**Chapter Five: Center Stage**

Damian talked to the director the next morning, before company class, before Marisol could get there first. Nadia wasn't in the room for it — she heard about it secondhand, in fragments, the way everything in this building eventually reached her: through Priya, through the corps grapevine, through the sudden, strange silence that fell over rehearsal when the director walked in looking thoughtful instead of irritated.

What she knew for certain was this: by the end of the week, the casting sheet for the spring gala went up on the call-board with her name next to the lead, not Marisol's.

She stood in front of it...