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"Like a man who's already read the last page."

Antonio held his gaze for one beat. Then he looked down at his glass. "My family's from Jalisco," he said. "I mentioned that."

Hakeem paused before continuing. "The tía."

"The tía." Antonio looked at his glass. "My Spanish is better than my English on most days. I just don't use it here."

"Why?"

Antonio looked at his glass for a moment. "Habit. Some things I keep closer than others."

The sentence arrived with an edge Hakeem recognized. Antonio didn’t sound bitter. But he recognized the scar tissue of something that had been bitter once and since reorganized into something harder and more private. Hakeem understood it.

"I get that," Hakeem said.

"I know you do."

The room had gotten darker while they talked. The lamp was still on, but the rest of the house shifted into the evening’s twilight and quieted around them. The whiskey was doing its slow work. Hakeem wasn’t impaired, but the altitude at which he usually flew was lower. He felt closer to the ground. Closer to Antonio, too, which was a different kind of descent.

Antonio poured them each another measure. Smaller this time. Careful, like everything he did.

"How are you?" Hakeem asked.

The question came out simpler than he intended—not how was your day, or what happened on that call, or any of the careful, coded versions he usually deployed. Hakeem was bare and sincere in a way that he normally protected himself from.

Antonio looked at him. His face shifted, and Hakeem watched the decision to let his guard down unfold. He was deciding whether to answer honestly. Whether Hakeem had earned it.

"Tired," he said finally. "I'm behind on something that matters, and I'm not writing well."

"The timeline thing."

"Related."

"Is it fixable?"

"Everything's fixable. Some of it just requires being a different person than the one you are when you sit down."

The words settled in him. It had nothing to do with Antonio's problems and everything to do with his own. Being a different person than the one you are when you sit down. That was the self-tape for After Amy, and every audition he'd been avoiding because the person who sat down was a bartender from Las Cruces. The person who needed to stand up was someone braver and less certain that the world had already decided about him.

"That's the most honest thing you've ever said to me," Hakeem said.

Antonio looked into his glass. "Don't get used to it."

"Too late."

The whiskey loosened the architecture of their dynamic without collapsing it. Hakeem was not drunk. He was honest-adjacent, sitting in a dim room with Antonio, and that felt worse. He'd been studying him for weeks and was currently feeling the warm blur of alcohol soften the edges of every reason he had to keep his guard up.

Antonio poured a third measure. Hakeem watched his hands. The left one, the writing hand, moved with the same controlled economy it always did, bottle tipped at precisely the angle needed and no further. Hakeem had seen that hand holding a pen in the dark. Had seen the slant of its script on manuscript pages describing a character who sounded like him in a house that felt like theirs.

"Can I ask you something?" Hakeem said.

"You've been asking me things all week."

"This one's different."

Antonio set the bottle down and looked at him. The lamplight caught one side of his face, leaving the other in shadow, which felt on-the-nose enough that Hakeem briefly cursed the electrical wiring of the house for its dramatic instincts.

"Go ahead," Antonio said.