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His next reading was lovely. He gave Drake’s words a warmth that carried the character’s longing without making him sound theatrical, and when I answered as Isadora, the exchange flowed so naturally that I forgot to watch the elapsed time.

For several pages, everything worked beautifully.

Then we reached the ritual itself.

Drake placed his bare palm against the Heartwood, and glowing sap began trickling down the ancient trunk. Isadora was supposed to press herself against the bark while enchanted roots curled around them both.

The author’s description became increasingly inventive.

Hudson finished his paragraph, waited for my response, and somehow maintained a perfectly serious expression.

I wasn’t nearly as accomplished.

I made it through Isadora’s first sentence before an image of the two fictional lovers tangled in affectionate tree roots defeated me.

I stopped the take and took off my headphones.

“I’m sorry. Give me a moment.”

Hudson remained politely silent while I tried to recover, although the way his mouth kept twitching wasn’t helping.

“Would it help if I told you that roots generally grow toward moisture and nutrients?” he asked eventually. “Because I’d have some concerns about what this tree’s after.”

That finished me.

I bent over my manuscript, laughing hard enough that I couldn’t have delivered a useful sentence if my life depended on it.

“Please stop helping,” I managed.

“I’m only saying that the author might’ve had fewer problems if she’d made the Heartwood a shrub.”

I laughed again, and Hudson waited with his script resting across his knees until I could breathe normally.

We eventually managed another take, approaching the ritual with a little more restraint. When the dialogue turned intimate, Hudson’s delivery was every bit as convincing as it had been during Friday’s recording.

He’d become remarkably good at trusting the words instead of trying to make them sound seductive.

I answered him with Isadora’s mixture of longing and determination, and the scene developed a rhythm that pleased me enormously. Even the glowing sap seemed less ridiculous once we concentrated on what the characters were feeling rather than what the magical vegetation was doing.

We finished the last exchange in a single take.

I stopped the recording, saved it, and sat back.

“That was excellent, Hudson. Really excellent. The absurdity is part of the fun, but the characters still need to sound as though they care about each other, and you made Drake’s feelings completely believable.”

Hudson removed his headphones, looking pleased. “I’ve got a pretty good idea how that works.”

His expression made it difficult not to kiss him immediately, but I resisted until I’d finished saving our work.

We spent the rest of the morning recording his remaining Saturday passages and correcting a handful of earlier takes. One needed a cleaner pause between two lines. Another required him to sound irritated rather than angry. A third contained a word he’d pronounced perfectly well but with an emphasis that changed the meaning.

Hudson listened to each explanation, made the adjustment, and tried again.

There were still moments when he approached a particularly outrageous sentence as though he were reading an equipment-maintenance warning, but those had become rare enough to be funny rather than frustrating. He’d also started making sensible performance suggestions of his own, and I was genuinely pleased with the progress he was making.

By early afternoon, we had an excellent selection of finished material.

I saved the session, checked the file labels, and prepared a short approved sample for Folio’s weekend reviewer. The production team would handle the technical work beyond my recording responsibilities, but I wanted to make sure the performances I’d supplied were as strong as possible.