Chapter 29
Elias
It feels wrong to drive to work without Maya.
It's only been a few days, but somewhere along the way it became routine.
Adrian rode with me this morning. An objectively inadequate replacement.
The absence remains noticeable when we arrive.
We step through the exterior door, and the set opens around us. I pause for a second to take it in.
It’s off. The rhythm is off.
I’ve worked enough productions to know what a floor sounds like at the start of a functional shooting day.
There’s a particular pattern to it. Conversations layer over one another without interruption.
People move between positions with the confidence of knowing exactly where they’re supposed to be and what comes next.
That pattern is missing this morning.
In its place is something looser. More reactive.
People hesitate at moments they normally wouldn't. Clusters form around equipment carts instead of dispersing. A PA I recognize from the second unit stands near the shot board with a clipboard in hand, staring at it with the expression of someone expecting to find a problem already solved.
I keep moving.
Near the prop area, two crew members are arguing about something in undertones. I catch the words mid-pass without stopping. “She always pre-sorts these before the first setup, that’s why we never have to—“ The other one cuts in: “I know, I know, just look through the box.” I don’t slow down.
The shot list situation is worse. I hear it mentioned three separate times in the first twenty minutes, always with the same helpless quality underneath it.
Where is the updated version?
Who has the updated version?
Did anyone check with—
The sentence trails off before anyone says her name.
Adrian is working, doing exactly what’s required of him.
But I’ve been paying attention to Adrian Wells for long enough to know what he looks like when he’s performing instead of being genuine.
The warmth he usually carries in his voice when he’s working with people is not there this morning.
He's present and technically doing everything right.
But there's a distance to him that wasn't there a week ago, and the people talking to him can sense it even if they can't explain what feels off.
The scheduling issue resurfaces around nine.
I’m near the east wall when I overhear the first assistant director on his phone, voice low, running through tomorrow’s call sheet with someone on the other end. He stops mid-sentence, says “wait,” and I watch him flip back three pages, then two more, then stop and push a hand through his hair.
“There was a continuity note somewhere about the location of the secondary camera for this setup,” he says. “I can’t find it. She usually has it already flagged before we get here.” A pause. He listens. “No, I know. I’m looking. I just— she usually has it already flagged.”
He doesn’t say her name either. He doesn’t need to.
The set functions. Nothing catastrophic happens.
But I keep watching, and the picture it draws is consistent: every system that runs smoothly on a normal morning runs smoothly because Maya ran it first. The continuity notes.
The prop organization. The updated shot lists.
The invisible pre-coordination between departments that nobody notices happening because it’s already complete before anyone arrives.
All of it traces back to her. Work being completed before anyone realized it needed to be done.
I step over a cable that’s been left in a high-traffic path. Someone would have moved it yesterday. I go around and keep walking.
The AD says it to a camera operator sometime before lunch, in the narrow corridor between the equipment room and the grip station. He says it quietly, almost to himself, the way people say things they’re ashamed they didn’t understand sooner.
“We didn’t realize how much she was handling.”
The camera operator makes a sound of agreement and they keep moving.
I don’t keep moving immediately. I stand there for a moment longer and let the truth of it settle into place.
She was afraid of this. She has been since the first morning her presentation made itself visible, the specific terror that becoming an omega meant the work would stop mattering.
That she’d stop being the person people called when something broke and start being the variable that needed managing.
The director thought he was protecting her.
He said so. He was very kind about it, apparently.
And this morning a first assistant director is standing in a corridor realizing out loud that they didn’t understand what they had.
She was right to be afraid. That’s the part that sits heaviest.
Adrian finds me during the long setup break when the lighting crew is rebuilding a rig and anyone without an immediate task has scattered to margins of the floor. He appears beside me near the storage corridor, and I know by the set of his shoulders what kind of conversation this is going to be.
“She slept,” I say, before he asks. “The whole night.”
He exhales. It’s small and carries more relief than he’d show anyone else. “Any symptoms shift overnight?”
“No increase. She was settled.” I think about the morning light in that room where we woke up. The way I knew she was awake before I opened my eyes. “She’s still thinking through it. But she’s not fighting herself the way she was last week.”
Adrian nods. His gaze moves out over the set, checking positions automatically. He does it the way I do, neither of us ever entirely off, and after a moment, he speaks again.
“How far out do you think we actually are from her heat?”
“Three days. Maybe less,” I say. “The blockers are doing less every day. The doctor confirmed as much. Her scent changes more every day.”
A muscle at the edge of his jaw moves. “She’s calmer when you’re near,” he says. He turns toward me now, which means the real conversation is starting. “She trusts you differently than she trusts us. I don’t say that as a complaint. I say it because it’s relevant.”
I wait.
“Bash and I talked last night,” he says.
“After you took her upstairs. We talked for a long time.” He pauses for a moment.
“We want you to move in. Permanently. Not because of the heat. And it’s not contingent on anything.
The life we’re building around her.” He meets my eyes.
“We want you to be part of it. Permanently.”
I don't answer immediately.
The offer hangs between us.
“You’ve been standing beside her like one of us from the beginning,” Adrian continues. “Bash and I aren’t interested in pretending otherwise anymore.”
The thing is, I already know my answer.
I've known it for a while, longer than I've had language for it.
The first night I spent on Maya's couch, I told myself it was practical. Temporary. She needed monitoring, and I was available.
That was true.
It just wasn't the whole truth.
By the third night, I was sleeping better on her couch than I'd slept in my own bed in months. By then, pretending that was only about convenience had stopped being convincing.
My apartment is a place I keep clothes. That’s about the most honest way I can describe what it’s become.
“Okay,” I agree.
Adrian waits, like he expected more.
“I mean it,” I say. “Yes. I’ll move in.”
Relief flickers across his face. With Adrian, that single nod says more than most people manage with a speech.
“There’s more,” he says.
“Her heat,” I say.
“Her heat.” He leans one shoulder against the wall. “Bonding. She hasn’t said she doesn’t want it. She also hasn’t said she does. I think the fear is still winning on that one, even now, even after everything.”
I think about her face this morning in the nest room.
The open quality of it, unfamiliar and very real.
The way she turned her face toward me when she woke up and held my eyes without immediately moving away.
Something had eased in her overnight. I could see it.
But ease and certainty are different things, and I don’t mistake one for the other.
“She’s not ready to make that call yet,” I say. “She’s closer than she was a week ago. But not ready.”
“The omega center,” he says. He says it the way you say something you’ve been avoiding.
A flash of disgust moves through me before I can stop it.
“I know,” Adrian says, reading my face. “I know. I felt the same thing when she mentioned it at the clinic.” His voice is even. “But that’s not the point.”
“No,” I agree.
“If she needs more time before she decides she wants this,” he says, “we give her more time. If the heat comes and she panics and she doesn’t want bonding, we support her through it without it.
If she needs us there and chooses not to bond, that’s still a choice she made.
She gets to make it.” He says it like it costs him something.
I know it does. “She keeps the choices. All of them.”
I sit with that for a moment.
It's the right position. I believe it. I also know it will require active effort from all three of us when her heat is actually upon her, when her scent fills the house and our instincts are louder than they've ever been.
The decision is easy to make now.
Holding to it then will be harder.
“She’ll feel the pull toward bonding,” I say. “When it’s actually happening. It may surprise her.”
“I know.” He rubs the back of his neck once. “I’m trying very hard to not get ahead of where she actually is. Which is difficult because emotionally we’re—“
He stops. Starts again.
“We already think of her as ours. I know that. Bash knows that. She doesn’t fully know it yet. And I’d rather she figure it out on her own terms than feel like she’s been decided for.”
That’s what it comes back to. Every time, from every angle. She needs to choose it herself. Not because of heat, not because of instinct pressure, and not because three alphas have already arranged their lives around her. But because she looked at this and decided she wanted it.
“She’s getting there,” I say. “She stayed the night. That matters.”
“Yeah,” he says. “It does.”
The set noise filters down the corridor toward us. Someone calls a setup position from the floor. Five minutes.
Adrian pushes off the wall and straightens his jacket.
He glances at me. “The guest room. Third door from Maya’s nest when you move in.
It’s already—“ He stops, something almost wry in his expression. “Bash started clearing space in the closet three days ago. In case you’re wondering whether the invitation is recent.”
I just look at him.
“He doesn’t do anything without thinking it through first,” Adrian says. “Neither do I.” He nods toward the set. “Come on.”
We come out of the corridor and back onto the production floor and the noise of it closes in around us.
Someone is mid-conversation about the continuity issue that surfaced this morning.
Three people are gathered around a monitor that wasn’t correctly positioned.
A PA moves past with an armful of binders and the expression of someone who has spent forty minutes looking for the original document and has finally decided to make copies of everything instead, just in case.
I scan the floor once, reading it the way I read every space. Exit positions, cable routing, who’s where, what’s in motion.
And then the specific thing I’ve been noticing all morning.
People keep glancing toward places she isn’t.
They aren’t aware that they’re doing it.
The first AD looks toward the shot board, and his eyes shift left to the edge of the frame, where there’s nothing, then back.
A camera operator finishing a setup pauses, turns slightly as if about to ask someone a question, and then stops because whoever he expected isn’t there.
A grip walks past the prop area, and his pace slows for exactly one step before picking back up.
The glances are small and unconscious, and they happen every few minutes, distributed across the floor in no particular pattern.
The involuntary reach toward a person who used to be everywhere on this set. The muscle memory of a production that learned to depend on someone and hasn’t adjusted to her absence.
I watch it happen, and I think about Nadia saying she’ll be back. The doctor saying the designation is a navigation problem, not a ceiling.
Maya will come back to this. Someone will hand her a call sheet again. Someone will ask where a continuity note is. Someone will realize they can't find something until Maya puts it in their hand. She'll do what she's always done.
And when she does, I won’t be on the other side of the city wondering how she’s managing.
The set is still running. People are still solving problems they shouldn’t have needed to solve, still catching up to systems that ran automatically before yesterday. Adrian takes his position for the next setup. I move to mine. The floor keeps moving.
I think about Maya's nest. The sound of her breathing as she fell asleep. The house dark and quiet around us, Adrian and Bash somewhere down the hall. All four of us under the same roof, and how ordinary it already felt.
Wherever she is from now on, I want to be there too.