Chapter 25
Adrian
The call drops.
I still have the phone pressed flat against my palm, screen already dark.
The trailer hums around me. The AC unit near the door pushes recycled air through the small space, and somewhere outside, I can hear a dolly being moved across the lot, the familiar scrape and roll of production still running without her.
Bash hasn’t moved. He’s across the narrow room with one arm resting on the back of the chair, watching me. Not saying anything yet. Giving me exactly two seconds to process before he decides whether to let me have more.
I put the phone down on the table without looking at where it lands. “They had no right.”
Bash exhales heavily through his nose. His way of acknowledging that he’s heard my words.
“She solved the prop continuity issue this morning before eight o’clock,” I say.
“Two days ago, she caught a scheduling overlap that would have cost us four hours of setup time, and she caught it in a thirty-second scan of the call sheet. She’s been running three problems at once all week while her body is doing things that would have most people flat on their backs, and they called it a situation.
” I hear how even my voice still sounds, and that makes it worse somehow.
“They called it her situation. And they were kind about it, apparently. Very kind. While they threw her out.”
“I know,” Bash says.
“She asked us not to intervene,” I say. “But what if she only asked that because she was overwhelmed? Because she was still processing and she didn’t want to make more of a scene in the moment? That’s not the same as her actually wanting us to stand back and let this happen.”
“Adrian.” Bash’s voice is flat. It’s the tone he uses when he needs me to stop and actually hear what he’s saying. “Walk me through what happens if we go to the director tonight.”
I don’t answer.
“I’ll walk you through it,” he says. “We pull rank, professionally or otherwise, and we make it very visible that two leads are interceding on behalf of the omega coordinator who just got pulled from the production. What does that story become?”
I press two fingers against the bridge of my nose.
“It becomes about her needing us to fight for her,” Bash continues.
“It becomes evidence that she can’t navigate the professional environment independently.
Every person on that crew who was already categorizing her differently since her presentation feels validated.
” He shifts forward in the chair, his elbows on his knees now.
“Maya’s nightmare is being reduced to what she is instead of what she does.
If we walk in there and make a public scene tonight, we hand that narrative to every person in this industry who was already looking for a reason to tell it. ”
He’s right. I know he’s right. That doesn’t make standing still feel any less wrong.
“I’m furious too,” Bash says. “I want to be clear about that. I’m not telling you to calm down or that this isn’t as bad as it feels.
Because it is exactly as bad as it feels.
” His jaw is tight. The teasing edge that usually softens his voice is completely gone.
“What I’m telling you is that there is a right way and a wrong way to help her, and the right way is the one she actually asked for. ”
I turn away from the window.
“She loves this,” I say, and my tone is raw.
“Not just this production. Film. The whole shape of it, the problem-solving, the way everything depends on a hundred invisible decisions made by people no one ever watches. She’s built for it.
You’ve seen her on a floor, the way she moves through a location in the first fifteen minutes and already knows what’s going to break.
” I lean back against the wall. “And it’s going to happen again.
She presents omega, she’s a late bloomer, and every executive in this industry does a mental calculation about whether the liability is worth it.
It happens so gradually nobody can point to it. But the doors start closing.”
Bash doesn’t say anything for a long moment. He looks at the floor.
“I’ve been thinking about that too,” he says finally. “Losing the ability to work in film production would cost her something she can’t replace. She’d work around it. She’d find something else and she’d be competent at it. But it’s not the same.” He exhales. “It’s not the same and she’d feel it.”
The trailer settles into a brief silence. Outside, a generator kicks on somewhere across the lot.
The thought comes out before I’ve decided whether to say it. “We could leave the production.” My voice sounds strange to my own ears. “Both of us. In solidarity. If they’re willing to treat her this way, maybe this isn’t a production worth finishing.”
Bash goes very still.
I wait for him to shut it down immediately. He doesn’t.
He runs a hand through his hair and sits with the idea for several seconds, actually sits with it, and I can see him doing the math.
Contracts. Penalty clauses. The studio relationship, which took years to build and which does not forgive emotional decisions.
The media coverage that would follow two leads walking, and who that coverage would center on once the story got out.
His expression doesn’t change much—it never does when he’s thinking—but there’s a weight in the set of his shoulders that tells me he genuinely considered it.
“I thought about it for ten full seconds,” he says finally.
“Which is nine seconds longer than I should have.” He looks at me directly.
“And then I thought about what Maya would say if she found out we blew up our careers and created a press cycle and handed the studio a grievance claim, all because she had a bad afternoon. After she explicitly asked us not to.” He tilts his head. “I can hear exactly what she’d say.”
I can too.
“She’d be horrified,” I say.
“She’d be horrified, and then she’d spend the next six months trying to figure out how to fix it for us,” Bash says. “Because that’s who she is. We’d hand her something impossible to carry and she’d try to carry it anyway.”
I close my eyes briefly.
“We stay,” he says. “And when the time comes, we find the right way to make this right for her. On her terms. Not ours.”
My thoughts drift without fully meaning to.
The house. The spare room on the second floor, the one with the window that gets the best light in the morning, which is not why Bash chose it but something I noticed when he started rearranging things in there.
He’d started researching late presentations as soon as we realized what was happening to Maya.
He’s read through medical documentation, forum posts, and firsthand accounts with the focus of someone preparing for something important.
The blankets Maya keeps reaching for—the soft, heavy ones draped over the arm of the couch in the theater room.
She always seems to gravitate toward them, and Bash noticed.
Now there’s an identical set in the spare room.
Electrolyte drinks in the specific cabinet near the fridge, tucked slightly back so they don’t look too obvious, even though they absolutely are.
Scent-safe laundry detergent. Bash replaced our entire supply without mentioning it.
One day it was regular detergent. The next day it was scent-safe.
Extra pillows, four of them, because the research said nesting instinct during a late first heat could be intense, and it was better to have too many options than not enough.
I think about the snacks I’ve been buying. The specific ones. Because she reaches for a particular kind on set during the long mid-afternoon setups, and I started picking them up without deciding to do so. They’re just in the pantry now. They’ve been in the pantry for days.
And the theater room smells faintly like her now, because neither Bash nor I have opened the window to air it out. We didn’t discuss that. It simply didn’t happen.
I stand in the trailer and realize none of it ever felt temporary while we were doing it. Not the curtains, not the food, not the meticulous organization of bathroom cabinet space, not any of it. It all felt like preparation for something that was already decided.
Meanwhile, somewhere across this lot, the people who run this production were drafting language about her “situation” and arranging for someone to very kindly explain that she’d been redistributed away from the job she’s been doing for eight months, and they framed it as concern for her wellbeing.
The contrast is astounding.
Elias surfaces in my thoughts the way he always does when I’m trying to trace the path that led us here.
He was there first. While Bash and I were still trying to figure out the right way to approach Maya, Elias was already there.
Sleeping on her couch. Bringing her food.
Driving her to work. Learning the shape of her days and the warning signs in her scent when stress started to overwhelm her.
He showed up consistently and somehow managed to do it without ever making her feel like she was being managed.
And Maya, who had spent years building a professional reputation that existed outside every alpha dynamic she could identify and avoid, let him in.
Because he didn’t make it about instinct or biology or any of the things that frighten her.
He just kept showing up and being dependable until she stopped bracing for the moment he’d become a problem.
Without that, she never would have come to the house. Never would have folded herself into the couch and fallen asleep against Bash’s shoulder. Never would have reached for my hand in the dark during a movie and held onto it. Elias built the foundation that the rest of us got to walk onto.
And tonight he’s driving her home from a production that just made her feel like a liability.
I start moving before I realize I’ve made a decision, grabbing my jacket from the chair by the door.
“Adrian.” Bash is on his feet too, watching me. “Where—“
“I need to leave,” I say. “I need to get out of this trailer.”
“Okay.” He moves toward his own jacket without drama. “Then we leave.”
“I’m not going to the director—“
“I know.” He pulls the jacket on. “We’re going home.”
He says it like it’s obvious. Like there’s never been any other version of the answer. And he’s right, there hasn’t been.
“She’s waiting,” Bash says. His tone has shifted into something determined now, the contained anger still present but organized around a single point.
“She asked us not to fight for her in the way that would cost her something. That doesn’t mean we stand here talking about it.
It means we go home and be there for her.
That’s what she actually needs right now.
Not this.” He nods toward the space we’ve been occupying for the last few minutes.
I stop at the door, and he stops beside me, and for a second we’re both just standing there, the anger still sitting unresolved in my chest.
“She already feels like home,” I say.
Bash looks at me for a beat. “Yeah,” he says. “She does.”
He pushes the door open. Cool evening air rushes into the trailer, carrying the familiar scent of the lot. The production is still running without her.
He steps through first, and I follow.
The anger is still there, burning steadily beneath everything else. But Maya is already at the house waiting for us, and getting back to her matters more than anything happening here.