Eric looked like he wanted to linger a bit, but with Mrs. Amberson shooing him out and Spencer going as well, he couldn’t really stay.

“I knew you had it in you,” Mrs. Amberson said when they were gone.

“I guess,” Scarlett replied.

“You guess? Learn to take a compliment, O’Hara. I asked for your help, and you came through. I won’t forget this, mark my words.”

It was only now that Scarlett remembered what this was all about. For better or for worse, she had just helped to destroy Donna’s chance at a Broadway role. And though she knew that Mrs. Amberson’s words were meant in a friendly way, she couldn’t help but feel a faint sense of alarm, as if the sirens in the street below were headed in her direction.

THE NEW SPACE

“Billy called me,” Mrs. Amberson said, when Scarlett walked in the next morning. “It seems that Donna has walked away from her new musical because of a major television opportunity that’s come up.”

She was sitting on her bed, in a meditative position, grinning like a serial killer who’d just been given all the keys to a dorm building. She got up and climbed onto her perch so Scarlett could change the sheets on her bed.

“We have to get going in a minute,” she said. “I have a lead on a place for rehearsal. It sounds absolutely ideal.”

The ideal place was a former church in the East Village. It looked like it had been repurposed long ago—there was nothing left on the inside to hint at its previous function except the stained glass windows. The main room had been gutted and a low stage installed at one end. The stage felt hollow when Scarlett walked on it, and there were small holes dotting its surface. The rest of the room was hard to walk through, as it contained a hundred or so folding chairs, countless boxes, folding tables, fake trees, broken clothes racks, and for some reason, a lawn mower. In the back, there was a large closet with exposed insulation that they called the “workroom.” There were two tiny bathrooms and a dirty window facing an unused playground.

Mrs. Amberson wrote out a check for two thousand dollars for two weeks without blinking an eye.

“It’s gorgeous,” she said, carefully negotiating around the holes on the stage. “It’s a miracle we got it on such short notice and for such a short time. I wish we could just do the show here, but someone has it booked starting next week. Still. It gives us a good place to work out the new concepts. I have fabulous ideas.”

“Ideas?” Scarlett asked. “What are you…”

Mrs. Amberson held up a silencing finger.

“Scarlett, let me tell you the one thing I’ve learned in life. You have to tell people what they want. Most people don’t know. They mill around through life, bumping into things, waiting for someone to give them some direction. Trevor’s a sweetheart, but without guidance, this show will go nowhere. That’s the trouble with so many of these groups—they have no one to tell them the big things they have to do. And this works so well for us!”