Selene walked away, smiling. Thorne stood still outside the stage door, his face unreadable, and then turned back toward the amphitheater. He didn't see Phoebe watching.
The fear underneath the possession was worse.
David Sterling told her she could be a star if she just let him shape her into something the industry wanted:You're not enough. You were never going to be enough. She came back for him because she knows what you're only starting to figure out. You're the temporary one. The performer who passes through. He's the one who stays. He'll be here long after you've taken your contract and your scrubbed voice back to Earth where you belong.
She knew it wasn't rational. She knew she could walk outside and ask him what Selene had said, what she wanted, and what the kiss on his cheek meant.
He would tell her if she asked.
She didn't move.
She performedthat night to a full amphitheater.
The show was technically perfect. Every note placed where it should be. Every phrase shaped by decades of craft. Every gesture calibrated, every breath controlled, every dynamic shift executed with the kind of precision that would have made her old vocal coach weep.
And it was hollow. She knew it. She hated it.
Her voice did what it always did when she was armored. It sat higher in her throat, trimmed where it should have sustained, delivered precision instead of truth. The instrument that had opened for Thorne, that had gone low and bare and real when his eyes were on her from the front-of-house rail, had closed again.
Because his eyes were not on her.
Thorne was at his post. He scanned the crowd with professional efficiency, left, center, right, balcony, repeat. His gaze returned to her face the way it returned to every sector. And then it moved on.
The absence of his attention that had been her anchor since opening night was the loneliest thing she had ever felt onstage.
After the show, he walked her home.
The festival wound down around them. Late vendors called their last orders into the cold. Strings of bioluminescent lights dimmed to their overnight glow, and the Eternal Pine pulsed slow and gold against the dark sky like something breathing. Their boots crunched on the vanilla-scented snow in a rhythm that had once been synchronized and was now just two people walking at the same speed.
Neither of them spoke.
At her door, her comm pinged. Her agent. Desperate now, the message all capitals and exclamation marks and the unmistakable panic of a commission slipping away.
THE WINDOW CLOSES IN AN HOUR!
WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!
She looked at the message. Then at Thorne.
His face was composed. His posture correct. His hands at his sides, not reaching for anything.
She made herself say the words. "I got a recording contract offer." Her voice remained level. "A major label. Earth-based. Studio access, touring schedule, promotional obligations. It’s the dream I organized my entire life around. It requires me to leave Evergleam. During the festival. Possibly permanently."
He did not move.
"I haven't decided. I don't know what I want." She swallowed. "I should have told you when I found out. I'm telling you now."
The vanilla snow fell around them in the quiet. A bioluminescent light on the nearest lamppost shifted from gold to soft green and back again, casting his pale features in alternating warmth and cold. The frost was visible at his collar, faint and barely there. It was the smallest tell that his discipline was holding, but not effortlessly.
She waited. Underneath the words, in the part of her that could not be performed away, she was hoping with a desperation that sat in her chest like a fist, that he would ask her to stay.
"You should take it."
His voice was steady. It held the flat, careful cadence of filing a report.
"This is the dream you organized your life around. It is real, and it is here, and you have earned it." A pause. "You should take it."
Phoebe stood at her threshold looking at the man whose truth-sense should make him incapable of hiding from her, the man whose frost bloomed involuntarily when his emotions outran his control. She could not tell whether he was giving her his honest blessing or building the most carefully constructed wall she had ever seen a person build.
