It’s more than just the smell, though. I feel my mother here. There’s still some part of her lingering in this space. Like her soul has soaked into the wood and the walls, and when I breathe in that theatre smell, I’m breathing her in, too.

I run my palm along a wooden railing at the edge of the stage. It’s worn smooth from years of being touched, and I think about how my mother’s fingers probably rested where mine do now. It’s the same thought I had about the porch railing this morning, and it hits me that this is the closest thing I can remember to the feeling of holding her hand.

There’s no lobby in the barn. The big double doors open directly into the performance space. And it’s dark, at least until Jude moves to a small booth at the back to turn on the lights.

We all blink at the sudden brightness, and I’m mesmerized by the bits of dust floating through the air like snow.

A rectangular stage stands in the middle of the huge room, surrounded by bleacher seating on three sides. A big black curtain hangs across the back. Above our heads, a loft holds even more seating below the original beams of the barn.

“Find a chair, everyone,” Willa says. “We need to go over a few things.” The way she’s smiling at us, it makes it hard to stay nervous. That energy of hers is so contagious. “I’m sure you know all this,” she begins, “but Midnight Music is a love story.” She raises one eyebrow. “With a little bit of a twist.”

It strikes me again how wild it is that we’re all sitting here with Willa Culver. The Willa Culver. Midnight Music is a beautiful play, and it was a huge success on Broadway, but that’s only one part of the mythos and mystique surrounding Willa. She could have gone on to have this extraordinary career as a brilliant New York City playwright, but she didn’t. She took all that newfound fame and those connections, and she brought it right back here to Whisper Cove and invested it into making this little theatre something extraordinary instead.

I read an interview with her once where she said she’d come back here because this is where her heart was. She’d never written another thing, before or since. But she hadn’t needed to. Midnight Music was an instant classic, and she was an overnight celebrity. The mysterious and reclusive darling of the theatre world.