***The Understudy***

**Chapter 1**

The call came at six forty seven pm.

Nadia was in the wings doing the thing she always did in the forty minutes before curtain — not pacing, not running lines, just standing in the dark at the edge of the stage and listening to the theatre breathe. The specific smell of it, dust and wood and the faint chemical ghost of last week's set paint. The sound of the audience settling into their seats on the other side of the curtain. The low hum of two hundred people who had paid to be here and were getting themselves ready to feel something.

She had been...