It has to be Leopold.
Zara can’t believe she ever thought it was Barrett. The motivation that was missing is suddenly clear. Leopold trusts his visions. He believes in what they show him. It has to be Leopold. This version of the story finally connects Roscoe and Enna. And it doesn’t rule out Barrett’s role. Leopold could have asked him to steal the pills for Enna’s murder, replace them with fakes so Kestrel wouldn’t notice the missing ones, threaten Zara when she refused to stop asking questions.
It has to be Leopold. Zara’s whole body pulses with the knowledge. Which is a problem, because she’s onstage.
There are people out there in the dark, watching her, waiting for her to show them something glorious, but this doesn’t feel like a performance. It feels like a dream gone wrong.
She floats into the scene with Echo’s father and mother. When Carl scolds her, it feels like he’s scolding her, not Echo. She remembers Leopold giving him permission to trap her with his body, a moment that keeps coming back to trouble her. Enna’s understudy blinks at her with soft blue eyes, naive. She has no idea what’s going on in this theater.
Zara stands upstage while Echo’s parents argue. She spreads her fingers wide to keep them from shaking. When her first monologue comes, her voice starts out small, a series of nervous steps.
“I would touch without feeling,
Kiss without taste.”
When Zara leaves the stage, Leopold is there, waiting. He grabs her away from the spot by the curtains where she is supposed to wait for her next entrance. “What was that?” he asks, his accent flattened.
In that moment, trapped between the curtains and his body, she finds another key.
Leopold never would have picked her if he thought she couldn’t handle this role. He cares too much about his own reputation. About perfection. He knew from the start that she was good enough. But he also knew she was young and hungry and unsure. He chose her out of nowhere, spun her life in a circle and clothed it in the prettiest dreams. He wanted an Echo who would be desperate to please him. An Echo he could control.
Zara rushes into act 2, already midflight. Running away from Leopold gives her plenty of motivation.
She pulls up the hood of the rich cloak that Cosima made. It’s just Echo and the woods now. This part of the play has always spoken to Zara in an urgent whisper — there is something here, a feeling that lies underneath the rest of the story, sliding against the happiest moments, rubbing off on them in ways that foreshadow the ending.
Trees made of darkness crowd her path. Roscoe’s stencil created these patterns, but it’s Eli’s touches that have turned the woods truly menacing. The lighting is perfect. One more thing Leopold was wrong about.
“I must find a way
To a place that does not know
The girl I once was.
A place that does not know
The name I left
Like a leaf, shed and dying.”
As Zara spins through the woods — talking to herself, to the trees, to the strangers she meets along the way — she notices that people are collecting in the wings. Everyone presses to the farthest edges of the curtains — Kestrel, Toby, even Carl. Everyone is watching her. No one knows what to expect from this Echo.
She is burning. Bright. Alive.
Her certainty has lit her up in a new way, and it leads her back to Eli. The thought of Eli, warm in her mind. The memory of Eli, hot on her skin.
When she enters the market scene, she’s ready to fall in love. Ariston marches in from the other side of the stage. He says his lines beautifully — they slide out of him like he’s not even trying. But no amount of acting can cover up the anger trapped in his arm muscles, the hurt flinch in his eyes that only Zara is standing close enough to notice. Zara hoped that a day apart would calm him down. But everything that went wrong on the landing is still there.
“I dreamed of a beautiful girl,” he says. “To see you is to watch that dream wander on new shores.” The words are the same as always — Adrian has learned them well — but tonight he uses them to sting her.
Eli’s light is there, like a firm hand at Zara’s back. It reminds her of how she felt when she was at her brightest and most beautiful. The Aurelia is full of Zara’s voice and Eli’s light, and Zara soars through the rest of the scene on a feeling that no hate or fear can force back to earth.
And then — Adrian stops trying to fight her. All the sweetness that she’s seen in him, the need for love, it’s there in the way that he puts his hand on her waist. In the way that his eyes warm up before he smiles. Soon they are in some rarefied atmosphere, breathing the dizzy-thin air.
The lines burn up fast. Here is the love scene, begging to be played like it never has before. The bed that Ariston made for Echo is the only thing onstage. As Zara climbs onto it, she wills herself to forget that Leopold chose this bed. She does a furious rewrite in her head, turning it into a bed from another story.
She thinks Eli. She wants Eli. And when she closes her eyes and kisses Adrian, she is kissing Eli.