Chapter Twenty: Restructuring

"Asha." Tony's voice had that specific quality she'd heard managers use before, the careful measured tone of someone who had rehearsed what they were about to say and was now delivering it slightly too smoothly. "Thanks for picking up."

"Sure." She moved to the window without thinking, looking out at the street below. Force of habit now. "What's up, Tony?"

A pause. Just a beat too long. "So, listen. I wanted to call you directly because you've been with us a long time and you deserve to hear it from me rather than through the schedule app."

Asha said nothing. Just waited.

"We're making some changes at Ember. Restructuring the lineup, going in a slightly different direction with the bookings, and unfortunately your slot is one of the ones we're looking at." Another pause. "I'm going to have to let you go, effective end of next week. You'll get your full hours for the remaining shifts and I'll make sure your final pay is sorted by Friday."

The street below was quiet. A woman walked a dog past the building, the dog stopping to investigate something on the pavement while its owner waited with the particular patient resignation of someone who had learned not to rush this part.

"Okay," Asha said.

"I'm sorry. You've been great, genuinely. This is purely a business decision, nothing personal."

"Okay," she said again.

Tony said a few more things. Something about references, something about the industry being small and him being happy to put in a good word if she needed it. She listened to all of it standing at the window in her cardigan with the cold glass against her shoulder and said the right things in the right places until the conversation was finished and she could hang up.

She stood there for a moment after.

The woman with the dog had moved on. The street was just a street again, grey and ordinary, a Saturday morning going about its business without any particular interest in hers.

Three years.

She'd given that place three years of Friday and Saturday nights, three years of muscle memory and stage makeup and the particular performance of being Cinder while Asha watched from somewhere inside and counted down the shifts until she didn't have to anymore. And it was gone now in a four minute phone call on a Saturday morning and Tony had sounded so carefully apologetic about it that she almost felt sorry for him.

Almost.

She pushed off the window and went to the kitchen table and opened her laptop.

The certification exam was in six weeks. The medical records office was waiting. The plan was still the plan and one lost income stream was a problem that had a solution and she was going to find it before she let herself feel anything else about this morning.

She opened a new tab and started searching.

There were three clubs on the border territory that she knew of. Ember, which was no longer relevant, and two others she'd heard mentioned over the years but never looked into properly. She found the first one's website, read through it, clicked through to the booking inquiry page. Smaller than Ember. The photographs looked dated, the kind of club that had been the same for fifteen years and had no particular plans to change. The money would be less. The crowd would be different.

She kept it open and checked the second one.

Further away. Forty minutes by bus, which meant earlier departures and later arrivals and less time for studying on shift nights. The website was newer, cleaner, and the inquiry form looked professional enough. The pay scale wasn't listed publicly but there was a contact email for bookings.

She drafted a message. Kept it short and professional, three years of experience, available immediately, references on request. Read it back once, changed one word, and sent it before she could think too carefully about what it meant to be starting over at twenty three with six weeks left until everything was supposed to get easier.

Then she sent a version of the same message to the first club.

She closed the laptop and picked up her coffee.

Cold. She drank it anyway, standing at the kitchen counter looking at nothing in particular, letting the silence of the apartment settle around her. The textbook was still open on the table to the page she'd been reading when Tony called. The sticky note she'd used to mark her place was still there, slightly crooked, a small yellow square against white pages.

Six weeks.

She could do six weeks standing on her head. She'd done harder things than six weeks with less reason to get to the other side of them. This was a setback. Setbacks happened. You located the problem, you found the solution, you kept moving. That was how it worked. That was how it had always worked and it wasn't going to stop working now because a club she'd never planned on staying at forever had let her go on a Saturday morning.

She rinsed her mug and put it on the drying rack.

Went back to the table and sat down and found her place in the textbook and started reading again. The words took a few minutes to mean anything but they got there eventually. They always got there eventually.

The envelope was on her nightstand.

She could see the edge of it past the doorframe, white against the dark wood, sitting exactly where she'd left it last night when she emptied her pockets and decided without deciding that she wasn't going to deal with it yet.

She looked at it for a moment.

Then she looked back at her textbook.

The page was still there. The words were still there. The exam was still six weeks away and the plan was still the plan and some things were just going to have to wait.

She turned the page and kept reading.