. It wasn’t magic. But it helped.

“You’ve been through a lot,” he said, voice low. “It’s okay to take a moment. You don’t have to carry all of it at once.”

She didn’t answer, but he didn’t seem to expect her to.

“I’ll walk you back to the hotel,” he added. “You should have space to breathe. Call your friend. Try to rest.”

“Thank you,” she whispered, the words heavier than she meant them to be.

He picked up her bag with one hand and kept the other lightly resting over her shoulder. As they headed for the exit, a melody drifted through the hallway—soft and slow, a piano that played itself, each note like a sigh in the dark.

Graham paused, tilting his head. “Am I imagining that, or...?”

Elise smiled faintly, not bothering to hide her exhaustion. “Yeah. It’s a ghost thing.”

He blinked, bemused, and then they stepped through the door. It clicked shut behind them, and the last note hung in the air.

Chapter Sixteen

Graham

Graham knocked on Lark’s dressing room frame with the lightest rap he could manage—polite, restrained, the kind of knock you used when you already regretted being there.

No answer.

He waited a second, listening past the muffled post-show chaos in the hallway. The women’s star dressing room sat in the same semi-private pocket as his, tucked off a side corridor most people only remembered existed when they needed something. Normally, he appreciated that. Tonight, it made the silence feel… pointed.

He knocked again, slightly firmer. “Lark?”

He was still in costume—Darcy’s coat tugging at his shoulders, shirt damp at the collar, the faint grit of stage makeup still on his skin. They’d only just taken their bows. The applause was probably still dying in the house. And yet Lark had hurried off the moment the curtain fell, fast enough that he’d barely caught her shadow as she vanished into the wings.

That alone would’ve been enough to make him pause.

Lark loved an exit, but not like that. Not when she’d had a crowd.

He shifted his weight, irritation sparking—not at her, exactly, but at the fact that he was here, outside her door, like a man who didn’t know how to mind his own business. He usually did. He’d made an art of it with Lark: stay out of her way, keep things cordial, keep things sterile. Scene partners. Coworkers. No unnecessary overlap.

It had been easier that way.

But something was wrong. Not just in the general sense—the creeping, uncanny disturbances that had started to feel less like coincidence and more like a pattern—but with Lark specifically.

Onstage, she hadn’t been herself. Her timing was fine. Her voice was fine. Her blocking was flawless, as always. But the energy behind it—the thing that made her magnetic, that made the audience lean forward as if she were pulling them by a string—had been… absent. Like someone had turned down the voltage.

He knew her tells. He’d been Darcy to her Elizabeth long enough to recognize when she was playing the scene versus when she was surviving it. Tonight she’d smiled at the right moments and hit the right marks, but her eyes had looked unfocused in the way they did when she was somewhere else entirely. During their final moments, when he’d drawn her close for the stage kiss, she’d felt brittle. Like something in her had cracked and she was holding herself together by sheer will.

He had no idea what he could possibly offer her. They weren’t friends. They barely qualified as acquaintances outside of their shared lines and choreography.

And still… he couldn’t shake the image of her disappearing offstage, too fast, too intent, like she was fleeing something no one else could see.

It struck him then—absurdly—that her door was closed at all. These dressing rooms were rarely shut. They were little more than designated corners with mirrors, and theatre people treated privacy like a suggestion. Even costume changes happened with doors propped open, conversations continuing as bodies slipped in and out of garments without ceremony.

A closed door meant someone wanted to be alone.

Or wanted to keep something in.

Graham swallowed and tried again, softer this time, as if volume might be the difference between intrusion and concern.

“Lark,” he said. “Are you alright?”