The Voice They Didn't Deserve

Chapter 6 False Alarm

Talia had the post pulled up on three different tabs before they'd even reached the bus stop bench, thumbs moving fast across the screen like she could out-scroll the panic climbing up Mira's throat.

"Okay. Breathe. Look at this properly instead of spiraling." Talia turned the phone so Mira could see it clearly, not just the flash of dread from the first glance. "Read the actual comments before you decide the world is ending."

Mira made herself look. The photo was grainy, shot from too far away, the license plate more suggestion than evidence, half a letter and a smear of light. Underneath it, the fan account's followers had already started arguing among themselves.

That's not even a real street sign in frame, one comment read. Could be literally any loading dock in the state.

Another: OP said "I think," not "I know." Calm down everyone.

A third, from an account with a small blue checkmark Mira didn't recognize: Hidden Voices films in three different cities on rotation, it's in their press kit. This could be any of them.

"See?" Talia said. "Nobody actually knows anything. It's a blurry photo and a guess. People guess wrong on the internet approximately every four seconds."

"It's still a photo of me. Getting into their car. Outside their studio." Mira's hands had gone cold despite the warm evening air.

"It's not nothing, but it's not confirmation either." Talia's voice softened, steady in the way it always got when Mira needed her to be the calm one. "Your mask was on. Your face isn't visible. The plate's unreadable. If this was going to blow up into something real, it would've happened already, not sat here with forty comments most of which are people telling the original poster they're wrong."

Mira exhaled slow, some of the ice in her chest starting to c***k, not fully melted, just enough to breathe around. "Cross needs to know about this."

"Probably. But not tonight, standing at a bus stop having a panic attack about it." Talia pocketed the phone, gentler now. "Tonight you have a taping to get to, and a mother at home who thinks you're covering a shift at a diner. One crisis at a time."

She was right, the way she was usually right, and Mira let herself be pulled back into motion, one foot in front of the other, toward a car that would be waiting on schedule whether Mira felt ready or not.

She texted Cross from the back seat, the studio car humming quietly beneath her, city lights sliding past the window in long amber streaks.

There's a photo circulating. Fan account. Outside the loading dock, two nights ago. Mask visible, face isn't, plate's mostly unreadable.

His reply came fast enough that she wondered if he slept with the phone in his hand.

Send me the link. And Mira, breathe. This happens every season.

She stared at that for a long moment, uneasy in a way she couldn't fully name. There was something almost too calm in his answer, like he'd expected this, like maybe he was even counting on it a little. She pushed the thought down. She didn't have room for one more thing to be afraid of tonight.

She almost asked him outright, fingers hovering over the screen, whether the photo leaking was actually bad for the show at all, or whether a little mystery was exactly the kind of thing a producer like him would want circulating two weeks before a big vote episode. She deleted the question twice before deciding she wasn't ready to hear the answer either way.

By the time she reached the studio, an assistant met her at the door with an update, brisk and businesslike. We've had our legal team reach out about the post. It's coming down within the hour, standard procedure, nothing to worry about. The loading dock's getting rerouted for exits going forward. You're safe.

Safe. The word sat strange in Mira's mouth, borrowed rather than earned, but she let herself hold onto it anyway, if only for tonight.

The taping itself went the way tapings had started to go, familiar now in a way that surprised her, the lights and the countdown and the strange steadying calm that settled over her the second the mask went on and the music started. She wore the new coat under her jacket, just to feel it there, even though no one on set would ever see it, a small secret comfort in the middle of a night full of borrowed calm.

She sang a slower song this time, one she'd written two winters ago about her father leaving without ever quite writing the word father into any line of it, and when she finished, the studio audience was quiet in the specific way that meant they'd actually felt something, not just watched it happen.

Dana caught her backstage after, gold mask pushed up onto her forehead the second the cameras stopped rolling. "That one wrecked me a little. Fair warning, I might actually cry during the broadcast when it airs, which is deeply inconvenient for my personal brand of looking unbothered at all times."

"Sorry."

"Don't apologize. It's the whole point, isn't it." Dana studied her for a second, something more serious underneath the usual teasing. "You okay, though? You seem rattled tonight."

Mira hesitated, then decided, for reasons she didn't fully examine, to tell at least part of the truth. "Someone posted a photo. Outside the studio. Nothing that gives me away, but it scared me."

Dana's expression flickered, something Mira couldn't quite read passing behind her eyes before she covered it with a shrug. "Happens to all of us eventually. Comes with wearing the mask. You get used to the ground shifting a little." She bumped Mira's shoulder, lighter than the moment before. "You're still standing, though. That's the part that counts."

Mira thought about that on the ride home, mask off now, her own face reflected faintly in the dark window glass. Still standing. It felt like a small thing and a large thing at once, the difference between surviving a scare and being destroyed by one, a line she was only just starting to understand she could actually hold.

Camille was asleep on the couch when Mira let herself in, one arm curled under her head, the television murmuring low with the volume down the way it always was these days. Mira stood in the doorway a moment, watching her mother's chest rise and fall, steady and unaware of everything her daughter had carried through the door with her that night.

She turned off the television, pulled the blanket up over Camille's shoulders, and went to bed without waking her.

Monday morning, Brianna started in on her by the lockers, same sweater, Castillo, the same tired script she'd been running since October. Except Mira was wearing the coat now, the collar sitting right, her shoulders back without her having to think about it, and for the first time in three years, she didn't look at the floor while Brianna talked.

Brianna faltered, just slightly, thrown by something she couldn't name yet, the joke losing its footing halfway through her own sentence.

"New coat?" Brianna finally managed, like she needed something to say that wasn't the thing she'd actually noticed.

"Yeah," Mira said, and kept walking, and for once, it wasn't retreat.

Behind her, she heard Ashley ask Brianna something too quiet to catch, and Brianna's answer even quieter, and Mira let herself smile, small and private, all the way to homeroom.

It wasn't much. A coat, a straighter spine, one girl faltering mid-sentence in a hallway that had never once given Mira the upper hand before. But it was hers, earned in pieces she hadn't fully counted yet, and for the length of that walk to homeroom, it felt like enough.