In The Light of Destiny

​The End of the Four Years

The three of them sat with that for a moment. Four years was not a small thing. Four years in this city, four years of doors that didn't open, four years of holding onto something that most people would have let go of long ago. Kira had come to this dormitory carrying more than just a portfolio. She had come here carrying the need to escape something she never spoke about directly — something she carried in the careful blankness of her expression whenever her past came anywhere close to the surface of conversation.

Emma reached over and put her hand over Kira's. "You will be a star soon," she said. There was nothing performative about it. "All the struggle and the hard work will be worth it. I truly believe that."

Lia glanced between the two of them and softened, because underneath the humor and the brazen ambition, she was as tender-hearted as either of them. "All right, all right, I believe it too," she admitted. Then, because she couldn't help herself, she added, "But I will still be very happy when I am getting paid."

The laughter returned, lighter this time. The kind of laughter that was a release valve — that let some of the day's pressure escape before it built into something harder to manage.

Kira looked at her, something between amusement and exasperation on her face. "Honestly, Lia, do you intend to struggle through sore feet all day, sitting in lobbies for hours, just for staff members to tell you the director is in a meeting after you've waited since eight in the morning?"

Lia tilted her head, considering this genuinely. "No," she said. "I want the suffering to be worth something."

"Doesn't seem right," Emma murmured, almost to herself. She was staring at the turned-off television screen, her gray eyes distant. "Why does it have to be this hard? There has to be an easier way to get noticed."

A small, loaded silence settled over the room. The kind of silence that had something specific living inside it.

"There is one way," Kira said, raising an eyebrow.

Both Emma and Lia looked at her. Lia pressed her lips together and shook her head firmly before the sentence had even fully landed. "No thank you," she said. "I haven't given up yet." The words carried enough weight that no one pushed further. The entertainment industry was full of shortcuts that weren't shortcuts at all — they were traps dressed in opportunity's clothing, and all three of them knew it, even Lia, who joked about money and passion as if they were interchangeable.

Emma stood up from the couch with the decisive energy of someone who had decided not to let the evening slide any further into defeat. "Well," she said, smoothing her blouse, "I am hungry. Let's all go get something to eat. My treat."

There was a momentary protest — there always was, because none of them liked the reminder of who could afford to treat and who could not — but it dissolved quickly, the way it always did, because Emma had a way of making generosity feel like an invitation rather than charity. They gathered their things, pulled on their jackets, and filed out of the apartment with the comfortable ease of people who had done this a hundred times before.

The side street outside the dormitory was narrow and lit with the amber glow of streetlamps, the city's noise drifting in from the wider avenues nearby. They walked close together on the sidewalk, their footsteps falling into an unconscious rhythm that spoke of months of shared routine. The bar on the corner was the kind of place that was warm without being crowded, friendly without being loud — exactly the kind of place three tired dreamers needed at the end of a day that had tried its best to knock them flat.

They settled into a corner booth. Ordered food. Ordered beers. The conversation settled into something gentler than it had been back in the apartment, the way it always did when there was food on the table and something cold to drink. It was the particular grace of friendship — the ability to walk through the hard parts of a day together and come out the other side still capable of laughing.

It was Lia who circled back to the harder question, the way she always eventually did, because for all her humor, she was also the one who said the things no one else wanted to say.

"Kira," she said, folding her hands on the table. "You said you'll give it a few more months. What will you actually do if it doesn't work out? If you don't sign with anyone?"

The table went quiet. Emma stilled her bottle halfway to her lips. Kira stared at the rings of condensation on the wooden table surface, tracing one with her fingertip before she answered.

"I don't know," she said finally, in a voice just above a whisper. Then, lower still, as though she was saying something she had only ever said to herself before: "But I would rather die than return to my old life."

Neither Emma nor Lia asked her to elaborate. They didn't push, didn't pry, didn't fill the silence with well-meaning questions she wasn't ready to answer. They simply sat with her in it, the way real friends do. And for the moment, that was enough.

They finished their food and split the last two beers among the three of them. The walk back to the dormitory was quieter than the walk out, but not uncomfortably so. When they returned to the building and climbed the stairs to their floor, the night had softened around them, the way nights sometimes do after you've made it through them together.

Emma and Kira headed toward their shared room. Lia paused in the living room, dropping her jacket over the back of the couch, kicking off her shoes for the second time that evening. The fairy lights above the window cast everything in soft gold.

Her phone rang.

She picked it up, glancing at the unfamiliar number on the screen with the casual suspicion of someone who had given her number to too many agency receptionists to expect anything good from an unknown caller.

"Hello?" she answered.