The mirror didn't lie.
That was the thing about mirrors in dressing rooms.....the lighting was too harsh, too honest, too determined to show you every crack and shadow that stage makeup was meant to hide. Eva had sat in front of enough of them to know. Three years of dressing rooms. Three years of fluorescent bulbs and the smell of other women's perfume and the distant thudding bass that seeped through the walls like a second heartbeat.
She knew exactly what she looked like under these lights.
And tonight, she looked tired.
Not in her face....her face was beat to perfection, as always. Foundation that made her brown skin look like it had been kissed by something golden, liner that made her amber eyes pull focus from across a room, a mouth painted the deep red of something dangerous. No, the tired wasn't in her face. It lived behind her eyes, the way it always did these days....this low, persistent exhaustion that had nothing to do with sleep and everything to do with the stack of hospital bills sitting on her kitchen counter at home, held together by a rubber band because she'd run out of folders.
Her's last scan results had come in two days ago.
Eva hadn't let herself think about them. Not really. She'd read the words, set the paper down, gone to the bathroom, turned the shower on as hot as it would go, and stood under it for twelve minutes. Then she'd gotten out, gotten dressed, and gone to work. Because that was what you did. You kept moving. You kept earning. You kept the lights on and the hospital bills at bay and you didn't let yourself fall apart in a dressing room on a Thursday night because falling apart didn't pay for chemotherapy.
She uncapped her lip gloss and applied a second layer. Her hand was steady. She'd trained it to be.
Two more sets tonight, she told herself. Then home. Then sleep. Then figure it out.
She was so deep in her own head that she didn't hear the door open.
"Eva."
Maya's voice cut through the bass and the mental math and the low-grade anxiety that had become Eva's permanent background noise. Eva met her friend's eyes in the mirror.....Maya, who was already fully dressed in tonight's costume, a deep burgundy two-piece that sat stunning against her dark skin, her locs pinned up in an elaborate style that she'd somehow managed in under twenty minutes.
"Five minutes," Maya said, holding up her hand, fingers spread.
Eva turned back to the mirror. "I know."
"Do you?" Maya stepped fully into the dressing room, letting the door swing shut behind her, and the bass muffled slightly. She crossed her arms, studying Eva's reflection with the particular kind of attention that best friends deployed when they were deciding how worried to be. "Because you've been in here for forty-five minutes and the last time I checked you were fully dressed thirty minutes ago and have just been sitting there."
"I've been doing my makeup."
"Your makeup has been done since eight o'clock, baby."
Eva's mouth twitched. Just slightly. "Maybe I'm perfecting it."
"Mmhm." Maya came to stand beside her, close enough that their shoulders almost touched, and for a moment they just looked at each other in the mirror ....two beautiful women in a dressing room that smelled like vanilla body spray and someone's forgotten takeout, under lights that told the truth whether you wanted it to or not. Maya's expression softened. "How bad was the scan?"
Eva picked up her mascara even though she didn't need more. "We're not doing that right now."
"Eva..."
"Maya." Her voice came out quiet and firm in equal measure. "Not right now. I'll get in my head and I dance better when I'm not in my head. You know that."
A beat of silence. Maya knew when to push and when to let something rest ....it was one of the reasons Eva had kept her close for three years in a world where trust was a rare and fragile thing. She let it rest.
"Fine," Maya said, reaching out to adjust a pin in Eva's hair with the practiced ease of someone who'd done it a hundred times. "But we're talking later."
"Later," Eva agreed. Which meant maybe never, but Maya would accept that answer for now.
"Okay." Maya straightened, checking her own reflection quickly, the way women did....that fast, automatic sweep that catalogued everything in under two seconds. "Oh, before I forget..." She turned, leaning against the vanity counter with something shifting in her expression. Something that looked almost like curiosity. Or warning. Eva wasn't sure yet which. "Tonight's different. Apparently we have special VIPs."
That made Eva pause.
Sinners had VIPs every weekend. That was the nature of the club....it wasn't the kind of establishment that showed up on Google Maps or had a Yelp page. You got through the doors of Sinners by knowing someone who knew someone, by being the kind of person who operated in the world that existed beneath the world most people could see. Eva had worked here long enough to understand that her clientele wasn't entirely....or perhaps even primarily....human. She'd learned not to ask direct questions about that. She'd learned to simply notice: the way some clients moved too fluidly, the eyes that caught light at wrong angles, the coldness of certain handshakes. She'd learned to perform for them and collect her money and keep her observations to herself.
But Maya's face right now said that tonight's VIPs were a different category.
"Who?" Eva asked.
Maya opened her mouth.....
The door banged open. Not Maya's careful, announcing knock.....a sharp, impatient bang that rattled the frame, and then Derek's voice filled the room, the stage manager's particular brand of aggressive urgency preceding him like a weather system.
"Santos. You're up. Right now, let's go, the stage doesn't wait....."
"Derek, she has four minutes...."
"She had four minutes thirty seconds ago, the rotation shifted, she's up now!"
Eva was already standing. She'd learned in her first month at Sinners that arguing with Derek's timeline was an argument you had after the fact, never during. She smoothed the front of her costume with both hands....a deep black ensemble that left very little to imagination and everything to art — and took one last look at herself in the mirror.
The tired was still there, behind her eyes.
She buried it. She was good at that.
"Tell me later," she said to Maya, already moving toward the door.
"Eva...." Maya's voice had something in it now, something that sounded almost like be careful, though that made no logical sense for a walk to a stage.
But Eva was already gone, following Derek's impatient stride down the narrow corridor that led to the wings, the bass growing louder with every step, the air changing....warmer, charged, electric with the kind of energy that three hundred bodies in a dark room generated. She could feel the stage ahead of her the way she always could. Like a pull. Like a tide.
Whatever Maya had been about to tell her about the VIPs, it could wait.
The music shifted as she reached the wings, the current performer's set drawing to its close, and Eva closed her eyes for exactly four seconds. Four seconds was all she allowed herself, a ritual she'd developed so long ago she couldn't remember starting it. Four seconds to leave everything outside the stage in the dark corridor. The bills. The scan results. The rubber band around the folder on her kitchen counter. Her mother's face, thinner than it was three months ago, smaller in the hospital bed.
She left all of it in the dark.
Then she opened her eyes, and Eva Santos walked out onto the stage.