She laughs. “Sure, I would love one.” She hops off the counter in front of me, and I embrace her like my life depends on it for a good four seconds before letting go.

She grins and fiddles with her hands for a moment. “Okay! We have ten more minutes before we eat, let’s run through the Gerald structure again.”

I pay an excrement load of attention this go around. I won’t let Jamie down.

The information spills out of Dawn so easily, like she lives and breathes the stuff.

The name of the game is saying yes to your team apparently and supporting their choices. And paying attention. I’m supposed to make dramatic choices. I can do that.

And be okay with failing. I don’t know about that one.

“If we fail, it’s as a team,” she stresses. “It’s no one person’s fault, and when we go down, we go down hard. We don’t abandon beats, we work to find the funny and turn it around, and if we can’t, then fuck that, people will forget about it in less than twenty-four hours. We’ll perform again, we’ll get over it. The only way you can really fail a scene is by abandoning your teammates.” She finishes the sentence as the pizza timer starts to ding.

As I rise to turn it off, Dawn reaches out and touches my arm. She catches my eyes with her dark, endless ones. She has actual ocean eyes. I sit back down.

“Once you relinquish the need to control what’s happening around you and accept the present, you start to see a path forward…” She clears her throat, drops her hand, and smiles. “I think subbing for Jamie in a last-minute celebrity improv performance is exactly what you need right now.”

My arm is tingling where she touched it. “How so?”

She shrugs. “Well, from what you’ve told me, it seems like your brain is so caught up in what you can’t do, you can’t see what you can.”

I gaze at her wearily. “Is that like a Dumbledore quote or something?”

“No…” Dawn tilts her head. “It’s just a truth.”

I move to free the pizza. “Why are you so wise?”

At the table Dawn shrugs and mockingly throws her nose up in the air. “I don’t know. I’m a smarty pants. I can’t help it.”

An unacceptably embarrassing giggle flows out of me. I try to cover it with the squeak of the oven door.

“Failure’s all about perception,” she continues. “You didn’t fail at ballet, Siri. You had a successful career and were forced to retire early.”

A sarcastic huff falls out of me as I carefully place my pizza masterpiece on the stove. Dawn comes over to admire it with me.