Presented by SHANNON MUIR’S INFINITE HOUSE OF BOOKS
SPONTANEOUS CHOICES SHORTS features short serialized fiction by author Shannon Muir, that may be later released as part of e-book or print collections.
In 2019, these serials will appear every second and fourth Thursday (and fifth Thursdays as they occur). This week continues a new serialized story, “A Second La Chance,” about a young woman who originally hoped to have the children of a wealthy spoiled man to get paid off to leave him, but ends up with more than she ever bargained for when deciding to take a chance to start a new life for herself.
This is part 4 of 16.
As it turned out, I wouldn’t get that chance.
The fire alarms started going off on the set, and all of sudden I found myself surrounded by chaos and shouting as everyone was being guided to the exits. Someone’s hand pulled me along through the doors and to the outside. “Come on, hurry!” All of us – cast, crew, and guests – ended up in an evacuation zone some distance from the studio. From the outside, it wasn’t apparent what caused the alarm to go off.
“I hear some food burned over at the cooking show the next studio over,” I heard someone whisper.
“Maybe someone else thought the interview so boring they just pulled the alarm to get it over with,” said a voice from somewhere else in the crowd.
I wasn’t happy about the situation at all. Maybe they would let us go and shoot a new segment again from scratch. Perhaps we’d get to pick up where we left off. Yet, I wondered if the one person I overheard might be right. Now that the show staff knew how I performed on camera, would they find some excuse not to have me back? Would my abbreviated except somehow make it to the airwaves and not allow me the opportunity to change the perception of me that still seemed burned into the minds of the press?