Page 2 of Take Two

“I said I know,” I snap, sharper than I intend, the words escaping before I can weigh the consequences of them.

I brace for her to raise her voice, to pull out something from scripture about honor and respect, to make me feel smaller than I already do. It doesn’t come.

A brief silence crackles through the line. Then she exhales, softly, and the sound of it somehow hits me harder than anger would have.

“You sound irritated,” she says calmly. A little too calmly.

Because I’m twenty-four years old and my entire life feels like a performance I never once auditioned for, and I am standing in the lobby of a hotel that costs more per night than some people earn in a month, wearing cufflinks shaped like the career I don’t want, talking to the woman who loves me most in the world in a language that has never quite fit.

“Long day,” I say instead, carefully. “There’s a lot riding on all of this. It’s a lot of decisions to be making at once.”

“You were the one who chose to schedule all of your interviews within the same week,” she tsks disapprovingly. Like I had a choice.

No, you chose this. I want to say it plainly. The schedule was hers. The hotels were hers. The itinerary was printed and emailed to me like a boarding pass for someone else’s destination. She already absorbed one outburst though, and I know better than to spend what little goodwill I have left, so I bite the inside of my cheek until the copper taste of it grounds me back into my body.

The worst part, the part that keeps me from saying any of the things that actually live inside me, is that my mother genuinely believes she is helping. Mave Reed loves her sons with a ferocity that I’ve never once questioned. That love has never been the issue.

The problem is that her love arrives wrapped so tightly around expectation that eventually you can’t breathe beneath the weight of it. You can’t move without brushing up against the shape of the future she already decided was best for you before you had any say in the matter.

I watched it happen to Julian for years. His careful answers and his carefully rehearsed smiles. The way he slowly learned how to fold parts of himself away quietly every time our parents started talking about image and legacy and what the family name was supposed to represent. Julian spent the majority of his life trying to become the version of himself they wanted him to be rather than the one that actually made sense to him.

I love my brother more than anyone in this world. I don’t want that for myself. I hope that one day he finds his way out from underneath it too. Tonight, in this lobby, I am choosing something different. Even if I don’t know yet exactly what it is.

“You have another interview tomorrow morning at ten,” my mother says, her voice smoothing back into the efficient register she uses when she has a plan. “Your reservation has already been extended with the hotel. A car will collect you from the lobby at eight thirty.”

I stop walking.

Ahead of me, at the far end of the lobby, is the entrance to the hotel bar. Low amber light falls across dark wood floors through the glass. Soft jazz piano drifts through the open doorway alongside the quiet murmur of early evening conversations, unhurried and warm. The bottles of liquor behind the bar glow gold in the backlit shelving, and the people perched on stools and sitting in leather chairs look like they belong in a magazine spread.

More piano music is playing through the room, because of course in establishments like this, there’s no other instruments available to serenade its customers. Something that sounds like it could belong to Julian floats out of those speakers and the irony of it pulls the first genuine, unguarded smile out of me that I’ve managed all day.

For the first time since I landed in New York, something inside my chest loosens slightly. Just enough to breathe.

“You’re listening, aren’t you?” My mother’s voice cuts back through the moment cleanly.

“Yes, ma’am.” The words come out on their own.

“You can’t afford to lose focus right now, Cyaire. One impulsive decision, just one, can alter the trajectory of the rest of your life in ways you are not prepared to navigate.”

A laugh rises in my throat and I press my lips together to contain it before it escapes.

If only she knew.

Because the truth is, I’ve already made a life changing decision. It’s been sitting there for days, maybe longer, waiting for me to stop pretending I haven’t already made up my mind.

I’m done with medicine. Done pretending I want this. Done forcing myself through the paces of a future that feels emptier and more airless every single time someone congratulates me for how far I’ve come toward it. Done making every decision according to a blueprint that was drawn up before I was old enough to understand what I actually wanted, or who I actually was.

The second I get back to California, I’m applying to Berkeley’s acting program. Film, theatre, auditions, all of it. Everything that has lived in the back of my mind like a door I kept walking past but never opened. I don’t care if I have to start at the bottom. I don’t care if my parents look at me like I’m dismantling something precious and irreplaceable. Ruining my future, by their definition of it, sounds like considerably less suffering than spending the rest of my life trapped inside a version of myself I never chose.

Maybe they’ll never fully forgive me for it. Maybe they’ll look at me the way they’ve always looked at Julian on the days he failed to be exactly what they needed him to be. Even though my brother has given them nearly everything, bent over backwards to please them, and it’s never been enough. That specific look, patient and disappointed at once, is one I know by heart.

Maybe choosing something for myself means losing them in some significant way.

I think I can carry that. I think I have to.

“Cyaire?”

I surface back into the conversation and realize my mother has been speaking this entire time. I’ve completely checked out, my gaze fixed on the amber warmth spilling through the glass of the bar door.