In The Light of Destiny

Whole Heart

He looked toward the front of the building. He called a name Angie and a woman from the reception desk appeared in the lobby doorway, stepping out onto the entrance steps with the careful posture of someone who already knew she was in trouble and was trying to minimize the damage by meeting it head-on.

"Have you seen these people before?" Mr. Jonas asked her. His voice was quiet, which made it more severe, not less.

Angie looked at each of the waiting faces in turn. Emma watched her look at them really look, not the dismissive scan of a gatekeeper, but the recognition of someone who knew exactly who these people were because she had sent them away herself, repeatedly. Angie lowered her head.

"Yes, sir," she said. "They've all been here multiple times."

The silence that followed had a specific quality the quality of a very small room getting very much smaller.

"WHY HAVE THEY NEVER BEEN SEEN BY THE TEAM WHO HANDLES NEW RECRUITS?"

The question was not quiet. It rolled out of him and off the face of the building, and the handful of people on the sidewalk nearby either sped up or slowed down to listen.

Angie kept her eyes down. "I was told not to send any new recruits in by Mr. Colson," she said.

Mr. Jonas stared at her. "Look me in the eye and say that again."

She did. It took her a moment to find the courage, but she raised her eyes to his and repeated it, word for word, without flinching. Whatever else Angie was, she wasn't a liar, and Emma found herself respecting the woman even in this moment.

Mr. Jonas turned to his assistant. "Cancel all my meetings until noon." He paused, and then added in a tone that was carefully measured: "And you know how to handle the other situation."

"Yes, sir," the assistant said, and his fingers were already moving across the tablet screen.

Mr. Jonas turned back to the small crowd gathered near his entrance. For a moment he just looked at them at the portfolios and the good shoes and the careful hair and the expressions of people who had been preparing for this possibility without actually believing it would arrive.

"Alright," he said. "Let's get started. Your time will be short and I apologize for that I'm a busy man. But you will each be seen today."

Emma let out a breath she had been holding for what felt like considerably longer than that morning.

"That's completely alright, sir," she said. "We'll do our best with whatever time you give us."

He looked at her then not the quick appraising look of someone cataloguing a face, but something more considered. Something that lingered for half a second longer than she expected.

"I'm sure you will," he said.

---

" and then after the auditions, I thought that was it," Emma said, surfacing from the memory. "I thought it was one of those things where you finally get your five minutes and then nothing happens. I came home and tried not to get my hopes up." She paused. "But then about two hours later, I got a call from the studio directly. Apparently Mr. Jonas called them himself. The actress who was supposed to play the third female lead in one of their current productions had been let go that morning. He recommended me for the role."

Kira stared at her. "He called them himself."

"He called them himself." Emma smiled, and it was the widest, most unguarded smile Kira had seen from her in months. "I went straight to the studio from there. There were only a few scenes today they needed to get me oriented and film what they could before the day ended. So I came home." She spread her hands. "I am the third female lead, Kira."

Kira stood up from the couch. There was no deliberation in it she simply stood up and crossed the room and wrapped her arms around Emma, holding her properly, the way you held someone when words weren't the right size for what you wanted to say.

"I am so happy for you," she said, and she was. She was fully, completely happy for her friend. That was true. She held onto it.

Emma hugged her back hard. When they separated, Emma was bright-eyed and slightly pink, the particular glow of someone whose long season of waiting had just broken open.

"Thank you," Emma said. "It is late and I need to be back at eight in the morning, so I am going to go to sleep early for once in my life." She laughed softly. "Don't tell anyone I said that." She squeezed Kira's hand once and turned toward her bedroom, pulling her hair loose from its style as she went.

Kira stood in the living room after the door clicked shut.

The fairy lights above the window did their soft, steady thing. The city outside continued being the city indifferent and enormous and full of the noise of a thousand other people pursuing a thousand other dreams in the dark.

She stood there for a long moment. And then, very quietly, in the privacy of her own face where no one was watching, something broke a little. Not Emma's happiness she would never begrudge her that, not a single second of it. But the arithmetic of it was hard to sit with. One year. Emma had been doing this for one year. She had walked up to one of the most powerful men in the entertainment industry on a Tuesday morning and come home with a lead role.

Kira had been doing this for four years.

Four years of background work. Four years of rooms that smelled like industrial carpet and stale coffee, of casting directors whose eyes moved over her without catching, of going home and practicing her lines in the mirror by herself because it was the only audition she was guaranteed. Four years of watching other women's stars begin to rise while hers stayed low on the horizon, so steady and unchanged she had started to wonder if it was moving at all or if she had simply mistaken a fixed point of light for something on its way toward her.

She walked to her room slowly. She sat on the edge of her bed and looked at her hands in her lap for a while. Then she looked at the ring on her finger the one she never talked about, the one she wore as a reminder rather than a symbol of love, a cold band of metal that said *you have already survived the worst thing that has happened to you, and you are still here*. She pressed her thumb against the inside of it.

When the tears came, she let them come quietly. She was good at quiet. She had learned it early.

She cried for a few minutes and then she stopped, because she had also learned that. She washed her face in the small bathroom down the hall, changed into her sleep clothes, and climbed into bed.

She would get up tomorrow. She would try again. She would keep going because the alternative going back was not something she was capable of surviving.