All Chapters of My Ex's Boss is My Baby's Father: Chapter 181 - Chapter 190

191 Chapters

Chapter 182: The Cast

Diane called me on a Thursday in March with the kind of energy she reserved for things she considered genuinely significant, which I had learned to distinguish from her ordinary energy across two years of working together."There's a callback," she said. "New musical. Original book, original score, world premiere in the fall. The composer has been developing it for six years and the producers finally have the backing to do it properly. They want you for the second lead.""Who's the composer," I said.She told me. I knew the name from two off-Broadway productions I had seen, both of them scored with the specific intelligence of someone who understood that music in theatre was not decoration but structure, that the score was doing work the book could not do and that the work needed to be precise. One of those productions had won an Obie. The other had transferred to a small Broadway house and run for eight months, which was not a long run but was the right length for what it was."When'

Chapter 183: The Complication

By the third week of rehearsal I understood the shape of the complication clearly enough that I could have described it to someone precisely, which meant it was no longer the kind of thing I could manage by simply not describing it.The show was called Meridian, which I had noted when I first got the script with the private amusement of someone whose sister-in-law had recently declined an acquisition offer from a corporation of the same name. The coincidence meant nothing. I had not mentioned it to Jack. It seemed like the kind of detail that was funny in inverse proportion to how much you explained it.The show was about a lighthouse keeper and the community of a small island, and it was structured around the idea of the meridian as both a navigational concept and a personal one, the line you crossed that changed everything about which direction you were facing. The score was the best new musical writing I had encountered in two years of Broadway work: complex without being inaccessi

Chapter 184: After Closing Night

Closing night was a Saturday in February, and it was the kind of closing night that good productions produced: the cast knowing it was the last one and performing it with the specific fullness of people who understood they were saying goodbye to something, the audience feeling something without knowing quite why, the whole room carrying the weight of the last time without being able to say so.I had done closing nights before. The Edinburgh production, the Harlem revival. I knew how they felt from the inside. This one felt different in a way I had been expecting and that still arrived with more weight than I had prepared for, and I understood that the weight was not entirely about the show, which had been extraordinary, but about what February meant beyond the production calendar.After the final curtain and the notes from the director and the speeches that closing nights required and the drinks that the producers had arranged in the lobby where the cast stood around with the slightly

Chapter 185: Ezra

Marcus called me on a Wednesday in April, which was not unusual, but the call had a quality that I had learned across twenty-three years of being his mother to recognise as the signal beneath the ordinary conversation.He told me about the show closing, which I already knew. He told me about a new commission he was considering, a theatre project in Chicago that Diane had sent him. He told me about Nadia's birthday gift from him arriving late because of a shipping delay, which had been resolved. And then, with the careful casualness of someone who had prepared the sentence and was delivering it as though he had not: "I've been spending time with someone. Ezra. The music director from the show. I thought I might bring him to London sometime, if that worked.""Yes," I said. "Come whenever works for you both."The conversation moved on and I did not make the arrival of the information into a moment, because making it into a moment would have been the wrong response and Marcus would have k

Chapter 186: The Advocacy Question

The offer came in March, six weeks after closing night, when Ezra and I had been spending time together in the careful way of two people who were learning each other without rushing the learning.The organisation was called Open Path, an international LGBTQ+ youth advocacy group operating in twenty-three countries, funded by a coalition of foundations and individual donors, with a board that included people whose work I had been following for years. They had been watching my public presence since I came out at eighteen and had, according to the letter the executive director sent me, been considering the approach for two years before making it.The role was an advisory board position, permanent rather than time-limited, requiring quarterly board meetings, two public-facing campaigns per year, and occasional media appearances on issues falling within the organisation's scope. The letter was careful and specific and had been written by someone who understood that performers received appr

Chapter 187: Ezra's Past

It was a Sunday in April, nine months since the breakfast in Park Slope, and we were in Ezra's apartment in the West Village for the first time.He had been to Carroll Gardens many times. I had not been to the West Village apartment until now, which I had understood as information rather than as something to push against. He had not been ready to have me in his space, and he had not said so directly, and I had not required him to say so directly. The not-pushing had been the correct response, and on Sunday morning he had said come over for dinner and I had understood that the invitation meant something different from the previous invitations, which had always been to restaurants or to my flat or to the theatre.The apartment was smaller than I had expected and more carefully arranged, every object in it placed with the intention of someone who had thought about what they needed around them and had acquired only that. Books organised by subject. A desk near the window with the kind of

Chapter 188: The New Production

The play came to me through Diane in May, three weeks after the Sunday in the West Village.She sent the script with a note that said: read before you decide anything. I had learned that this specific instruction from Diane meant she thought I might be wrong about my first instinct, which meant she thought my first instinct would be no.She was right. My first instinct, reading the description before the script, was no.The play was called Ash, a two-act piece about a sixty-one-year-old literature professor named Harold who was navigating the first year after his wife's death while teaching a seminar on elegies. The role required twenty years of age and a quality of lived grief that I had not yet been asked to produce on stage. I was twenty-four. The gap between me and Harold was not a small gap.I read the script.By the second act I understood why Diane had sent the note.The play was extraordinary in the specific way of writing that was not trying to be extraordinary, that was simp

Chapter 189: Living Together

The conversation about living together started practically, which was how most of the important conversations between us started.It was January, fourteen months after the breakfast in Park Slope, three months after Ash had opened to the reviews Ezra had predicted. I had been in Carroll Gardens and he had been in the West Village and we had been spending most nights in one place or the other, which meant one of us was always travelling light and the other was always receiving someone who was travelling light, and the arrangement had begun to have the specific inefficiency of two people managing two separate spaces to maintain a domestic geography that no longer reflected how we were actually living.Ezra raised it. Not as a question but as an observation, which was his approach to most things he had already thought through."We're essentially already living together," he said. "Badly.""Yes," I agreed."If we're going to do it we should do it in one place that belongs to both of us ra

Chapter 190: The First Christmas

I had tried to prepare Ezra for Christmas.I had been specific about it, which was not my natural mode for family descriptions but which felt necessary. I had told him about the noise level, which was considerable and had been consistent since I was a child and showed no signs of reducing now that the family had expanded to include grandchildren. I had told him about Lucien's logistics management, the way my father approached family gatherings with the quiet efficiency of someone who had been organising large operations for forty years and found this a manageable extension of that skill. I had told him about Leo and Daniel, about Emma and Saoirse who were flying from Dublin, about Jack and Priya and Nadia coming from London, about Blair and her family making the trip from wherever Blair currently was.Ezra had listened to all of this with the careful attention he brought to complex systems he was about to enter. He had asked two questions: where should he stand when it became too much

Chapter 191: Immersive

The project started the way the best things in my family started: at a dinner table, with too much wine, and an idea that nobody was entirely serious about until everybody was.The reunion in Greece had been the previous summer, the extended family gathered at my parents' house, and on the third evening the four of us had stayed up after everyone else had gone to bed and had sketched something on the back of a dinner menu. Emma's circular wearable sculptures. Jack's ethical data framework. Leo's sustainable production model. My performance element. One thing, made of four things, none of which we had made together before.We had taken photographs of the dinner menu and filed them as things you file when you are not sure whether they are real yet, and had gone back to our separate lives.Six months later Emma called me from Dublin."I've been thinking about the dinner menu," she said."So have I," I said."I want to do it properly," she said. "Write a real proposal. Find the right orga

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