I sit in the small kitchen of my small apartment and I look at the fifty-thousand-dollar debt that isn't in the room but might as well be, and at the envelope that represents someone's optimistic theory about my romantic future, and at the plank in the hallway floor that I am going to fix, genuinely, this weekend, which is not a lie I'm telling myself, it's a plan.
It's a plan, Mila.
Elowen comes back around the corner, buttoning her coat, smelling like florals and goodnight and the specific warmth of a person who is not going to let you give up without a fight on your behalf. "I'll be at the café before eight, and I’ll leave your lucky item in your jacket pocket," she says. "Go be brilliant at the bar and try not to trip on anything on your way out."
"I will absolutely trip on something," I tell her honestly.
She laughs.
The door closes behind her, and the apartment is quieter without the peonies, just me and the eggs and the envelope and a shift that starts in twenty-two minutes.
I get up. I pull on my jacket. I find my keys in the third place I look, which is an improvement. I walk toward the door, and I look at the government envelope one last time before I leave, sitting there under the kitchen light in its official beige, the return address like a small, persistent argument I haven't answered.
Lucky season.
Emerald silks and candlelight and the whole Bridgerton production.
Sure.
I step over the plank.
Successfully…this time.
I'll need all the luck in the universe to get me out of this maddening financial disaster.
CHAPTER 2
The Coin
~MILA~
The coin is beautiful.
I don't say that about many things. Beautiful is a word I tend to reserve for things that earn it—a perfectly balanced cocktail, the specific amber of good bourbon when the bar light catches it just right, the fifteen minutes before a shift ends when the last customer pays their tab and the whole room exhales. But this coin earns it without trying.
I've been turning it between my fingers for the last ten minutes. Spinning it along my knuckles the way I learned to roll coins as a teenager to keep my hands busy during slow shifts, watching it catch the low light of Hannigan's back room in small, gold flashes. It's heavier than a regular coin—substantial in the palm in a way that suggests age rather than cheap manufacture. The four-leaf clover pressed into the face is worn smooth at the edges, the kind of wear that comes from decades of hands rather than weeks, and the lettering around the rim is something old, something that predates the version of English I use daily.
Elowen mentioned it before I left the apartment. Something about a jacket pocket. I was already pulling on my coat, already calculating whether I had enough time to stop at the cornerstore for a bottle of water before the shift, and I tucked it into my pocket without really looking and then forgot it existed until forty minutes ago when my hand found it during the first slow moment Hannigan's has produced since I arrived.
3 AM does things to a bar. The chaos finds its limit, and then it just—stops.
It's break time now. Officially. Danny told me to take fifteen and I took fifteen and turned it into twenty-two because the back room smells like old wood and spilled Guinness and nobody's looking for me right now, and I'd like approximately three more minutes with this coin before I go back to pretending I have everything together.
I hold it flat in my palm and really look at it.
It's an heirloom. That's the only word for it. Elowen's family heirloom, which means it's probably the kind of thing that should be in a case somewhere, or at minimum not shoved into the jacket pocket of a bartender who trips over her own floorboards at midnight. If it's what I think it is—old, genuinely old, the kind of craftsmanship that stopped being made when craftsmanship became too expensive to justify—then Elowen handed me something that belongs in a collection.
Which is exactly the kind of thing Elowen would do. Not because she doesn't understand value, but because to her, the point of valuable things is to give them to people who need them.
The thought makes my chest do something it shouldn't at 3 AM.
Elowen Bloom is, genuinely, the most confusing rich person I've ever met. And I say that as someone who has spent years working service jobs and has met the entire spectrum of people who have money and would like you to know it. Elowen's parents are currently in South Africa—because they played one of those destination randomizer games on TikTok and it landedon Cape Town and they simply went. Rimowa luggage, the full two-thousand-dollar set, loaded into a car to the airport within a week of the video. I saw the photos. Breakfast on a deck overlooking the bush. A giraffe eating leaves at eye level from their table.
A giraffe. At the table.
Meanwhile, her parents' daughter is here, in Oakridge Hollow, choosing to run a quiet florist shop and spend her midnight hours cooking eggs for a friend who is actively losing a financial war with the ghost of her failed pack. Elowen could be anywhere. She is here. Voluntarily. With no complaint and no performance of sacrifice.
I turn the coin again.
