Gabriel had imagined seeing his father again for eleven years.
Never like this.
Not with one sock on, his seventeen-year-old knees showing beneath a pair of old football shorts, Clara Byrne standing three feet away in his childhood bedroom, and his dead father’s voice travelling up the stairs to complain about the bus timetable.
“GABRIEL!”
The shout came again.
Alive.
Irritated.
Completely ordinary.
Gabriel forgot the audition.
He forgot the second locket clenched in his fist. Forgot the impossible hotel room in London, Miles’s birthday present leaning against a wall twenty-five years away, Clara seven months pregnant, and every headline that had spent the night cutting his name open for public inspection.
He ran.
“Gabe?”
Clara caught at his sleeve, missed, and followed him onto the landing.
Gabriel took the stairs too fast.
The Hart house had been small when he was growing up and had become smaller in memory. Now it rose around him in brutal, perfect detail: the faded runner his mother had threatened to replace for six consecutive years, the nick in the banister where Gabriel had crashed a toy car at eight, a school photograph of him with ears he had eventually grown into, the brass-framed Sacred Heart image Margaret kept mostly because her own mother had given it to her and partly, she claimed, because no one in the house behaved well enough to risk removing Jesus from supervision.
At the bottom of the stairs, Daniel Hart stood in the kitchen doorway holding a slice of toast.
Gabriel stopped so hard Clara nearly collided with his back.
Daniel was forty-six.
Gabriel knew that because he remembered this morning now.
Not as a magical event. As history.
His father had been forty-six the year Gabriel auditioned for drama school. Thick dark hair beginning to grey at the temples. Heavy shoulders from thirty years of lifting timber. A shallow white scar across the left thumb from a circular saw. A face weathered earlier than it should have been by cigarettes he had quit and outdoor jobs he had not.
Daniel wore his work trousers even though it was Saturday because Daniel wore work trousers to weddings if Margaret did not intercept him in time.
He had Marmite on his toast.
Gabriel had forgotten his father liked Marmite.
That nearly broke him.
Daniel chewed once.
“Why are you looking at me like I owe you money?”
Gabriel’s mouth opened.
Nothing came out.
Daniel glanced at Clara behind him.
“Has he taken something?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Good. Too early for drugs.”
“Da.”
One syllable.
Gabriel had said it thousands of times.
At football matches. From the back seat of cars. Across dinner tables. On the telephone. Once in a hospital room where Daniel had been too breathless to answer.
Da.
Daniel looked back at him.
“What?”
Gabriel crossed the hallway and threw both arms around him.
The toast fell.
Daniel made a noise somewhere between outrage and suffocation.
“Jesus Christ!”
Gabriel held on.
His father smelled of shaving soap, tea and wood dust.
Wood dust.
There it was.
A smell Gabriel had spent eleven years trying and failing to find in old jackets, toolboxes, the workshop Margaret eventually sold, and one ridiculous bottle of aftershave he bought online because the description included cedar.
None of it had been right.
This was right.
Daniel was warm.
Solid.
Annoyed.
Alive.
“Gabriel,” Daniel said, voice muffled against his shoulder. “You’re crushing my liver.”
Gabriel laughed into his father’s neck and the laugh became a sob halfway out.
Daniel’s hands, which had been held awkwardly away from Gabriel as if he were being arrested by an emotional octopus, settled slowly against his back.
“Ah, son.”
That was worse.
Gabriel closed his eyes.
“You’re here.”
Daniel pulled back enough to see his face.
“Where else would I be?”
Dead.
Under a yew tree in Glasnevin Cemetery beneath a headstone Margaret had rejected twice because the first engraver misspelled Daniel’s middle name and the second suggested an angel Daniel would have considered “fierce showy.”
Gabriel could see the funeral.
Rain on black umbrellas.
Clara holding his hand so tightly he lost feeling in two fingers.
Lucy, two years old, asleep against Margaret’s sister Eileen because nobody could explain death to a child who still expected Grandad to return from every closed door.
Gabriel stared at Daniel’s face.
“I missed you.”
Daniel’s expression changed.
A joke began somewhere and thought better of it.
“I’m in the kitchen most mornings.”
“I know.”
“You’ve only been upstairs twenty minutes.”
“I know.”
Daniel touched Gabriel’s forehead.
“No temperature.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re crying on me before eight on a Saturday. That is not our working definition of fine.”
Behind Gabriel, Clara said softly, “He’s been strange since I came in.”
Daniel looked past him.
“Stranger than normal?”
“Considerably.”
“That’s serious.”
Gabriel laughed despite himself.
Daniel smiled.
The smile was slightly crooked.
Gabriel had inherited it.
Millions of people would eventually recognise that smile as part of Gabriel Hart’s face without ever knowing it belonged first to a Dublin carpenter who considered Shakespeare suspicious and theatre tickets overpriced.
Footsteps sounded from the kitchen.
“What in God’s name is happening out here?”
Margaret Hart appeared wearing a blue dressing gown over a blouse and skirt, one earring in and one held between two fingers.
Gabriel looked at his mother.
She was forty-six.
Her hair was dark.
Not dyed-dark. Dark.
There were fewer lines around her mouth. No reading glasses hanging from a chain. No careful stiffness in her left knee when she turned.
He had spoken to seventy-one-year-old Margaret less than twenty-four hours ago.
You absolute gobshite.
Now she looked at him and frowned.
“Why are you crying?”
Gabriel crossed the hall.
Margaret put up a hand.
“No. Whatever you’ve caught, keep it. I’ve work at ten.”
He hugged her anyway.
“Gabriel!”
“Morning, Mam.”
“You’ve seen me every day of your natural life.”
“I know.”
“Then develop some restraint.”
But she hugged him back.
Of course she did.
Margaret always complained first and loved second, as if affection needed plausible deniability.
Gabriel pressed his cheek against her hair.
She smelled of Pond’s cold cream and toast.
He had forgotten that too.
“I love you.”
Margaret went still.
Then she pushed him away and stared at Daniel.
“He’s definitely on drugs.”
“Too early,” Daniel said.
“For drugs?”
“That’s what I said.”
“There is no appropriate breakfast hour for heroin, Daniel.”
“I meant age.”
“That’s not better.”
Clara made a choking noise behind them.
Gabriel looked over.
She was trying not to laugh.
Seventeen.
Rain in her hair.
The silver locket resting at the base of her throat.
His silver locket - hers, twenty years older - was still in his fist.
He shoved his hand into the pocket of his shorts before anyone noticed.
Margaret pointed at the kitchen.
“Eat. Both of you. You’ll miss the bus.”
“I’m not hungry,” Gabriel said.
Three people stared at him.
Daniel picked up his fallen toast from the floor, examined it, and put it in the bin.
“Definitely drugs.”
“He doesn’t eat when he’s nervous,” Clara said.
Gabriel looked at her.
She shrugged.
“You don’t.”
No ceremony.
No grand declaration that she understood him.
Just a fact.
You don’t eat when you’re nervous.
Twenty-five years from now, Clara would know hundreds of facts like that.
Which side he slept on.
How to tell stage nerves from real panic.
That he hated being touched in the ten minutes before a live television appearance and wanted her hand on his knee the instant it ended.
That success made him restless rather than calm.
That he always lost keys in coat pockets.
That he became absurdly sentimental when drunk.
She would know everything about him.
He had once known almost everything about her.
When had the balance changed?
“Gabe.”
Clara’s eyebrows lifted.
“Toast.”
He followed them into the kitchen.
The room was painfully familiar.
Yellow cupboards Daniel had built himself because the old ones were “daylight robbery.” A square pine table scarred by homework, hot pans and Gabriel carving his initials underneath at twelve. A kettle with a whistle instead of a switch. The little radio Margaret listened to while cleaning.
On the refrigerator, held by a souvenir magnet from Bray, was Gabriel’s audition letter.
His stomach turned.
DUBLIN CONSERVATORY OF DRAMATIC ARTS.
AUDITION: SATURDAY, 9:30 A.M.
He remembered the place under another name because it would merge and rebrand years later, but at seventeen it had seemed to him like Mount Olympus with central heating.
He had wanted this.
God, he had wanted it.
Clara went straight to the counter and began making tea as if she lived there.
In many ways, she had.
Margaret put two slices of bread into the toaster.
“Your monologue in the folder?”
Gabriel stared.
Clara answered for him.
“Yes.”
“Photograph?”
“Yes.”
“Bus fare?”
Clara tapped the pocket of her coat.
“Yes.”
Margaret looked at her son.
“Anything you’re responsible for yourself?”
Gabriel opened his mouth.
Clara said, “Hair.”
Daniel snorted.
Gabriel touched his head.
There was so much of it.
“What is wrong with my hair?”
All three answered at once.
“Nothing.”
Which meant everything.
Clara put a mug in front of him.
Two sugars.
He had taken two sugars at seventeen.
He had forgotten.
At forty-two, he drank coffee black because a trainer on his second major film told him sugar made him sluggish and Gabriel, eager to become the version of himself success required, had stopped without thinking.
He lifted the tea.
Sweet.
Milky.
Home.
“Your shirt,” Margaret said.
Gabriel looked down.
“What about it?”
“You cannot audition looking like you were evicted from your own wardrobe.”
“It’s fine.”
“It was on your floor.”
“That doesn’t make it dirty.”
Clara looked at Margaret.
“I brought the ironed one.”
Gabriel stared at her.
Clara nodded toward a canvas bag beside the door.
Memory struck.
The shirt.
Margaret’s good iron had broken the previous night. Clara had taken Gabriel’s only decent white shirt home with her, ironed it before school on Friday, and brought it back Saturday morning.
Such a small thing.
He had told the story in interviews years later.
My wife ironed my audition shirt.
Audiences always sighed.
A charming origin story.
He had polished it into anecdote until the labour disappeared.
Seventeen-year-old Clara had taken his shirt home because seventeen-year-old Gabriel had not prepared properly for the single most important morning of his life.
She had prepared for him.
Again.
Gabriel put down the tea.
“Clara.”
“What?”
“Thank you.”
She frowned.
“For what?”
“The shirt. The folder. Bus fare. All of it.”
Her suspicion increased.
“Have you joined a cult overnight?”
Daniel pointed with his mug.
“I said drugs. Your theory has legs.”
“I’m serious.”
Clara looked at him for a beat.
Then shrugged.
“You’d do it for me.”
Gabriel could not answer.
Would he?
At seventeen, yes.
At twenty-two, absolutely.
At thirty-two, probably, if production did not run late.
At forty-two, an assistant might have found someone to iron the shirt and Gabriel would have considered the problem solved.
Clara misread his silence.
“You’re going to be fine.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do.”
“How?”
She leaned one hip against the counter.
“Because you’re very irritating when you’re frightened.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It is if you’ve known you since September.”
September.
They had known each other less than a year.
The fact nearly stopped his heart.
In Gabriel’s mind, Clara had always been there.
But no.
There had been a before.
Months, not years, separated this kitchen from the day seventeen-year-old Clara Byrne had first looked across a classroom and decided Gabriel Hart was showing off because he was insecure.
Twenty-five years of history sat inside his body.
She had five months.
And she already knew he didn’t eat when nervous.
Margaret glanced at the clock.
“Seven fifty-three.”
Clara straightened.
“We need to go.”
Gabriel’s pulse jumped.
The audition.
His first instinct was absurd.
He didn’t need it.
He had already done it.
He knew he got in.
He knew the training would lead to a touring play, then a small television role, then London, then years of rejection, then a supporting part that changed everything.
He knew exactly what waited on the other side of this door.
Fame.
Money.
Lucy.
Miles.
Elva.
Jude.
Nicole.
Clara crying under premiere lights.
The same road held all of it.
For one terrible second Gabriel wanted to stay in the kitchen.
Refuse the audition.
End the chain here.
No fame.
No arrogance.
No Nicole.
No broken family.
But the thought had barely formed before three small faces rose in his mind.
Lucy, thirteen, furious and brilliant.
Miles in a navy suit asking if Daddy would still come Saturday.
Elva asleep in his university shirt because it smelled like him.
And Jude, not yet born, kicking beneath Clara’s hand.
Erase the road and he might erase them.
Gabriel’s hand went instinctively to the locket hidden in his pocket.
No.
Whatever this was, it did not belong to him enough to gamble with his children’s existence.
“Gabe?”
Clara stood by the door.
He looked at her.
“I’m coming.”
Daniel clapped his shoulder as he passed.
“Break a leg.”
Margaret glared.
“Don’t tell him that.”
“It’s theatre.”
“It’s stupid.”
Daniel smiled at Gabriel.
“Don’t be shite, then.”
Margaret slapped his arm.
“Daniel!”
Gabriel laughed.
His father opened the door for them.
Cold Dublin rain blew into the hall.
Gabriel stepped onto the path.
Then stopped.
He turned.
Daniel was already bending to retrieve the newspaper.
“Da.”
Daniel looked up.
Gabriel wanted to tell him.
Stop smoking even though you already have.
Get the pain checked earlier.
Don’t ignore the cough.
Take the blood pressure tablets every bloody day, not only when Margaret is watching.
Go to the doctor before the heart attack turns a future Christmas into the last one.
Eleven years ago, Daniel Hart had died three days after telling Gabriel the indigestion was nothing.
Gabriel had believed him.
Because sons believed fathers when fathers promised they were fine.
Daniel frowned.
“What?”
Gabriel couldn’t change everything in a doorway because grief had made him greedy.
Not yet.
Maybe not ever.
“Love you.”
Daniel stared.
Margaret, behind him, said, “Again?”
Daniel’s mouth twitched.
“Go get your bus, you strange little bastard.”
Gabriel smiled.
“Right.”
He walked away before his father could see him cry.
Clara caught up beneath one umbrella.
“You are genuinely terrifying today.”
“I’ve had a strange night.”
“Dream?”
Gabriel looked at her.
Twenty-five years.
A hotel.
Their children disappearing from a phone screen one by one.
“Something like that.”
She handed him the umbrella because he was taller.
“Hold this.”
He took it.
The gesture was so automatic that his chest tightened.
They walked toward the bus stop shoulder to shoulder.
Dublin twenty-five years earlier moved around him like a film set nobody had dressed correctly because it was too accurate.
Cars he had forgotten existed.
Shop signs long gone.
A newsagent selling papers through an open doorway.
A teenager on a bicycle with a Walkman clipped to his jeans.
No one looking at Gabriel.
No phones lifting.
No double takes.
Nobody knew him.
The anonymity felt enormous.
Clara nudged him.
“You’re doing it again.”
“What?”
“Looking at everything like you’ve never seen a road.”
“Maybe I haven’t.”
“Excellent. A breakdown before the audition. Very efficient.”
He laughed.
They reached the shelter.
A bus was already visible at the far end of the road.
Clara pulled two coins from her pocket and pressed one fare into Gabriel’s palm.
He looked down.
“No.”
“What?”
“Keep it.”
“Gabe, you have no money.”
He checked his pockets.
She was right.
Of course.
Seventeen-year-old Gabriel Hart had forty-two-year-old guilt and no bus fare.
“I’ll pay you back.”
“You say that every time.”
“Do I owe you money?”
Clara said nothing.
“Three pounds forty.”
“That’s all?”
“All?”
He nearly told her a coffee would eventually cost more.
Instead he closed his fingers around the coin.
“I’ll pay you back.”
“When you’re famous.”
The bus pulled up with a hydraulic sigh.
Clara climbed aboard.
Gabriel stood on the pavement.
When you’re famous.
She had said it as a joke.
He followed her.
They sat upstairs near the front because Clara liked seeing where they were going and Gabriel liked pretending it didn’t make him carsick.
Rain streaked the windows.
Clara took the folder from her bag.
“Run it.”
Gabriel groaned.
“Now?”
“Yes, now.”
“On the bus?”
“Whisper.”
“Shakespeare should not be whispered.”
“Your Hamlet sounds like he’s trying to wake a neighbour. He’ll survive.”
Gabriel stared at the page.
Hamlet.
Of course.
He had auditioned with Hamlet because at seventeen Gabriel Hart possessed exactly the amount of ego required to think nobody had ever properly considered What a piece of work is a man until he arrived.
Clara tapped the paper.
“Start.”
He knew the speech.
Not from memory.
From work.
Gabriel had played Hamlet at thirty-four in a limited West End run that sold out before previews and nearly destroyed his voice.
He knew every hesitation, every trap, every cheap choice a young actor made when trying to sound profound.
He could perform the speech now at a level seventeen-year-old Gabriel should not be capable of.
That frightened him.
If he walked into the audition carrying twenty-five years of professional craft, what would change?
Everything?
Nothing?
Would they recognise something impossible?
Would success arrive earlier?
Would he distort the road that led to Lucy?
Clara waved a hand in front of him.
“Earth.”
Gabriel lowered the page.
“I don’t want to do it like I know how.”
“You don’t know how. That’s why you’re auditioning for school.”
He laughed.
She frowned.
“What’s funny?”
“Nothing.”
“You’re going to make that face in there and they’ll think you’re concussed.”
“What face?”
“The one where you look like you’ve been told the ending of a film nobody else has seen.”
Gabriel looked out the window.
Too close.
“Clara.”
“Mm?”
“Why are you doing this?”
“Doing what?”
“All of it.”
She glanced around the bus.
“Public transport? My mother says character building.”
“Helping me.”
Clara’s teasing expression softened.
“Because you’re good.”
“Lots of people are good.”
“You’re better than good.”
The certainty in her voice embarrassed him even with a middle-aged man’s memories.
“You don’t know that.”
“I do.”
“How?”
She thought.
“Because when you stop trying to impress people, they stop looking at you and start looking at whatever you’re talking about.”
Gabriel went still.
She shrugged, suddenly self-conscious.
“That’s acting, isn’t it?”
He stared at her.
Forty-two-year-old Gabriel had been interviewed by great directors, critics, professors, journalists who used phrases like emotional transparency and transformative presence.
Nobody had ever described his gift more accurately than a seventeen-year-old girl on the upper deck of a Dublin bus.
“Yeah,” he said. “That’s acting.”
“Good. Then do that.”
“Do what?”
“Stop showing them you can act. Tell them something.”
Gabriel looked down at the monologue.
He remembered an acting teacher saying almost exactly that six months from now.
Clara had said it first.
How many pieces of himself had he later credited to mentors, directors, experience, when Clara had been there before the language became sophisticated?
“Run it,” she said.
This time he did.
Not as forty-two-year-old Gabriel Hart.
Not as the man who had played Hamlet before critics and television cameras.
He let his seventeen-year-old voice remain uncertain.
He stumbled once.
Clara stopped him.
“You’re performing sadness.”
“Hamlet is sad.”
“People don’t announce they’re sad while they’re sad.”
“He’s literally talking about his feelings.”
“Then make him embarrassed by them.”
Gabriel stared at her.
“What?”
“You’re embarrassed when you’re frightened. You get sarcastic. Maybe he’s doing the olden-days version.”
Gabriel began laughing.
“Olden-days version?”
“You know what I mean.”
“Shakespeare will be gutted he missed your notes.”
“Shakespeare is dead.”
“Cold.”
“Useful. Start again.”
He did.
And for the first time that morning, Gabriel forgot the future for almost a minute.
The bus rolled toward the city.
Clara watched him.
At seventeen, she had not yet kissed him.
He remembered that suddenly.
Their first kiss was six weeks away.
May.
After an end-of-term party neither of them enjoyed.
Clara would walk him halfway home. It would rain - naturally, because apparently Dublin had supervised their romance for thematic consistency. They would argue about whether he had flirted with a girl named Aisling. Gabriel would say Clara sounded jealous. Clara would tell him he was unbearable. He would ask if she wanted to kiss him. She would say no.
Then do it anyway.
Gabriel looked at her mouth.
Clara caught him.
“What?”
He looked immediately at the script.
“Nothing.”
“You’re blushing.”
“I’m not.”
“You are.”
Forty-two years old inside seventeen-year-old skin and she could still reduce him to this.
“It’s warm.”
“It’s February.”
“Bus is warm.”
“Bus is freezing.”
“Can we rehearse?”
Clara grinned.
“Coward.”
He loved her.
The knowledge arrived without revelation.
Of course he loved her.
At forty-two, even after Nicole, even after arrogance, even after the premiere, that had never been the uncertain part.
But this was different.
He loved this Clara too.
Not because she would become his wife.
Not because she would give him children.
Not because he already knew every version of her that came later.
He loved the girl sitting beside him with ink on the side of her hand and rainwater drying at the shoulders of her coat, spending her Saturday morning getting him to an audition for a future that had nothing obvious in it for her.
He had loved her before he knew what love was asking him to protect.
The bus reached the city centre.
They got off near O’Connell Street and walked south.
The conservatory occupied a Georgian building with tall windows and a blue door.
Gabriel saw it from half a block away.
His body remembered before his mind did.
His palms went damp.
His stomach dropped.
Clara kept walking.
Gabriel slowed.
There were young people gathered outside.
Older than him, some of them.
Confident.
Folders under arms.
Black clothes.
One boy was doing vocal warm-ups under an archway with the self-importance of a man preparing to address Parliament.
Seventeen-year-old Gabriel’s old terror returned intact.
Not fear of failure.
Fear of being ridiculous for wanting it.
That was the first wound ambition gave him.
The possibility that everybody else had silently agreed he was ordinary and he had simply failed to notice.
Clara reached the steps.
Gabriel stopped on the pavement.
She turned.
“No.”
He stared.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“I know that face.”
“What face?”
“You’re leaving.”
Memory slammed into him.
This was it.
The moment.
The one Margaret had described on the phone twenty-five years later.
The one Gabriel had turned into a polished interview anecdote.
I nearly walked away. Clara wouldn’t let me.
He had remembered himself frightened.
He had forgotten how young Clara looked while saving him.
“I’m not ready,” he said.
The words belonged to seventeen.
Clara came back down one step.
“Nobody is.”
“They’re all better than me.”
“You haven’t heard any of them.”
“Look at them.”
She looked.
The vocal-warm-up boy trilled his lips dramatically.
Clara turned back.
“That one sounds like a motorbike refusing to start.”
Gabriel laughed despite himself.
“Clara.”
“What?”
“I can do this another year.”
“No.”
“I’m seventeen.”
“Exactly. You have less dignity to lose.”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I.”
She stepped onto the pavement in front of him.
“You filled out the form.”
Gabriel winced.
“You filled out most of the form.”
“You signed it. Eventually.”
“Exactly. This is a sign.”
“Of illiteracy?”
“Clara.”
She grabbed the lapels of his coat.
Not romantic.
Functional.
“Listen to me.”
Gabriel did.
Her eyes were grey-green in this light.
Had he remembered them that colour?
He had spent years telling interviewers Clara’s eyes were green.
They weren’t.
Not exactly.
Grey first.
Green when light caught them.
How had he flattened even that?
“You want this,” she said.
His throat tightened.
“I know.”
“No. You want it enough that you’ve made the rest of us listen to you talk about it for five months. So now you have to do the inconvenient part.”
“Which is?”
“Try.”
He looked at the blue door.
She shook his coat once.
“You don’t get to decide the ending before you’ve even walked through the bloody door.”
There.
Exactly.
The sentence that had followed him through the impossible darkness from London.
Gabriel stared at her.
Clara mistook his expression for terror.
Her grip softened.
“Gabe.”
He looked at the girl who would become Dr. Clara Hart.
Consultant paediatrician.
Mother of Lucy, Miles, Elva and Jude.
The woman who would build a home around his absences until the architecture exhausted her.
She had no idea what waited behind this door.
Neither had she asked for guarantees.
She was simply asking him to be brave enough for one morning.
Gabriel covered her hands with his.
“If I get in…”
Clara smiled.
“When.”
“If.”
“Fine. If.”
He remembered what came next.
The sentence.
He had told it to her here.
He had meant it for twenty-five years without understanding it.
“If anything ever happens for me,” he said, voice unsteady, “it’ll be because you got me through that door.”
Clara rolled her eyes.
“Then become very successful. I want credit.”
Gabriel laughed through tears.
“I’m serious.”
“Terrible habit.”
“Clara.”
She looked at him.
He wanted to say thank you for Lucy.
For Miles.
For Elva.
For Jude.
For every night shift followed by a school morning.
For every suitcase she helped pack and every return she made feel like home.
For the marriage before he damaged it.
For being seventeen and already carrying more of his future than either of them knew.
He couldn’t.
Not yet.
So he said the only true thing small enough to belong to this morning.
“I’m glad you’re here.”
Clara’s face softened.
“Course I am.”
As though there had never been another possibility.
She released his coat and pointed toward the door.
“Go.”
Gabriel climbed the steps.
At the top, he looked back.
Clara had already taken his folder from her bag.
She held it up.
“You forgot this.”
Of course he had.
Gabriel laughed.
She brought it to him.
“See? You’d last six minutes without me.”
The joke should have been harmless.
Instead, it reached across twenty-five years and found the exact wound.
Gabriel took the folder.
“I lasted longer.”
Clara frowned.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
A woman opened the blue door.
“Gabriel Hart?”
His name.
Not famous.
Not shouted.
Not printed thirty feet high above Leicester Square.
Just a name on a list.
Gabriel looked at Clara.
She gave him a tiny shove between the shoulder blades.
“That’s you, genius.”
He crossed the threshold.
The corridor beyond smelled of dust, old radiators and floor polish.
Students’ voices echoed somewhere upstairs.
The woman led him toward a rehearsal room.
Gabriel’s pulse hammered.
He had walked through thousands of doors since this one.
Studio gates.
Theatre entrances.
Hotel suites.
Award stages.
Delivery rooms.
The front door of the house where his children slept.
A private terrace in Prague where Nicole Fraser had waited for him.
He had spent half his life believing the important doors announced themselves.
They didn’t.
Most were ordinary.
Blue paint.
A brass handle.
Someone you loved behind you saying go.
The audition room waited at the end of the corridor.
Gabriel stopped outside it.
His hand tightened around the folder.
In his pocket, the future locket warmed suddenly against his thigh.
Once.
Like a pulse.
Gabriel looked back.
Through the glass panel at the far end of the corridor, he could still see Clara outside beneath the awning.
She had not left.
Of course she hadn’t.
She stood in the rain waiting for him.
The woman opened the audition-room door.
“Mr. Hart?”
Gabriel looked forward.
Twenty-five years of life waited behind him.
Another twenty-five waited ahead.
For the first time, he understood they were not the same thing.
He stepped inside.