Vanya laughed, a hollow, ruinous sound. "There. The truth. We aren't characters. We're the audience's pity projected onto a page. I'm not a tragic idealist. I'm a man who drinks too much and loves a woman who sees him as furniture. Sonia isn't sweet. She's terrified that her kindness is just cowardice with a better PR agent."

"No," Sonia whispered, her knuckles white. "We're not supposed to see it. Chekhov said—"

"So," Spike said, scratching his head. "What do we do now?"

Something flickered behind her eyes. A crack in the porcelain. "They think I'm a monster. But monsters get sequels."

Sonia, perched on a trunk labeled "COSTUMES - 1998," adjusted her spectacles. They were taped at the bridge. "Waiting is the only thing we're good at, Vanya. It's our craft." She smiled a small, brave smile that didn't reach her eyes. "I've been waiting for a bus that doesn't come for forty-two years. I'm practically a Zen master."

"We're stuck," Vanya announced, not for the first time. He wore a faded dressing gown over a stained sweater, a uniform of dignified surrender. "Spike has taken the car. Masha is on a conference call about a streaming deal that will never happen. And we are here. Waiting for a climax that was cut in the second draft."

Sonia, the quiet one, the one who watered the plants and remembered everyone's birthdays, stood up. She walked to the laptop. She closed the PDF.

The PDF opened to a single page. On it, one line of text, enormous and sans-serif: A long silence. The maple branch stopped scraping. The dust motes froze.

The attic dissolved. Not with a bang, or a fade, or a wry stage direction. It simply became less solid, like a memory after a long sleep.

"Together?" he asked.