I breathe.
In through the nose: the apartment, the morning, the faint ghost of yesterday's Elowen-peonies still somehow present, my own honey-and-vanilla scent threading up around me with a brightness it hasn't had since before the dream—the lime zest back now, sharp and present, because apparently my body's response to fifty thousand dollars is the same as its response to something it wants and hasn't fully decided to want yet.
Out through the mouth.
Okay.
The date on the confirmation line is six days from today. This Saturday. The letter has been sitting on my kitchen island for—I count backward from when Elowen brought it—two days. Two days that I didn't open it because I didn't want to confirm that it was exactly what I expected it to be. Another standard parade. Another evening of standing in a room and being assessed and coming home to the same island and the same debt and the same plank.
This is not that.
This is categorically, documentably, wax-sealed, not that.
I set the card down flat on the island and look at it from a slight distance, the way you look at something you're trying to see whole rather than in pieces. The green ink. The clover seal, broken now, the two halves of the wax sitting on either side. The cream paper catching the kitchen light. Beside it, the coin—Elowen's family heirloom, Scottish and Chinese and warm from sitting on a counter since 4 AM, its four-leaf clover face upright, looking at me.
The life-rearranging kind.
My phone buzzes.
I look at it.
Elowen: Good morning! I'm outside the café. Take your time. I brought the good pastries.
I look at the time.
8:07.
Late. You're late. You are standing in your kitchen in a jacket that's half on reading an invitation that has rearranged the inside of your chest and you are seven minutes late and Elowen is outside with pastries.
I shove the card into my jacket pocket. Grab the coin. Think about it for half a second and shove that in too, because the coin has been on my person since yesterday and today feels like a day to keep it close.
I finish the protein shake in four swallows, leave the bottle on the counter, and get out the door.
The morning air is cold and cuts right through the jacket with the specific March opinion that spring is a concept that applies to other places. I walk fast, hands in pockets, fingers finding the edge of the cream card and the weight of the coin simultaneously. Six days. The number cycles through my head with the same persistence as the debt number does, which is ironic—fifty thousand dollars going in and fifty thousand dollars potentially coming out, the same figure on both sides of the same impossible equation.
Don't get ahead of yourself.
It's a chance. Not a certainty. One Omega wins out of however many they've invited. You don't know the room. You don't know the Alphas. You don't know anything about this except what's on a card in your pocket and what Danny heard through a bar floor at 3 AM.
But the seal was real.
The no strings was in writing.
I round the corner onto the café block and see Elowen through the window—already inside, already moving behind the counter with the ease of someone who has been watching me open this place long enough to have absorbed the routine. She's wearing a soft green knit today, her strawberry-blonde hair loose, and she looks like a person who got adequate sleep and woke up before her alarm and has feelings about it in a positive direction. The complete inverse of my current state.
She looks up when the bell above the door chimes.
"You look?—"
"I opened the letter," I say.
She goes still.
"And?"
I pull the card out of my pocket and set it on the counter between us. She picks it up. I watch her read it—the way her expression moves through several positions, the small inhalewhen she hits the prize amount, the pause at the conditions paragraph, the longer pause at the end.
She sets it down.
