“Show me who you are. Show me what drives you, moves you, what is important to you,” she says.
“My life will bore you to death,” I say dryly.
“Mia,” she says, and a shudder runs down my spine, because it is the first time that I can recall that she used my first name. “Just because I can offer you the world, does not mean I do not know how to value a book read in silence.”
A grin stealths onto my face.
“Okay,” I say.
“Okay, what?” she asks.
“My cats need to be fed and cuddled,” I say with a glance at my watch. “That’s what my life looks like.”
Victoria laughs with such rich laughter that I can’t stop myself from joining her.
“Give Henry the key to your flat, and instruct him,” she says as she walks me out of the room. “He’s a sucker for cats. They come to him like he is their messiah.”
“So, that’s why he’s the only one who survived picking up my male cat,” I say.
“Henry,” she calls sternly down the staircase, and he appears through a door down to the left. “Cat duty.”
He smirks.
I feel quite uncomfortable ordering him around.
“Any notice regarding your roommate?” he asks after I've instructed him on their food-and-cuddle routine.
“Not necessary,” I say, and fumble my phone out of my pocket to check Bella’s location. “She is out—yep, still at the party she texted me she’ll be at. She won’t be home until tomorrow.”
“She seems not to have learned anything from last weekend,” says Victoria, and I snort out.
“She thinks it was an amazing, consciousness-broadening trip,” I say.
“One way to see it,” says Victoria, sardonically.
“Well, Bella, she’s—she has different priorities in life,” I say. “Her main objective is not to work and have as much fun as possible.” It is something I secretly admire, because I could never. I have no idea what fun is, and my dutifulness will kill me one day.
“And you don’t?” she asks me.
“I don’t think life is meant to be fun,” I say. “We live, fulfil our duties to the community, and then we die, and no one is going to remember us within the matter of one or two generations, especially if there is no generation reproduced.”
“Huh,” she says.
“I know you look at life differently than I do,” I say, “But not everyone is like you.”
“So…you suffer because everyone else suffers?” she asks casually, but I freeze.
“I—no,” I say. “It’s more complicated like that.”
“Is it?” she asks. “I think it’s quite simple. You do not allow yourself to have fun because you do not feel worthy.”
I roll my shoulders and bring some distance between us. Her words feel like an attack on me.
“I have a proposal for you,” she says. “One day, where you allow yourself to enjoy life, have fun and let yourself be surprised by it. One day. Give me one day to show you what life can be like. And I give you one day to show me the extraordinary in the ordinary.”
We’re standing in the middle of the entrance hall with this monumental chandelier. My eyes wander up and over to the art on the wall, as I consider her words for a moment. I am scared that if I let her, I might never recover from it.
I don’t know why, but I keep thinking of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave as I stare at the Caravaggio oil painting I looked up after my first visit here, which is estimated to be worth around 130 million pounds.
