Chapter 4 Half a Truth

Wren's POV

Wren didn't remember deciding to run. She just remembered being in the parking lot with her keys already in her hand, phone still gripped tight, heart slamming so hard she could feel it in her ears. She didn't look back at the theater once, afraid that if she did, she'd see a light on somewhere it shouldn't be.

She sat in her car for a full ten minutes before she trusted herself to drive, and even then, she didn't go home. She drove three blocks to the address Nora had scribbled on a sticky note her first day, in case of emergencies, and knocked on Julian Voss's door at ten thirty at night without a plan for what she'd say when he opened it.

He opened it fast, like he hadn't been asleep, like he'd been waiting for something to happen all night and had simply been wrong about who it would happen to. He wore a plain gray shirt, hair slightly disheveled, none of the composed stillness he carried at the theater. For a second Wren almost felt bad for showing up this late, then remembered why she had.

"What's wrong?"

"The closet in the costume shop. The one Nora keeps locked." Wren's voice came out steadier than she felt. "It was open tonight. Odette's dress was hanging inside it. And before that, someone was humming in the wings, in a building I know was empty, because I checked."

Julian didn't ask her to repeat any of it. He grabbed his jacket off a hook by the door and was outside before she finished her sentence, moving with the kind of fast, controlled urgency that told Wren this wasn't news to him so much as confirmation of something he'd been dreading.

They drove back to the theater together in near silence. Julian let them in through the stage door, moved straight through the wings to the closet, which now stood locked again, exactly the way it had been every other time Wren had walked past it.

"It was open," Wren said. "I swear to you, it was open."

"I believe you." Julian's hand rested against the door for a moment, like he was steadying himself against it rather than checking the lock. "This isn't the first strange thing that's happened in this building. It won't be the last, if this season runs the way I'm afraid it might."

"Then talk to me. Actually talk to me, not the half sentences you've been giving me since day one."

He was quiet long enough that Wren thought he might just walk away again, the way he always did. She watched him instead of pushing, letting the silence stretch, sensing this was the kind of moment that broke faster with patience than with pressure. Instead, he leaned back against the wall, arms crossed, but this time it looked less like armor and more like exhaustion.

"I was fifteen the night Odette Marsh disappeared. My father ran this theater then. I was in the building, up in the catwalk, because I used to sneak up there during performances when I was supposed to be doing homework in the office." His voice stayed level, but something underneath it had gone raw. "I saw her leave the wings during intermission. I saw which door she went out. Nobody ever asked a fifteen year old kid what he saw that night. And by the time I was old enough for anyone to think to ask, the case was closed, the story was set, and telling the truth wouldn't have brought her back. It would have just reopened something my family had already decided to bury."

"What did you see?"

"That's the part I'm not ready to say yet." He held up a hand before she could argue. "Not because I don't trust you. Because I've spent eighteen years deciding what I'd do if this ever came up again, and I'm not there yet. I need you to accept that as an honest answer instead of a dodge."

Wren studied him, the tired set of his shoulders, the careful way he'd chosen every single word so far tonight. It wasn't the full truth. It was, at least, more than he'd given her before. She thought about pushing harder, the way she might have with anyone else, and decided against it. Something about the way he held himself told her that pushing too hard tonight would cost her more ground than waiting would.

"Okay," she said finally. "Half a truth. For now."

Something in his face eased, just slightly, like he hadn't expected her to take the deal. "Thank you."

"But someone got into a locked closet tonight and hung a dead woman's dress up like she was about to wear it again. That's not a story from eighteen years ago. That's happening right now, to me, in a building you insisted I follow exact blocking in for reasons you still won't fully explain."

Julian's expression sharpened, some of the exhaustion burning off into something closer to alarm. "Show me exactly where the trunk was moved to. Yesterday. You said it was shifted."

"How did you know about that? I never told you."

"I didn't." His eyes locked on hers, and for the first time since she'd met him, Wren watched Julian Voss look genuinely afraid, the composed director from rehearsal gone completely, replaced by someone closer to the frightened fifteen year old he must have been thirty years ago. "Which means whoever's doing this told me themselves, in the only way they seem to know how."

He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a folded slip of paper, same aged texture as the one from Wren's nightstand, same careful looping handwriting, left sometime that evening in a place only the two of them should have had reason to check.

It had Wren's name on it.

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