Page 35 of Specters & Spotlights

Outside the wig closet, the theatre creaked. The ghost light still waited out onstage, warm and steady—but somehow, Elise felt a chill creep in anyway.

Chapter Seven

Graham

Graham sat in the lead’s dressing room with Pride and Prejudice open across his knee, the spine cracked to the same well-worn place he always returned to when his thoughts got too loud.

A few minutes before places. Just enough time to settle.

The corridor outside hummed with the pre-show scramble: footsteps, laughter, someone calling for bobby pins like it was a medical emergency. A muffled burst of music leaked through a wall and died again. The building had that particular, expectant energy it always got before places was called.

He read the same paragraph three times without absorbing it.

The words were familiar, reliable in the way he preferred most things to be. And still, his attention kept slipping sideways, as if his mind had developed a draft.

He checked the time. He had a few minutes before he needed to swing by the wig closet for the pre-show hair check.

He tried to focus on the page. And yet, his attention slid away from the book again, uninvited, to the memory of Elise’s voice from the day before.

It’s perfect.

Not a compliment dressed up as teasing. Not a line delivered for effect. Just… matter-of-fact, as if she’d reached out, touched something, and named it true.

He’d been told he had good hair before. Enough times that it had become background noise, filed away with other facts about himself that didn’t require consideration. It was like being told the sky was blue. Fine. Noted.

But Elise saying it had landed differently. It had slipped past the usual armor, warm and irritating and absurdly persistent.

He stared at the line of text without seeing it, the corner of his mouth threatening an expression he didn’t have a name for.

Ridiculous, he told himself.

And yet the warmth of it lingered—because it wasn’t that his hair was perfect. It was that she had thought so.

Graham turned the page with careful precision, as if he could flatten the thought into the paper.

It didn’t work.

He stared at the page like it had personally betrayed him, then let his gaze slide off it, unfocused. The warmth from yesterday’s comment was still there—unhelpful, persistent—like a stage light you couldn’t quite escape once it found you.

And then came the other memory. The one that made his stomach tighten.

Emily.

He could still hear Lark saying it—casual, assured, as if she were handing him a harmless fact. Her name’s Emily. And he’d repeated it, because he’d been tired and distracted and because Lark spoke with the kind of certainty people mistook for truth.

He’d watched Elise’s expression flicker when he’d said it. The brief confusion. The quick recovery. The polite correction. He’d felt the embarrassment flare hot and immediate, and ever since, his brain had been insistent about the conclusion: he’d blown whatever small chance he might’ve had of being anything other than the aloof leading man who couldn’t be bothered to learn a name.

Which was… not inaccurate, if you wanted to be cruel about it.

His jaw worked once, as if he could grind the moment down small enough to swallow. He couldn’t.

Lark, of course, had been perfectly unbothered. Lark was always perfectly unbothered. And she’d been… pointed about it—no apology, no correction, not even a flicker of concern that she’d set him up to look like an idiot. It wasn’t only that she’d told him the wrong name. It was the ease with which she’d done it, the casual certainty. The way she’d watched the result afterward like she was measuring distance between pieces on a board.

Lark seemed to think she had some sort of claim on Elise. Not in any way she’d say plainly, because Lark rarely said anything plainly when she could imply it instead. But he’d seen it—the way she positioned herself, the way she steered conversations, the way she looked at Elise like Elise’s existence in the room was a decision Lark had made.

And that was what bothered him most.

Not jealousy. Not interest. Not… anything like that.