Confirm the mayor
Confirm the banner outside
Confirm the coffee care from Violet’s café
My eyes linger on that last one longer than the rest.
I look around the lobby. If someone had told me that I would be standing inside the fully restored Starlight Theater, preparing for its grand reopening, I probably would have laughed in their face.
When I first bought the building, it had been a shell of what it once was.
Dusty floors. Broken seats. Faded posters still clinging to the walls like ghosts of another time.
Most people only saw what it had become.
Empty. Forgotten. Too far gone to be worth the trouble.
But the bones were still there.
You just had to look past the damage long enough to see the structure underneath.
I understood that better than most.
Because when I first walked into this building. I wasn’t much different.
After years in LA, chasing a version of success that never quite felt like mine, I’d come back to Lavender Creek feeling like a stripped-down version of myself. The kind of tiredness that doesn’t come from work but from trying to be someone you aren’t for too long. This place felt familiar in that way. Both of us were a little worn down. A little neglected.
Still standing but not exactly thriving.
Renovations aren’t about erasing what something used to be. They are about uncovering what’s worth saving.
You sand down the rough spots. Replace the parts that can’t be fixed. Reinforce the foundation so everything built on top of it can actually last.
And slowly, sometimes so slowly you barely notice, it starts to look like something new.
Something better.
Standing in the middle of the finished lobby now, I can see every hour that has gone into bringing the theater back to life.
It looks nothing like the broken building I first walked into.
And in a lot of ways, neither do I.
“You’re doing that thing again.” Henry’s voice snaps me out of my thoughts.
I glance up to see him standing halfway up a ladder near the entrance to the screening rooms, adjusting the banner that reads:
