Chapter 1 The Job - Cue the Dark

Wren's POV

The Regatta Playhouse looked smaller than its pictures online, and older, the kind of building that had settled into the ground instead of just sitting on top of it. Wren Castellane stood on the sidewalk with one suitcase and a box of scripts and told herself this was exactly what she wanted. A small town. A steady job. Distance.

Distance from the marriage that had ended so quietly nobody outside her family even knew to send flowers. Distance from the production in the city that had folded two weeks before opening and taken her name off every future call sheet with it.

She pushed open the theater's front doors and stepped into cool, dusty air that smelled like old velvet and older wood.

"You must be the new stage manager." A woman in her sixties came down the aisle wiping her hands on a smock covered in pins. "Nora Fitch. Costumes, mostly, though around here everybody does a little of everything."

"Wren. Nice to meet you."

Nora's handshake was firm, but her eyes kept flicking toward the stage like she expected someone to be standing on it. "They told you what you're walking into, right? Centenary season. Big revival. Biggest one this house has done in thirty years."

"The Drowning Room." Wren had read the season announcement twice on the train ride in, mostly because the title stuck with her in a way most play titles didn't. "I looked up the reviews from the original run. There weren't many."

Something crossed Nora's face, there and gone so fast Wren almost missed it. "There wouldn't be. That production only ran eleven nights."

"Why'd it close early?"

Nora's smile went thin. "You'll hear the story soon enough. Everybody does. Let me show you the booth."

They walked the house together, Nora pointing out sightlines and trap doors and a catwalk that swayed if you weren't careful with your weight. Wren liked the theater more with every step. It had good bones. It had history, even if that history came with a story nobody seemed eager to finish telling her.

"How long have you worked here?" Wren asked, mostly to fill the quiet as they climbed toward the booth.

"Since I was younger than you are now." Nora ran a hand along the worn wooden rail, fond and careful at once, like touching something breakable. "I've dressed every leading lady this house has had in thirty five years. Some shows you forget the second they close. Others stay with you."

"And this one stayed with you."

Nora didn't answer that directly. "You'll want comfortable shoes. Centenary season means long days, and the board wants this revival perfect. First time this house has felt full pressure in a long while."

At the back of the house, near the sound booth, a man stood with his arms crossed, watching the empty stage like it owed him something.

"That's Julian," Nora said, lowering her voice out of habit rather than necessity, since the man showed no sign of hearing them at all. "Voss family. His grandfather built this place. Julian's directing the revival himself."

"He doesn't look thrilled about it."

"He hasn't let anyone touch that play in thirty years. Word is the board had to practically beg him to finally do it for the centenary." Nora hesitated. "He doesn't sit in the house during rehearsals. Ever. Watches everything from the booth instead. You'll get used to it."

Wren filed that away the way she filed everything, in the part of her brain that noticed patterns other people walked right past.

She crossed the house to introduce herself, since ignoring the director on her first day seemed like a bad start to a new job. Up close, Julian Voss was younger than she'd expected from Nora's description, maybe early thirties, with the kind of careful stillness that made a room feel quieter just by standing in it.

"Wren Castellane. New stage manager."

He looked at her for a beat too long before answering, like he was deciding something. "Julian Voss." A pause. "You'll want the stage manager's book from the office. Second drawer. It has thirty years of notes in it from everyone who's held your job before you."

"Any advice, before I dive in?"

"Follow the blocking exactly as it's written. Don't improvise around this particular script." His tone stayed even, but something underneath it tightened. "It matters more with this one than most."

"Any particular reason?"

"You'll figure it out." He turned back to the empty stage before she could ask anything else, arms still crossed, like a man standing guard over something only he could see.

Wren spent the rest of the afternoon in the cramped stage manager's office, unpacking her own supplies and getting familiar with the building's quirks, the light switch that stuck, the radiator that clanged twice before it warmed up. The office itself felt like a time capsule, corkboards layered with decades of forgotten rehearsal schedules, a shelf of coffee stained binders nobody had bothered to sort. She liked it immediately, the way she liked any space that clearly belonged to the people who worked hardest and got noticed least.

Around six, with the theater emptied out for the night, she finally opened the drawer Julian had mentioned and pulled out the prompt book.

It was thick, held together with a cracked rubber spine, pages yellowed at the edges. Decades of stage managers had filled its margins with cue notes and blocking diagrams and the occasional coffee ring. Wren flipped through slowly, getting a feel for the house style, the shorthand everyone before her had used.

Near the middle of the book, tucked between two pages from a production that wasn't even the one she was working on, she found a folded scrap of paper that didn't match the rest. Newer than the surrounding pages, but the handwriting on it was old fashioned, careful, looping in a way nobody wrote anymore.

She unfolded it with careful fingers.

She never got to finish this one either. Neither will you.

Wren read it twice, her pulse picking up despite the empty, ordinary silence of the office around her. She checked the drawer again, the rest of the book, the desk. Nothing else out of place. No signature. No date.

She thought about calling someone, Nora maybe, or the theater's general manager, whoever might explain this away as an old prop from a previous show, a leftover line from a script nobody had bothered to throw out. But some part of her already knew that explanation wouldn't hold, not with handwriting that looked freshly pressed into the paper, not tucked exactly where the new stage manager would be certain to find it on her very first night alone in the building.

Just six words that felt less like a warning and more like a promise, sitting in a building where nobody would tell her why a play had closed after eleven nights thirty years ago, and a director who had spent three decades making sure nobody staged it again.