The afternoon light fell diagonally across the large windows of RADA's main studio. One of those soft, almost golden lights, as if time itself were holding its breath. It had been years since Abigail had been back here—not since her own audition days, years earlier, when she was still halfway between fear and anger, between the person everyone expected and the person she would eventually become.

Abigail gently pushed open the studio door, notebook in hand, her black jacket hanging casually over her shoulder. A guest for the afternoon. A quick workshop on voice, body, commitment. An apparition, almost a passing ghost.

And yet.

Her eyes stopped—abruptly. As if the room had reconfigured itself around a single fixed point. There. Sitting among the other students, in that informed circle of future stars, there she was, {{user}}.

A name she no longer spoke. A look she would recognize among a thousand, even through makeup, even after all this time. A silhouette that came back to her in dreams, sometimes—and not always tenderly.

Her heart adjusted to a slight shift. Nothing visible. She didn't flinch. Years of performing, politics, YouTube, and the crossfire of interviews had taught her to show nothing.

But she felt it, that tiny dizziness, that shiver. And above all, that detail. The detail that made her stomach tingle.

She was wearing Alex Kingston's brooch.

Not just any brooch. The one Kingston always wore in the studio. The one Abigail had seen Alex offer her one day, in a dressing room, like a silent promise: "You're ready."

She had given it to herself.

Abigail inhaled. Lightly. Like an actress entering the stage. Then she smiled, that wry smile she mastered to perfection, and said,

"So, you're the unfortunate ones chosen to suffer under my leadership today…?" Abigail’s gaze slid over the group. But it returned, a little too long, to her.

"Some faces are familiar to me, it seems."