Chapter 13
PAIGE
The ambient temperature inside a dormant theater always manages to sink directly into your bones.
It doesn’t matter how many layers of wool you wear or how high you crank the ancient boiler in the basement; the cold lives in the brickwork, in the heavy velvet of the curtains, and in the cavernous, empty air above the stage.
The auditorium was dead quiet first thing in the morning.
I stood at the back of the center aisle, gripping my plastic clipboard so tightly that my knuckles ached.
My body felt brittle, running on a toxic combination of stale black tea and pure adrenaline.
Tech week was always a brutal marathon, but adding a looming municipal safety inspection to the schedule had turned the entire building into a pressure cooker.
If the city didn’t sign off on our historic structural permits by noon, we couldn’t open the doors for preview night.
We couldn’t sell tickets. The entire season would fold.
I dragged my thumb across the bare skin of my left ring finger, rubbing the pale indentation where my wedding band used to sit.
The absence of the gold was a sharp, constant ache, a physical reminder of the devastation I had initiated in a downtown high-rise just days ago.
Walking away from Malcolm had been a matter of basic survival, a desperate attempt to preserve whatever was left of my soul before his corporate ambition suffocated me completely.
But cutting him out of my life felt like severing a major artery.
I was bleeding out on the inside, hiding the raw, gaping wound behind production schedules and technical cue sheets.
I couldn’t afford to break down. Not today.
Forcing a breath into my lungs, I started down the slanted concrete aisle toward the stage, bracing myself for the usual morning disasters. At the top of my list was the lighting tower.
Our main piece of high-reach equipment was a towering aluminum scaffolding rig rolled out near the stage-right portal.
It was an absolute death trap—a rickety, mismatched assembly of metal pipes, stripped bolts, and worn casters that swayed like a ship at sea whenever a student climbed past the second level to adjust a spotlight.
I had spent the last three production meetings fighting with the crew about it, fully convinced the city inspectors would take one look at the rusty frame and immediately revoke our operating license.
I dumped my clipboard on the front row of seats and climbed the stairs to the apron of the stage, walking directly toward the base of the tower. I reached out, grabbed one of the main vertical support pipes, and shoved my weight against it to check the wobble.
The metal didn’t move. It didn’t rattle, it didn’t creak, and it certainly didn’t sway.
I frowned, gripping the pipe with both hands and shoving harder. Nothing. The towering frame stood perfectly rigid against the scuffed floorboards, as solid as if its legs had been sunk deep into wet concrete.
I crouched down to inspect the base. Someone had gone through the entire apparatus, taking a heavy wrench to every single pipe clamp and tightening the iron bolts until they were flush and secure.
But the real transformation was the woodwork.
Thick boards had been slotted into the lower bays of the metal frame, wedged diagonally and secured with heavy-duty construction screws.
The wooden braces locked the entire structure into a perfectly rigid structure, eliminating every ounce of the lateral shaking that had plagued us for weeks.
It was a beautiful efficient piece of carpentry, done by someone who genuinely understood how to stabilize heavy loads.
“Morning, Paige.”
I jumped slightly, standing up to see Leo walking out from behind the heavy velvet curtains of the wings.
Our twenty-year-old technical director looked like he had slept in his clothes, his hair sticking up in odd directions and a half-eaten blueberry muffin in his left hand.
A heavy wrench dangled from his tool belt, clanking against his jeans.
“Leo,” I said, pointing at the base of the scaffolding. “Did you do this?”
He let out a short, tired laugh, shaking his head. “I wish I could take credit for that. I was dreading the safety inspection just as much as you were. Look at it, though. The thing is a tank now. You could drop a piano on the top tier and the frame wouldn’t even flinch.”
“Then who fixed it?” I asked, my brow furrowing. “Our student volunteers barely know how to use a power drill without stripping the screws. And the joints are immaculate.”
“It was the new guy,” Leo said, taking a massive bite of his muffin and gesturing vaguely toward the back hallway.
“One of the neighborhood volunteers who signed up during the emergency call yesterday. He goes by Mal. He showed up here at dawn, long before I even got the coffee maker going. He dug through that miserable pile of scrap wood behind the scene shop, and just went to town on the frame.”
“He just did it? Without you asking?”
“Didn’t ask me for a damn thing,” Leo said, chewing thoughtfully.
“He just looked at the tower, saw it was a liability, and fixed it. Barely said three words to me the entire morning. He just keeps his head down and works. The guy knows his way around a tool belt, I’ll tell you that much.
It’s like having a professional just hanging out in the wings. ”
A strange, uncomfortable prickle of curiosity crept up the back of my neck.
We had dozens of community volunteers—mostly retired teachers, enthusiastic high school kids, and local parents who wanted to support the arts.
We rarely got professional-grade carpenters volunteering to do the heavy, unglamorous grunt work in silence.
I picked up my clipboard from the front row. “I’m going to check the lobby schedule. Get the student crews ready for the audio check. I want the microphones synced before ten.”
“You got it, boss,” Leo mumbled, already turning back toward the soundboard.
I walked out of the dim, freezing auditorium and pushed through the double doors into the main lobby.
The contrast was jarring. The lobby was bright, warm, and chaotic, buzzing with the loud, cheerful energy of the morning shift change.
People were shaking out wet umbrellas, stacking boxes of program inserts, and hovering around the massive aluminum coffee urns near the ticket booth.
The air smelled of wet wool, cinnamon pastries, and dark roast coffee.
It was a chaotic, beautiful mess of community effort—the exact opposite of the cold, sterile, highly regulated corporate boardrooms I used to navigate as Malcolm’s wife.
I wove through the crowd toward the long folding table set up against the far wall.
Rachel, our new volunteer coordinator, was currently buried under a mountain of yellow adhesive name tags and sign-in sheets.
She had moved to Seattle from Indiana a few months ago, a warm, no-nonsense woman who treated the entire theater cast like her own children.
She had zero knowledge of the city’s elite social circles, which made her the perfect gatekeeper; she didn’t care about pedigrees or bank accounts, she only cared if you showed up on time.
She looked up as I approached, her face softening with immediate maternal concern.
“Paige, honey, you look absolutely dead on your feet,” Rachel said, pushing her reading glasses up into her hair. She reached under the table and handed me a steaming paper cup of coffee. “Drink that before you fall over. You’re working yourself into an early grave.”
“I’m fine, Rachel, just running on fumes,” I said, wrapping my cold hands around the hot paper cup. The warmth seeped into my palms, a small mercy. “I wanted to check the ledger. Leo was just telling me about a new volunteer on the tech crew who rebuilt our scaffolding. A guy named Mal?”
Rachel’s face lit up instantly. “Oh, my goodness, yes. He has been an absolute godsend for us. I don’t know where he came from, but we are lucky to have him.”
“Who is he?” I asked, leaning over the table to look at the open composition notebook.
“I couldn’t tell you,” Rachel said, organizing a stack of waivers.
“He’s an incredibly quiet, polite man. Showed up yesterday morning in this faded, beat-up gray sweatshirt and work boots.
I asked him what kind of jobs he was comfortable with, and he just politely asked where the heaviest manual labor was. That was it.”
“He just wanted the heavy lifting?”
“Insisted on it,” she said, shaking her head in amazement.
“He spent hours yesterday out in the alley, working in the freezing rain to unload those massive costume trunks from the storage trucks. Then he hauled dozens of those heavy sandbags up the spiral stairs to the fly galleries. He doesn’t complain, he doesn’t take breaks to eat donuts with the college kids, and he certainly doesn’t ask for any credit.
He just works until his hands are raw, signs out late, and shows up again before I even unlock the front doors. ”
I looked down at the open ledger on the table, my eyes scanning the column of messy, rushed signatures from the neighborhood locals. Halfway down the page from yesterday morning, a single entry stopped my breath in my throat.
Mal.
It was just one syllable, but the handwriting was a violent shock to my system.
It was sharp, clean, and mathematically precise.
The slant of the ‘M’, the hard, deliberate pressure of the pen—it was the unmistakable, ingrained script of a man who had spent his entire adult life drafting architectural blueprints and signing off on multi-million-dollar structural permits.
The line for the surname had been left completely blank.