The chaos of the studio was a muffled roar on the other side of Lyra’s dressing room door. She watched the pandemonium on a small monitor, her face pale in its flickering light. Isolde’s unraveling, the flashing police lights, the swarm of media.
It was over.
The door opened and Zara Ali slipped inside, closing it firmly behind her. She moved with a doctor’s calm efficiency, her presence a shield against the storm outside.
“Don’t worry about a thing,” Zara said, her voice low and steady. She took the remote and switched off the monitor. “I’m handling it. No one gets in.”
A producer had left the winner’s trophy on the vanity table. It was a sleek, silver thing, gleaming under the lights. The culmination of months of work, of baring her soul on a national stage.
Lyra looked at it and felt nothing. No elation. No triumph. Just a bone-deep exhaustion that settled into her marrow.
“They just confirmed it, by the way,” Zara said, gesturing vaguely at the door. “You won. Officially.”
Lyra ran a hand over the smooth, cool metal of the trophy. She thought of her final performance, of singing “My Name” not for the judges or the audience, but for herself. That had been the victory. This was just a prop.
“I don’t feel like I won anything,” she said, her voice barely a whisper. “I just feel… over. I want to go home.”
Zara’s expression softened with understanding. “Okay. Home it is.”
Zara orchestrated their escape like a military extraction. She led Lyra down a private service corridor, a concrete tunnel that bypassed the media circus entirely. The air was cool and smelled of dust. The silence was a balm.
In the quiet of Zara’s car, Lyra’s phone, which had been off all night, was a dark, inert rectangle in her purse. She made no move to turn it on. The buzzing of the world could wait.
Instead, she leaned her head back against the seat and placed a hand protectively over her stomach. The public war was over. Her private future was all that mattered now.
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