The theatre smelled the exact way he remembered: rosin on the floorboards, the faint metallic tang of old lighting rigs, the ghost-lint scent that lived in velvet curtains. It was a smell that could make the past bloom like a pressed flower in glass. Ethan stood in the back of the room, arms folded, listening to the dull thud of young bodies warming up and thinking of how many times he had watched the same ritual unfold in his first life — the whispered jokes, the nervous stretches, the false bravado. Nineteen-year-olds still pretended they weren't terrified; eighteen-year-olds still tried to act as if the world owed them attention. He had been both once. Now, with a thirty-eight-year archive of failure and ache lodged behind his ribs, he felt the strange luxury of watching fear with the calm of an anthropologist.
Mary Holden moved like someone who had always belonged to stages: clipped stride, bun that never quite unravelled, a voice that cut through chatter the way a baton cuts through air. She was already giving notes to a pair of students about projection when her eyes snagged on Ethan in the back row. He could feel her glance like a minor current. It was the same look as before — teacher sizing up a body for truth. He felt a moment of old shame — the memory of trembling hands, the dry throat on that first monologue years ago — but it passed quicker than it would have then. He had rehearsed this moment in the quiet of the night, rehearsed steadiness into his jaw, steadied the heartbeat behind his ribs.
"Alright," Mary said, and the room quieted, not because she demanded it so much as because everyone expected the teacher to be the centre of gravity. "Circle up. Warm up voices. Ethan — sit forward. I want to see you when I call names."
Ethan folded the blanket of nerves tighter around his shoulders and settled into an upholstered seat. He watched the kids: a lanky boy trying to do tongue twisters and failing with a grin, a girl speaking Shakespeare from memory as if the lines were personal correspondence, two others translating an improv exercise into quiet, private masterpieces. He felt a softness watching them; their earnestness touched a place inside him that old failures had tried to calcify. He wanted to shelter them. He also wanted to be them — to feel first-try hope instead of the brittle ache of second-chance pressure.
Mary started with physical warm-ups. Heads rolled. Shoulders pumped. Voices slid into range like actors loosening chains. She moved through the room correcting posture, coaxing breath, circling like a careful surgeon. When she reached him, she touched his shoulder as if diagnosing muscle tension. "You've been working out," she said, not a question. "Good. Presence is muscle. Don't let it slack."
He managed a small smile. "Been… practising."
She studied him a second longer, then nodded. "Good. We'll begin with monologues today. Everyone, pick something that scares you. Scared is usually true in here."
The assignment caught the class like a current. Several students muttered under their breath, flipping through scripts. Ethan sat very still. His pocket felt heavy — the folded sides he had brought in, pages he had scrawled on in a hand that had once trembled with a different kind of fear. He thought of the monologue that had haunted him through his first life, the one he'd stumbled through and then swore never to perform that way again. It was a raw, aching piece about a man who had lost everything and lied to everyone; at the time, he had been too young to carry it. Now, that emotional weight was part of his inventory.
Mary called names, sending her students to the small stage two at a time. One by on,e they stepped up: a teen boy spilt a flood of words and then grinned as if relief had been born; a girl let the last line hang like a distant, fragile star; applause rose small and honest. He counted the students as they performed, and the list of names shortened toward the end. He could hear the oxygen in his own lungs, the minute rasp at the cadence of his pulse.
Then Mary pointed at him.
"Ethan Hale," she said, and the way she said his name made something that could have been fear feel like a recognised obligation. "You."
The room fell into a softer silence for him than for the others. He walked out under the lights and felt the boards respond to his weight the way an old friend remembered old steps.
"State your name," Mary instructed, as if testing his readiness.
"Ethan Hale," he replied, feeling the syllables land true. He found the centre mark he had laid down in the dust, and let the audience — his audience of awkward, eager kids and a watchful teacher — exist at the edge of his performance instead of its centre.
He thought of the life that had burned him — the bad reviews, the hollow thank-yous, the auditions he'd botched because the person trembling behind his eyes had been tired of being disappointed. He thought of the nights in his previous life when the same ache had turned into a bartered, small surrender — the roles he'd taken for money, the compromises with predators. Even now, the memory of that last failure in 2020 felt as close as a second skin. He breathed through it, let it untangle into words.
He began the monologue. The piece started in a small voice and grew as if a tide had decided to carry it. He didn't push for volume; he pushed for honesty. A single line — "I have kept my pain like currency and spent it on making myself invisible" — snagged the room. He let silence follow each sentence like punctuation; that was where the truth lived, he thought. Between sound and the next breath. His body did not tremble. His hands did not search for the floor like they had in that former life. They were steady. His voice carried the kind of weathered soft that comes from having watched the worst of things and still chosen to wake up for them.
A dozen small faces reflected back at him: classmates, not critics. Mary's eyes pinched the way a director's do when something rare happens on stage. When the last line left his throat, the theatre held its breath as if expecting to be punched when the silence broke.
A girl near the back — the Shakespeare student — let out a soft, involuntary sob. The lanky boy who had been laughing at tongues wiped his eyes. Even the class clown sat in a stillness he had never seen before. The room offered an answer that couldn't be scored on a rubric; it offered a communal recognition of something true.
Mary did not clap at first. She stood there, considering, as if the play had left her with a long, quiet question.
"Ethan," she said finally, voice small and precise, "where did you learn that?"
He could have lied. That had been simple before: invent a workshop, a mentor, a conservatory name. No one would have pressed it. But truth had proved a more useful currency for him lately — perhaps because he had nothing left to bargain with.
"Life," he said. "Mistakes. Watching."
Mary's face softened, then cracked into a smile that felt like the first warm light of day after a long winter.
"You're not supposed to be in this class," she said. "This is a beginner's workshop."
He felt warmth spread under his skin. "I know."
"Good," she said. She stepped closer as if the stage had made them conspirators. "Stay after. I want to talk about scene partners and a small reading I'm organising for a local casting director. If you're serious about this, we'll make sure you're not invisible this time."
The world at the edges of the theatre changed. It wasn't an overnight promise of success — he had seen too many doorways labelled "opportunity" that led nowhere — but it carried the weight of a teacher's belief. Mary did not flatter. She offered tasks: specific things he could do to be seen for what he was rather than for what others thought he should be.
He left the stage with the small euphoria of someone who had found a language after years of silence. Back in his seat, the class resumed as if a small volcano had quieted beneath them. Whispers floated to him: "Who is he?" "He's incredible." "Did you see how still he was?"
Mary waved him over after the others began packing up. He could have excused himself to lobster in the glow of performance, but he didn't want to be a ghost in her office. He wanted to be taught.
"You've got presence," she said the moment they were alone in the echoing hallway. The acoustics made her voice intimate, like a secret. "And something else: you make choices that are honest and specific. Most kids here fake that. You don't. That's rare."
He swallowed. He wanted to tell her everything — that he had failed in another life, that he had come back with ghosts and second hands. The truth felt obscene in the fluorescent light; people expected lies and half-truths because they made life easier for them. But the teacher's face had an impatience for smallness.
"What do you want?" she asked, not unkindly. It was not a question about career; it was a question about motive.
He considered how to answer without unravelling the fragile web he wore like armour. He wanted to say: I want to make my life matter. I want to protect young actors from people like Victor Dane. I want to build a career of small but fierce truth.
Instead, he smiled, a small and true smile. "I want to learn," he said simply. "And I want to do good work."
Mary studied him for a long time. Then she nodded, like passing judgment or passing a key. "Then work. There's a reading next Thursday. I'll put you down. Be ready. And Ethan?"
"Yes?"
"Don't be scared of being wrong. That's where the truth lives."
He left the theatre that evening with the smell of stage varnish in his clothes and a sense of something that felt suspiciously like hope. The looks of the students behind him — curiosity, awe, the first maybe-respect of peers — made him feel like someone reconciling with himself. On the walk home, the streetlight haloed the sidewalk, and he realised for the first time that the boards beneath his feet were not traps to test him, but planks to build on. He had come back for a second take. Tonight had been his first, and he felt for the first time that perhaps, this time, he might get it right.