I look at the dress. I look at my reflection. I look at the dress again.
It's the most beautiful thing I own, and I have technically owned it for thirty seconds.
"I give up," I say.
Elowen grins—full, unrestrained, the real one she doesn't perform but can't contain. She looks like someone who has been running a long game and has watched the last piece land exactly where she placed it.
"Good." She claps once. "Put it on. We've got the mask fitting in twenty minutes and I need to photograph you in the full look before the lighting changes."
"On your ancient brick of a phone?" I say.
"On my actual camera, which I own, because some of us have updated our technology in this millennium."
"Don't forget your lucky coin tonight," she calls as she leaves the bathroom to give me privacy, her voice already moving down the hall toward the kitchen, probably to put the kettle on because she puts the kettle on when she's happy, which is its own form of telling.
I look at myself in the mirror one last time before I reach for the dress.
Champagne blonde. Emerald ends. Eyes that look like they mean something.
Fifty thousand dollars.
Hand-picked Alphas.
Nobody who just shows up and decides they're owed something.
I breathe in. The bathroom smells like dye and roses and Elowen's lavender and my own honey-whiskey signature coming back now, the vanilla brightening, the lime zest arriving with the particular sharpness it gets when I've decided something. Not resigned. Not bracing. Something else—smaller and stranger and more dangerous.
Hope.
A very cautious, heavily qualified, fully prepared to be disappointed kind of hope.
But still.
Later—after the dress, after the mask Elowen has sourced from somewhere that involves gold filigree and absolutely no explanation of what she paid for it, after the photographs that she takes with the seriousness of a professional while I stand in her living room feeling like an impersonator of someone more confident than myself—we sit at her kitchen table with the good tea she keeps for real occasions and she reaches across and squeezes my hand once.
The coin is in my purse on the chair beside me. The invitation is folded inside my clutch. The dress is back in its garment bag, waiting with more patience than I currently have.
Tonight is less than five hours away.
"You're going to be magnificent," Elowen says, and she doesn't make it a question or a wish or a promise conditional on the universe cooperating. She says it the way she says things she's decided are true—simply, and with no room for argument.
I look at her across the table.
She's already turned back to her phone, already looking something up, already three moves ahead of where we are because that's Elowen—perpetually in forward motion, perpetually prepared, perpetually doing the work to make good things possible for the people she loves.
Even when my luck seems to always run out.
Even when the collectors call before sunrise and the dreams don't stop and the money doesn't materialize and the debt just sits there accruing interest on everything I thought I'd built.
I guess being friends with Elowen is the best luck I've ever had.
CHAPTER 5
Lucky Charm
~MILA~
The heels goes on last.
