The line under Kit's name

The printout is Blu-Tacked to the staff door and I'm trying not to look at it every time I pass but obviously I'm looking at it every time I pass. Same paragraph. Same font. Kit gets Cabaret, I get second-from-top Showcase, and someone in marketing thought that was an elegant way to announce two careers on completely different trajectories. I drew a line under her name with so much pressure the pen nearly tore the paper. Rae saw it happen. She didn't say anything. She never says anything. That's why she's the only person in this building I trust.

The Clapham clip is coming and I know exactly which twenty-two seconds they'll use — the bit where I went slightly too long and the light on my face did something weird and I could feel the room doing math about whether to stay or go. Backstage Banter called it a courtesy heads-up like I should be grateful for the warning. I'm not grateful. I'm calculating whether twenty-two seconds is enough to ruin something or whether ruin is a stronger word than I can afford right now.

But the thing — the actual thing, the one I can feel in my chest right now sitting at the kitchen table with pasta going cold — is that I wrote something tonight. One line I didn't cross out. About Dad. About the kitchen table. About two years after he left when I thought leaving was the same as coming back just with different intentions. I wrote it and it was true and I left it there. That terrifies me more than the Clapham clip. That terrifies me more than Kit's name in the same paragraph.