Chapter 2 Rules of the House

Wren's POV

Wren didn't sleep well that first night. She kept the note on her nightstand, propped against a water glass, like leaving it out in the open might make it less strange. She read it again before she finally turned off the lamp, and again when she woke at three in the morning for no reason she could name, and by the time her alarm went off she had memorized every loop and slant of the handwriting without meaning to.

By morning she had a plan. Ask around. Keep it casual. Find out who else had access to that prompt book before assuming the worst. She showered, dressed, and told herself this was simply a strange first day, the kind every new job produced sooner or later.

The problem was, nobody at the Regatta Playhouse seemed to want to talk about anything from before this season, let alone a thirty year old scrap of paper with unsettling handwriting on it.

"Probably a prank," said Desmond, the props master, without even glancing up from the trunk he was inventorying. He was a wiry man in his fifties with a habit of talking around a pencil clenched between his teeth. "New stage manager, spooky old theater, somebody's messing with you. Happens every season to somebody."

"The handwriting looked old. Not like a student prank."

"Old paper's easy to find in a building like this." He shrugged, still not meeting her eyes. "Attic's full of it. Somebody probably found an old rehearsal page and thought it'd be funny to freak out the new hire. You want my advice, don't go digging around asking who wrote what. Just focus on getting the show up. Three weeks isn't a lot of runway for a revival this size, and the board's already nervous about the budget."

"You worked here back then? In ninety four?"

Desmond's pencil stilled between his teeth for half a second before he went back to counting props. "Long time ago. I don't remember much of it. Focus on the show, Wren. That's my advice, free of charge."

Wren let it go, for the moment, and threw herself into the actual job instead, which turned out to be its own kind of overwhelming. The cast was talented but rusty, the set pieces from thirty years ago needed serious repair, and Julian ran rehearsal like a man executing a checklist rather than directing a play he seemed to have any feeling about at all. He called blocking corrections in short, precise sentences, never raised his voice, never lingered on a scene longer than the schedule allowed. Wren had worked with plenty of controlled directors before. She had never worked with one who felt this carefully rehearsed himself, like every word he spoke had been chosen in advance and approved by some private committee only he could see.

He also, true to Nora's warning, never once sat in the house.

Every rehearsal, he took the same spot in the sound booth, watching through the glass, calling notes down through the headset instead of walking onto the stage floor like most directors Wren had worked with. It was efficient. It was also, Wren was starting to realize, deeply strange.

"Why the booth?" she finally asked him, during a break, when the cast had scattered for coffee and the stage sat empty between them. "Most directors like to be close. Feel the actors' energy."

"I see plenty from up here."

"That's not really an answer."

Julian's jaw tightened, just slightly, the same way it had the day before when she'd asked why the play closed early. He glanced toward the stage, then back at her, like weighing how much silence he could get away with this time.

"It's the answer you're getting."

"You told me to follow the blocking exactly as it's written. Why does it matter this much? It's just staging."

"It's not just staging." His voice dropped, quieter, like he was fighting the urge to say more than he meant to. "Some of it needs to stay exactly the way it was. That's all I can tell you right now."

"Right now. So there's more."

"There's always more." He said it like it cost him something just to admit that much, and then, before Wren could push further, he pulled his headset back on and called the cast back to places, done with the conversation as thoroughly as he'd been the day before.

Wren stood there a moment longer than she needed to, replaying his tone, the way his hand had briefly gripped the console rail before he let go of it. It wasn't nothing. Whatever he was protecting, it clearly weighed on him more than his careful voice let on.

Wren spent the rest of rehearsal watching him instead of the stage, half convinced the answer to everything, the note, the closed production, his refusal to sit in the house, all traced back to something he wasn't ready to say out loud. She caught herself doing it twice, staring at the back of his head through the booth glass instead of tracking her own cue sheet, and made herself stop before anyone else noticed.

At the end of the night, once the cast had cleared out and Julian had disappeared into his office without a word, Wren did one last walk of the stage to check the prop table against her list before locking up. The building felt different once it emptied out, quieter in a way that pressed against her ears, every settling board and distant pipe suddenly loud enough to notice.

Everything matched, except for one thing.

The small wooden trunk at center stage, the one Desmond had specifically told her not to move because it was fragile and original to the 1994 production, had been shifted three feet to the left.

Wren stood in front of it for a long moment, arms crossed, running through every person who had been in the building that evening. Cast, crew, Julian, herself. Nobody had touched that trunk, not that she'd seen, and she prided herself on seeing everything that happened on her watch.

Exactly where it sat in the blocking diagram from thirty years ago, the one drawn in handwriting Wren now recognized from the note on her nightstand.