Chapter 26
Maya
The engine is off. I don’t remember Elias turning it off, but it’s quiet now, just the faint tick of cooling metal and the sound of my own breathing in the small space.
We are parked in front of Adrian and Elias’s house, waiting for them.
My hands are sitting in my lap, and I haven’t moved them in a while.
I keep replaying the director’s voice. He wasn’t trying to be cruel.
That’s the part I can’t seem to move past. He wasn’t trying to be cruel, and yet it still didn’t matter because the outcome was the same.
Your situation. He called it. Like I was a variable that had become inconvenient. Like months of my work on that production meant nothing.
Elias hasn’t spoken since we parked. He’s sitting silently beside me. Giving me space to process. The cool stone-and-dark-musk smell of him fills the car in a way that doesn’t help calm me as much as it usually does, which tells me something about how far past my limit I actually am right now.
I pull out my phone on autopilot. My hands shake slightly as I unlock my phone and call the person I have for years when shit hits the fan. Getting dismissed from my dream job definitely qualifies.
Nadia picks up on the second ring.
“Nadia”, my voice breaks on her name.
“Hey, I was just thinking about you, there’s this—“ She stops. A beat of silence, the kind that comes from reading a voice in half a second. “What happened?”
I open my mouth to try to speak again and close it again.
Beside me, Elias reads whatever’s on my face and opens the driver’s door without a word.
He steps out into the evening air, pulling it almost fully shut behind him.
Through the windshield, I can see him move to the front of the car and stop there, hands in his pockets, facing away toward the street.
Far enough that my voice won’t carry. Close enough that I can still see him.
“Maya.” Nadia’s voice comes through the phone with a firm edge. “Talk to me.”
So I do.
I tell her about the meeting. The way the director sat across from me like someone preparing for a difficult conversation and delivered a speech that sounded rehearsed from beginning to end.
I tell her about “the best interests of everyone involved,” how my responsibilities are being redistributed because there’s enough “material to complete the film,” and how I was told to rest, recover, and come back to future projects.
I tell her how I held my composure through the meeting and as I left the building.
The silence on her end is the particular kind that means she’s furious. I’ve known Nadia long enough to know the difference between her thinking silences and her angry ones. This is the second kind.
“Where are you right now?” she asks finally.
I look through the windshield at Elias, still standing at the front of the car with his back to me. “In Elias’s car.”
“Where?”
I hesitate for a second. Then I give her the address.
A short pause. “I’m coming over.”
“Nadia, you don’t have to—“
“I’m coming over,” she says, with the tone she uses when the conversation is already finished. “Text me the address. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
The line goes silent. I lower the phone and sit with it in my lap.
Outside, Elias turns at the sound of the car door opening, and I realize I’ve already reached for the handle. He moves back toward me, and when he reaches the passenger side, his expression is calm, but his eyes are assessing.
“She’s coming,” I say.
He nods once. “Good.”
We sit on the low front steps of the house as we wait, the evening air cool and smelling faintly of whatever flowering thing grows somewhere along the side fence.
I hold my phone in both hands. Elias sits next to me and says nothing, and I’m grateful for it in a way I can’t articulate because articulating things requires energy I don’t currently have.
Headlights sweep the driveway about fifteen minutes later. Then a second set immediately behind the first.
Nadia’s car and Adrian’s car pull in almost simultaneously, the timing so close it would be funny under different circumstances.
Bash is in the passenger seat of Adrian’s car.
Nadia is already out before her engine fully cuts.
Her heels click against the concrete as she heads straight toward me with the focused energy of someone who spent the entire drive furious and managed it by driving faster than she should have.
Adrian and Bash get out of their car more slowly than Nadia did.
Not because they’re not moving with purpose — they are — but because they’re reading the situation.
Their eyes find me immediately. Bash’s hands are loose at his sides, and his expression is neutral, but he covers the distance between the car and me quickly.
Adrian is two steps behind him, and even in the fading light, I can see the tension in his jaw.
Nadia reaches me first. She cups my face in both hands, tilting it up slightly to look at me in the way she’s been doing since we were fifteen, and whatever she sees there makes her exhale through her nose slowly.
“We’ll talk inside,” she says.
The driveway feels very full with all five of us in it at once.
I’m acutely aware of how many people are currently concerned about me, and how every one of their faces reflects a different version of that concern.
Nadia looks like she’s one minute away from getting back in her car and driving to the studio.
Adrian has gone unnaturally still, which is somehow worse.
Bash is watching my face with the assessing gaze he uses when he’s reading what I’m not saying.
Elias has positioned himself slightly to my left, a grounding presence.
“Is there somewhere we could have a few minutes alone?” Nadia asks. She addresses the question to the group, but her eyes are on Adrian, who is closest.
“Of course.” He says it immediately. “There’s a sitting room off the hall. I’ll show you.”
Bash catches my eye before we move. “Are you okay with that?” he asks, his voice low, meant just for me.
“Yes,” I say.
He nods and steps back. It’s a small thing, being asked instead of being managed into a direction, but it matters more than I can say.
Elias doesn’t say anything. He just moves aside to let me pass.
Adrian leads us inside and directs Nadia to the sitting room. Then he retreats to the main room without lingering in the hallway or positioning himself where he could hear. Bash follows him while Elias closes the front door.
Nadia shuts the sitting room door behind us.
I hold it together for approximately thirty seconds. I’m not sure what breaks it. Maybe the door closing. Maybe the sudden privacy after hours of forcing myself to hold it together. Maybe just the fact that it’s Nadia and I don’t have to pretend.
I press the back of my hand against my mouth, and then I’m crying.
Not the dignified kind of tears I would absolutely prefer to be capable of right now.
I’m crying hard, in the way that means my chest is heaving and my face is doing things I can’t control.
The grief has been building since I stood across from the director and listened to him redistribute my entire professional contribution into the phrase enough material to complete the film.
I cry from humiliation. From exhaustion.
From the anger I couldn’t express in that meeting because expressing it would have handed everyone on that set exactly the narrative they were already half-constructing.
From grief, maybe, though I can’t fully name what I’m grieving yet.
From the deep, consuming terror that this is only the beginning of what's to come.
Nadia sits beside me on the small couch and says nothing. She puts one hand on my back and keeps it there, and she lets me go until I’ve tired myself out.
It takes a while.
“It was so kind,” I finally manage, my voice wrecked and strange to my own ears.
“That’s what I keep coming back to. He was being so genuinely kind about it, and it didn’t matter at all because the result was the same.
Now everyone on that set is going to treat me like I’m made of something fragile and breakable, and I could see it already starting to happen.
Someone asked me if I should really be logging fourteen-hour days like I haven’t been logging fourteen-hour days on every production for three years, and it’s going to follow me, Nadia.
This is going to follow me into every job, and I solved the prop continuity issue before eight in the morning.
I caught a scheduling overlap that would have cost them four hours—”
“I know,” she says.
“I keep trying to separate it,” I say, and the words are tumbling out now.
“The omega thing from me. Like there’s Maya, and then there’s the omega, and they’re two different problems, and if I can just manage the second one correctly, then the first one gets to stay intact.
But it’s not working. It stopped working, and I don’t know how to—“
I stop and wipe my face with the back of my hand.
“I don’t know how to be both things at the same time,” I admit.
Nadia is quiet for a moment. Then she shifts on the couch so she’s facing me more directly, and I recognize her expression. She’s done being patient.
“Maya,” she says. “You are the omega. The omega is you.”
I start to say something and she doesn’t let me.
“I know,” she says. “I know you keep trying to put them in separate boxes because it feels safer that way. If the designation is a separate thing from you, then you can keep the you that you built intact while the designation gets managed. But that’s not actually how this works and I think part of you already knows that. ”
I look at the floor.
“Your designation changed,” she says. “Your intelligence didn’t. Your ambition didn’t. Your instincts didn’t. The way you connect with people didn’t disappear overnight. The omega didn’t take those things from you. If anything, it’s probably amplifying parts of them.”