Chapter 224: 224 | The Ready Part Comes Later
"I’m fine. Just tired."
"Tired how? Physical tired or emotional tired? Because those require different advice and I need to know which drawer to pull from."
I considered the question. The honest answer was both, but that felt too complicated to explain over the phone.
"Emotional tired. The kind where everything works out fine but you still feel like you’ve been running a marathon."
"Ah. That kind." The sound of liquid pouring into a glass came through the speaker. Diane settling in for a real conversation. "Tell me about your day, sugar. Start from when you woke up and don’t leave anything out."
So I told her.
Not everything. Not the System notifications or the Gacha pulls or the supernatural mechanics that governed my existence. But the human parts. The assessment with Steele. The physical evaluations. The way my classmates had demonstrated their Aspects while I’d held back and calculated how much to reveal. The shopping trip with Felicity. The conversation where Sloane and Felicity had negotiated some kind of détente that I still didn’t fully understand.
Diane listened without interrupting. Occasionally I heard the soft clink of her glass against something solid, but otherwise she stayed quiet until I ran out of words.
"So let me make sure I understand this correctly," she said when I finished. "You deliberately underperformed during your evaluation because you didn’t want to draw attention. Your instructor noticed and called you out privately. A pretty blonde girl convinced you to go shopping and buy clothes that make you look like you actually care about your appearance. And then that same pretty blonde girl had a civil conversation with Sloane that somehow ended with everyone agreeing to be friends."
"That’s the summary, yeah."
"And you’re calling me because you’re tired."
"I’m calling you because I don’t know what I’m doing."
The words came out before I could stop them, slipping past the usual filters I kept between my thoughts and the world outside my head. The kind of admission that felt like pulling a splinter from somewhere deep, the relief immediate and uncomfortable all at once.
Diane went quiet. I could hear her breathing on the other end of the line. Measured and unhurried, like she was giving the words the space they needed before responding to them.
"Sugar, nobody knows what they’re doing," she said finally. Her voice had shifted slightly, losing the casual warmth and settling into something more deliberate. "That’s the secret they don’t tell you in orientation. Every single person you’re going to meet at that academy is faking it to some degree. The confident ones? They’re faking it harder than the ones who look scared because they’ve learned to make the performance look effortless. The trick isn’t knowing what you’re doing. The trick is moving forward anyway and letting yourself figure it out as you go. The people who wait until they feel ready never start at all."
"That sounds exhausting."
"It is exhausting," Diane agreed immediately. "Welcome to being an adult, honey. The wine helps with perspective. So does sleep, but you’re not getting enough of that either, so we work with what we have."
I laughed. Actually laughed. A genuine sound that surprised me with how good it felt to let out.
"I’m not old enough to drink."
"You’re not old enough to do a lot of things that I suspect you’re doing anyway," Diane said dryly. "At least alcohol is legal with parental supervision. Or legal guardian supervision in this case, which I technically qualify as under California law. That means if you ever want to try wine I am absolutely willing to facilitate that in a responsible and educational context with proper food pairings and a lecture on sulfites."
"You’re offering to get me drunk?"
"I’m offering to teach you about wine appreciation. There’s a difference. One of them involves tasting notes and the other involves regrettable decisions. I’m aiming for the first category."
The conversation had shifted into familiar territory. Diane’s particular brand of maternal concern wrapped in humor and practical wisdom. She’d been doing this for years, ever since she’d picked me up from my parents’ funeral and installed me in a guest room that had somehow become my room without either of us discussing the transition.
"Can I ask you something?"
"You can ask me anything, sugar. Whether I answer honestly depends entirely on the subject matter and how much wine I’ve had, which right now is none, so proceed with caution."
"How did you know you were ready to start your agency?"
The line went quiet. Not the comfortable silence from earlier but something heavier, like she was reaching for something she’d filed away years ago and wasn’t entirely sure she wanted to retrieve.
When she spoke again, the casual warmth had dropped several degrees into something more honest.
"I didn’t know. I was twenty-four with one client who trusted me for reasons I’m still not entirely clear on. My business plan was on the back of a napkin from a bar I can’t remember the name of, and I had exactly enough money to cover three months of rent before I’d need to either produce results or admit I’d been wrong about everything and find someone else to hire me."
"That doesn’t sound like you at all."
"It really doesn’t, does it?" She laughed, but it had an edge to it. "But that’s who I was then. Scared out of my mind and too stubborn to let the fear mean anything. I was absolutely certain I could see something about the hero industry that nobody else was seeing, that I had a read on the gap between what Heroes were and what they could be worth if someone just framed them correctly. Turns out I was right. But I didn’t know I was right when I started. I just believed it loudly enough and consistently enough that eventually reality got tired of arguing with me and came around to my position."
"And if reality had disagreed?"
"Then I would have failed spectacularly and probably ended up working for someone else’s agency, bitter about the experience but at least employed. The point is that I didn’t wait until I was ready. I started when I was terrified and figured out the ready part along the way."
