Page 17 of Take Two

“What?”

“Are you sitting down?” Jasper asks again.

A laugh escapes me as I press myself deeper into the leather seat. “I’m literally in a moving vehicle.”

“Good.”

“That answer concerns me. Should I be concerned?” I say playfully.

“You shouldn’t,” he says, in the reassuring tone that has the immediate and counter-intuitive effect of making everything feel significantly more concerning.

Outside the window, Seattle traffic crawls in the direction of downtown. Our driver navigates through it all without paying either of us any particular attention, which I appreciate on a professional level.

I rub a hand over my jaw. “Jasper.”

“What?” he says, with a brightness that suggests he has been awake for hours already and has been waiting for exactly this phone call.

“You’re doing the thing.”

“What thing?”

“The thing where you sound like a man who’s had six cups of coffee and a life-changing realization that he’s been sitting on for too long and can barely contain,” I say. The man operates in a permanent state of restrained hype, as though every conversation has the potential to be the most important one he’s ever had, and about thirty percent of the time he’s right.

For a moment all I hear is his laughter, unguarded and genuine.

Then he says, “That’s because I have life-changing news.”

I close my eyes and take a slow breath through my nose.

“Cyaire.” He says my name with the gravity of someone who thinks I’ve been pausing our conversation for considerably longer than I actually have.

“Jasper.”

“They approved Blue Line.”

My eyes open immediately and I straighten in my seat. I am suddenly, completely, entirely listening.

For a second, the traffic and the clouds and the city outside the window disappear completely.

“What?” I ask. Like I didn’t hear him. Like I need him to say it again just to make it real.

“They approved Blue Line,” Jasper repeats, and there is a magnificent satisfaction in his voice, the sound of a man who has been working toward something for months and has finally watched it arrive.

Months ago, Jasper had sent me the script with the subject line Read this immediately. I had opened it expecting another sports film, the kind that follows the formula so faithfully you can mark off the beats before you’ve finished the first act. Instead, I read the first twenty pages and didn’t stop. I finished the entire thing before sunrise, sitting at my kitchen table in a state of unusual stillness.

The story had stayed with me in the particular way that the best material does.

It wasn’t simply that it was about hockey, or about the coach under impossible pressure, tasked with carrying an entire team through a season that should have broken him while projecting the kind of certainty that keeps everyone around you from falling apart. It was something underneath that. The feeling of being handed a version of your life by other people and then having to quietly, carefully, completely dismantle it. The process of proving yourself not only to the people who doubted you but to yourself, in the private hours when doubt is loudest and there’s no performance required. I know that feeling. I lived inside it. Walking away from medical school, from the future my parents had built their expectations around, from the version of me that was planned before I had any say in the planning of it. I have never regretted the choice, but I remember the weight of making it.

“They actually approved it,” I say finally, and even to my own ear I sound genuinely surprised.

“They want you,” Jasper continues, and the words have a particular momentum to them. “The director wants you. The producers want you. The studio wants you. We have spent months watching this thing slowly come together and now it is finally, actually happening, and you are going to be extraordinary in it.”

I laugh softly. It’s involuntary, the sound of something loosening.

“So, tell me everything.”

That is apparently all the invitation he needs.