No one else in the room seemed to notice when the clock stopped ticking. Marisol noticed, because she had been watching the clock for the past forty minutes with the focused desperation of someone whose entire future depended on it. The second hand had stuttered at the twenty-three-minute mark and simply given up. She chose to take this as a sign, though of what, exactly, she wasn't sure. The rehearsal room smelled of dust and old wood and decades of other people's ambition. Photographs lined the walls — opening nights, curtain calls, faces flushed and bright with relief. She had walked past them every day for three years without really seeing them. Tonight she saw them. "She's not coming," said the director, from somewhere behind her. "She might still—" "She's not coming, Marisol." The lead had twisted her ankle in the car park. This was the information that had arrived twelve minutes ago via a breathless stage manager, and it had rearranged the entire evening in a way that Marisol was still processing. She knew every line. She had always known every line — had learned them in secret, in her kitchen at midnight, for no reason she could sensibly explain. She had also prepared a prompt card, just in case her mind went blank. Stage fright did things to memory. Everyone said so. She'd written the opening lines small and neat and tucked the card into the waistband of her costume. She checked now. It was gone. Of course it was gone. "Can you do it?" said the director. The stage manager was watching her. The director was watching her. Somewhere beyond the curtain she could hear the audience settling — the low murmur of two hundred people adjusting their programmes and unwrapping sweets and leaning toward whoever they'd come with. She thought of the photographs on the wall. All those flushed, relieved faces. "Yes," she said. She was sick twice in the wings and forgot one line in the second act and cried real tears in the scene that called for them, for reasons that had nothing to do with the script. The audience gave her a standing ovation. She stood in the lights and shook. All things considered, losing the map was the least permanent consequence.