She kept her shifts.
Will black coffee him and already-haspread suit at 7 AM, her in the t-shirt oversized she slept in and cardie she decided to grab off the back of her door, hair all of a knot: absolutely This is not gonna do my morning person performance:
"I'm holding onto my shifts at the diner.
He peered at her over the kitchen island, using the face of someone who was stumbling on an unexpected variable in an equation that otherwise made sense.
"The contract doesn't require employment."
"But the contract does not restrict it either. I checked."
Something crossed his face. It may have been the start of something rueful.
"The bar," he said.
"I already quit. You're right about that, it's fine."
"That's unprecedented."
"What is?"
"You agreeing to me being right for a change."
She poured herself coffee. His coffee, in his kitchen — which was bigger than the entirety of her mother's apartment. The machine alone probably set her back more than a semester of the design program she had deferred three times. She attempted to not regard it with bitterness, and mostly failed.
"I can agree you're correct on logistical things," she said. "That's different from liking you."
"Understood." He turned back to his phone. "A stylist is coming Friday. We have the Renwick Gala on Saturday — the Millers have a table, they've booked it for two years, there'll be press.
"I style myself."
"Alora—"
"I'll wear whatever you send. But I don't need somebody managing my face." She picked up her coffee. "I've been taking care of my own face since I was sixteen. It's fine."
He looked at her.
She looked back.
"Fine," he said, in the tone of a man unaccustomed to fine but adjusting.
She switched into her uniform and took the bus to the diner, as she'd had no idea how to tell the driver to take her there — and also it seemed ludicrous to ask — and it was twenty-three minutes on the bus, she knew what route the bus took, and she needed those twenty-three minutes of something normal before going back into a life that made sense.
The diner was the same.
That was the miracle and the solace of it: the specific bell above the door, the scent of griddle grease and industrial coffee, that back booth with a wobbly leg everyone who came there knew to brace against, Millie herself behind the pass-through calling order numbers in a voice that could project out to the parking lot.
"You look different," her co-worker Bea called, squinting at her from across the counter.
"I'm tired."
"No, it's not tired. Tired has a specific look on you. This is—" Bea studied her. "Did something happen?"
"I began a new moisturizer," Alora said. "Table four's getting cold, Bea."
On Tuesday, James's usual corner table was empty.
She'd known it would be. She already knew, from notes passed through his assistant, that he was having a worse week. But here she was over at the corner table with a coffee she had poured sipwise without thinking, staring through an empty chair and an overdue crossword that she'd been saving for him — the Tuesday puzzle; month three of knowing him marked the start of her keeping them pristine and waiting and boil-fresh, because he liked to work perusing in real time — queuing hot, rolling across to perch on her palm.
It remained there until the end of her shift, getting cold.
She didn't throw it away.
The Renwick Gala.
Alora had forty-five minutes to prepare because she'd been at the diner on a double and the crosstown bus ran late, and so arriving at the penthouse—6:22 PM for a car by seven—she showered in precisely six minutes, dried her hair, pulled on the only cocktail dress she possessed: secondhand navy silk that had cost twenty-five dollars a few months ago after its previous owner responded poorly when nominated for some college award that Alora then missed when her mother's fever spiked the same afternoon. When she'd found it in the box under her bed, still had the tags on it. She'd taken that as a sign.
She was admiring herself in the full-length mirror when she heard a knock at her door.
"Car's here in eight minutes," Ares said, through the wood.
"I know."
A pause. "Did you need—"
"I said I know."
She opened the door.
He was in black tie. Of course he was. The proper if totally effortless black tie of a man who had been to hundreds of these things, and wore the formality like a second skin — jacket tailored just so, no slip anywhere, the watch on his wrist likely worth more than whatever building she'd grown up in.
He looked at her.
This time, the assessment was different. It went on longer than he intended. She observed as his blood ran cold, as he temporarily hobbled beneath the weight of a new focus — watched him readjust in real time, this controlled blankness reasserting itself over something he had not meant her to see.
"It came down to the navy," he said. Which was not what he'd nearly said.
"Useful to know," she said. Which is not what she nearly said, either.
The gala was an other civilization.
Five hundred people in a gilded room, each and every one of them belonging to a tax bracket that rendered Alora's very existence provisional. She smiled until her face hurt. She delivered the verbatim, well-polished account of how-they'd-met with the ease of someone who'd worked tables long enough to figure out how to read a room and pivot a conversation and make each person in her path feel like they were the most listened-to person within shouting distance.
She was, she thought with a grim sort of glee, damned good at this.
Ares stood next to her with his hand at the small of her back — a perfunctory weight, rehearsed, not personal — and studied her work with an expression she made out twice and both times he looked away before she could identify it.
Then a voice sliced through the orchestra like a red-painted blade.
"Ares."
Low. Feminine. A rehearsed warmth with a coldness beneath it.
She watched him go still — a whole-body stillness, the kind that was not absence but opposite, something bracing — before he turned.
Tall. White-blond. A red gown — the kind you pick with the intent to be the first thing anyone remembers about a dreary room. The type of beautiful that was aware of its power.
"Cassandra," Ares said. Even. Measured. Every syllable accounted for.
Cassandra Voigt's eyes shifted to Alora with the steadiness of a scope finding its range. The smile that came after did not reach her eyes. It wasn't designed to.
"So." She looked from Alora's secondhand silk, back up to Ares. "You got married."
"We got married" — and Ares's hand slid from the small of Alora's back to her waist, a tightening, a pull that drew her up against his side in a gesture so fluid it might have seemed rehearsed except hadn't been and Alora felt the solid warmth of him through the silk and then the sudden reality of being held by him — and she thought: focus.
She tacked to Cassandra with the smile she had practiced for years on unreasonable diner patrons — open, friendly, solid as a wall.
"I'm Alora," she said warmly. "And you are?"
A half-second of pure silence.
"Cassandra Voigt," she said. "There's some history between Ares and I."
"How lovely," Alora said, her voice sweet and restful. "Well, past tense is so elegant, isn't it.
She felt it pass through Ares's chest, brushing against her side — that which was almost a thing, stilled just enough to know its name, sure of its boundaries and borders; the source from which he drew the closest he got to a laugh.
Cassandra's smile didn't move. But something in her eyes did.
"Enjoy the gala," she said. And left.
Alora didn't wait until she was six feet away. Then softly, into the air just past Ares's shoulder:
"You're welcome."
The almost-laugh happened again. Bigger this time.
He glanced back at her, only just a little, and for one vulnerable moment she caught something in those brown electrified eyes that she had no box to put that into."
Then it was gone.
"Come on," he said. "We still have three other people to keep alive."