Chapter 15 – Elise
Chapter Fifteen
Elise
Elise turned into the alleyway again the next morning, mentally begrudging the painted bricks and fairy lights strung between fire escapes. It looked as cheerful as ever, but she definitely did not feel that way.
Her legs ached. She didn’t usually work out, but this morning she’d pushed herself through two solid hours on the treadmill in the hotel gym, hoping that physical exhaustion might dull the buzz of anxious energy still zipping through her chest.
It hadn’t worked.
She was running on fumes. She hadn’t gotten much sleep, but not because of the spell or the weird energy or even the whispering wall. Not exactly. What had really kept her up was the envelope.
She’d opened it in her hotel room, heart racing and hands slightly shaking. It was thicker than expected—at least ten pages folded together, stuffed into a manila sleeve. The first thing she saw when she unfolded the packet was a scribble on the back of the first page in Cici’s handwriting:
I love you! You are not alone!
It had almost made her cry.
She’d turned the packet over and her eyes immediately caught on the headline:
Pedestrian hit by a bus.
The laughter came out of her in an ungraceful bark, far too loud for a cramped hotel room after midnight.
Now, as she approached the stage door, she chuckled again under her breath, remembering. It was still macabre. Still unbelievable.
The keycard reader gave its quiet beep, and the lock released with a click. Elise pushed open the door—and Kevin was already there.
Not drifting in from a shadowed corner. Not arriving mid-sass with a shimmer of ghostly flair. Just there, waiting by the door like he'd been keeping watch.
She startled, only slightly. It wasn’t like him. Kevin didn’t wait for her, not like this.
He hovered just above the ground, arms crossed, eyes fixed on hers. There was something uncharacteristically still in the way he looked at her. A weight behind the usual arched eyebrow.
Her chest squeezed a little. “I’m fine,” she said before he could ask.
Kevin raised that eyebrow higher. She knew the look well—it was the “Really?” expression. And okay, maybe the concealer hadn’t fully handled the dark circles this morning, but she didn’t need commentary about it.
She gave him a glare sharp enough to draw blood.
Kevin relented with a dramatic sigh. “Of course you’re fine, darling. Radiant. The very image of rest and emotional stability.”
She snorted.
They moved together down the fluorescent-lit hallway, her boots echoing softly on the linoleum, Kevin’s form gliding just a breath above the ground. The light was too bright for him here—it leeched some of the presence out of him. He looked more like a suggestion than a person. A trick of the eye.
She glanced at him, quiet for a moment.
“You really were waiting, weren’t you?”
Kevin didn’t answer.
He merely drifted a little closer.
Elise rounded the corner into the wig closet, expecting silence and solitude—and instead found Nick leaning casually against the counter, holding two to-go cups like a gift from the heavens.
“For you,” he said, offering a coffee to her like a chalice.
She blinked at him, touched. “You didn’t have to—”
“I did,” he cut her off. “Anything for my backstage bestie. You look like you fought a demon army last night and maybe lost.”
She took a sip—too hot, but still perfect—and murmured her thanks.
Nick glanced at her over his own cup, tone easy but eyes attentive. “How was your night?”
The question hung there, heavier than it sounded. He didn’t ask about the spell or the envelope or the buzz of ghostly interference, but the curiosity was unmistakable.
Elise tilted her head, pretended to consider. “Well,” she said lightly, “my ex got hit by a bus.”
Nick blinked. “Come again?”
She gave him a wide-eyed, faux-serious nod. “Hit. By a bus. Like something out of a telenovela.”
Nick stared. “You’re joking. You have to be joking. Things like that don’t actually happen in real life.”
“Welcome to my life,” Elise said, raising her coffee in a toast. “It’s basically magical realism with better wigs.”
Nick didn’t press, but he didn’t look away either. His presence was steady, like a grounding wire. Elise appreciated it more than she could say.
“I read the rest of the articles last night,” she said, her voice quieter now, as if the truth needed softening. “It happened three years ago. Just days after I last saw him.”
Nick blinked. “That close?”
She nodded. “I didn’t know. I never looked him up. I just… moved on.” Her mouth twisted. “Or tried to.”
She took a bracing breath, and continued, “He died in a crosswalk. Hit by a bus.”
The words hung in the air, strange and absurd. There was something too poetic about it. A brute force ending for someone who had made her feel so small with precision.
Nick murmured, “That’s surreal.”
“He was cremated,” she added, like an afterthought. Like that sealed it. “That’s what the article said.”
Kevin drifted nearby, unusually quiet.
That was all she wanted to say. All she could say. Because the facts were supposed to make it impossible. A person who was cremated didn’t show up at a cast party. Didn’t whisper her name in a voice so sharp it felt like it had claws. Didn’t pull the edges of her world apart like it was paper.
She folded her arms, suddenly cold.
“So that’s it,” she said, with forced finality. “It’s not him. It can’t be. I must have… misheard. Or misremembered. Maybe I didn’t really deal with everything back then, and now it’s bubbling back up. That makes sense, right?”
Nick didn’t answer immediately, just looked at her with the kind of expression people save for skittish animals and broken things.
She gave a too-bright laugh. “I mean, I know ghosts. Ghosts I can handle. This isn’t a ghost thing. This is just my imagination running away with me.”
But her hand tightened slightly around the coffee cup. She didn’t quite believe herself. Not completely.
Nick was just opening his mouth to say something when the door creaked open again.
Graham stepped into the wig room holding two coffees. The paper cups steamed gently in the cool air of the backstage hallway, the scent curling toward Elise before he even spoke.
“I thought you might want this,” he said, extending the cup like an offering.
She glanced down at the coffee already in her hand—Nick’s coffee. Then back at Graham’s. “Oh,” she breathed, startled into a laugh. “I’ve been blessed twice over.”
Graham followed her gaze. “Oh. Double delivery.” He looked between them. “Didn’t realize we were competing.”
Nick raised an eyebrow. “We’re not. But if we were, mine has oat milk and moral support.”
Elise snorted, juggling the two cups like awkward trophies. “I guess I’m just extremely caffeinated and emotionally validated today.”
He hadn’t heard the conversation she was just having, didn’t know the ache she was still carrying from last night. But he’d thought of her anyway. Brought her warmth in a cup, like it was nothing. Like kindness didn’t have to be earned.
And that—more than the flirtation, the lingering glances across the green room, or even the impossibly perfect hair—was what got her.
Graham smiled, but his eyes had narrowed slightly. He was reading her, the way he might read a script—checking for beats that didn’t quite land. “You okay?”
She offered him a tight smile. “Depends which plane of reality you’re asking from.”
Before anyone could say more, the door opened a third time.
Lark stepped inside, the click of her shoes breaking the spell. She was early—fifteen minutes to call time—but she paused in the doorway, sensing the shift in the air. Her gaze scanned the room: four cups of coffee. Two leading men. One Elise.
Then, slowly, her eyes drifted to the patch of floor near the wig station where candles had glowed last night.
Elise saw it happen—the flash of awareness. Lark didn’t just notice. She knew.
There was a flicker behind her eyes—fear, maybe, or guilt—but it was gone as quickly as it came. She crossed the threshold with a smile that was a little too bright.
“Well,” she said brightly, “clearly I’ve interrupted either a summoning circle or a very elaborate caffeine intervention.”
Elise let herself laugh, grateful for the break in tension. “Honestly? Could be both.”
But she didn’t miss it—the faint tightness at Lark’s temples, the silent scan of shadows, the way she kept her back to the wall like she needed to see every exit.
The room began to hum with motion as more cast and crew filtered in, drawn to their usual pre-show rhythms. Chatter picked up, costumes rustled, and someone started tuning a cello in the pit.
Elise motioned for Lark to sit. She slipped behind her, hands already dividing her hair into smooth, practiced sections. The pins clicked softly against the countertop, each one a stitch in the quiet spell Elise wove to keep herself steady.
Lark sat silently at first, her hands folded neatly in her lap, but Elise could feel it—something about her posture, the quick glance she shot sideways, the way she didn’t quite meet Elise’s eyes. She had something on her mind.
“You good?” Elise asked softly, keeping her tone light but sincere. “I mean… I know everything with Ellen has been hard. But if there’s something else—something you need—”
Lark flinched almost imperceptibly, then gave a tight, practiced smile in the mirror. “I’m fine.”
Elise didn’t buy it. She hesitated, then tried again, a little softer. “You don’t have to be.”
Lark’s jaw flexed. She held Elise’s gaze long enough to make her answer final. “I can handle it.”
There was no malice in her voice. Just certainty. Or the kind of certainty that grows when you're too afraid of what might happen if you admit otherwise.
Before Elise could press, Romy wandered in with a half-eaten protein bar and a raised brow. She paused in the middle of the room, sniffed the air like someone tracking down a forgotten scent, and said, “Is it just me, or does it feel like someone was casting a spell in here?”
A few heads turned. No one answered.
Romy shrugged and moved on, unbothered.