I opened my hand.
The coin sat in my palm, catching the station's yellow light—the four-leaf clover face upward, the old Celtic lettering around the rim, the worn relief of something that had been held by a significant number of people and carried forward through each of them to the next.
Finn looked at it. Then at me. Then at the empty track.
"If you don't know her name," Finn said slowly, "why are you wearing that particular expression?"
I looked at the coin.
The smile had arrived without consultation and showed no immediate intention of leaving.
"I think," I said, "we just found our lucky charm."
CHAPTER 10
The Morning After
~MILA~
I'm mopping.
My apartment is approximately three hundred square feet. It does not take long to mop. And yet I've been doing it for twenty-two minutes, which means I've covered the same patch of laminate near the bathroom door multiple times and the mop is essentially just redistributing the same water in patterns that my feet then walk through, and I'm doing it anyway because stopping means sitting down, and sitting down means the thoughts get louder, and I've been managing the volume on those since approximately 12:57 AM when I walked through my own front door and the silence of the apartment confirmed that last night happened.
"Are you actually mopping?"
Elowen's voice comes through the phone speaker from the kitchen counter, where I propped it twenty minutes ago so I could be hands-free and also avoid looking directly at it while having this conversation.
"Yes."
"In all the heavens," she says, with the gravity of someone making a diagnosis, "what possible pack situation has your entire nervous system in a bunch to be mopping before a bar shift?"
I press the mop head into the corner by the radiator, which hasn't needed mopping since I moved in. "I mop."
"You have never in four years mopped anything before noon. You own a mop only because I bought it and refused to leave until you found a place for it."
She's right. The mop lived in the car for two weeks before I brought it upstairs.
She'd be face-timing right now if my phone had a camera.
I'm choosing to be grateful for the ancient brick and its complete absence of visual technology, because whatever my face is doing this morning doesn't need an audience.
I drag the mop back toward the kitchen and say nothing, which Elowen correctly interprets as information.
"Mila."
"I'm fine."
"You're mopping at nine in the morning after a masquerade ball that you attended in a gown that cost a seamstress three days of work and a coin that belonged to my grandmother. You are the furthest from fine that the word fine can structurally contain."
I set the mop against the wall. Sit on the edge of the kitchen island stool. The apartment smells like floor cleaner and the stale traces of last night's return: the damp from the rain that started as I was getting home, the faint ghost of the perfume still on my jacket where I threw it over the chair, that iris-and-amber residue that has mostly faded now but catches when I move past it.
"I lost the coin," I say.
Silence from the speaker. Brief, but substantial.
"On the stairs," I continue. "The back staircase. I heard it fall and I knew what it was and I kept running anyway because the train—" I stop. "I'm sorry, Ell. It was your grandmother's."
"Don't," she says, and her voice is quiet in the way it gets when she means something without decoration. "Don't you dare apologize for that. The coin was yours to carry last night. Whatever happened to it is what was supposed to happen to it."
