Like a conclusion.
Like something he already knows.
Don't.
Don't remember this.
Don't file this away in the part of your brain you're pretending doesn't exist, the part that still reads the cozy fairytale paperbacks Elowen leaves on the counter at Bloom & Brier on your day shifts, the part that has never fully given up on the idea that things can be different.
I gather the entirety of my emerald skirts and step onto the train.
The conductor settles the fabric with practiced efficiency and escorts me down the car to a private cabin at the far end—small, wood-paneled, warm in the specific way of old trains, like the heat has been there since the beginning and made itself at home. Single seat. Single mirror set in the wall opposite in a brass-framed oval, beveled glass, the kind that makes everything look like it belongs to another era.
The door clicks shut.
The platform begins to move.
I sit down. The gown billows and settles around me with the dramatic authority of something that knows it's extraordinary and has been waiting all evening for the right moment to prove it.
The cabin rocks gently with the motion of the train, finding its speed. Outside the narrow window, the platform slides past—and at the edge of the light, three figures growing smaller, the station swallowing them degree by degree until the curve of the track takes them out of sight entirely.
I exhale.
Long. Slow. The kind of breath that's been waiting since the bell rang.
Okay.
Okay. That happened. You attended the event, stayed the required hour, kissed a stranger in an alcove—one singular stranger, who it turns out was part of a pack of three, which is not a detail you're going to look too closely at right now—and you caught the train, forty minutes from Oakridge Hollow and a shift at Hannigan's at 1 am that you are absolutely not going to miss.
This is fine.
You are fine.
This was one night.
One very strange, very emerald, very well-scented night…and tomorrow it'll be a story you tell Elowen over coffee on Thursday, and she'll make her signature face, and you'll both laugh.
That will be the end of it.
I look up.
The mirror catches me.
I stare.
I barely recognize myself.
Not in an alarming way—in the way where you catch your own reflection and see what you actually look like, rather than the face you've grown so accustomed to registering it as wallpaper.
The champagne-blonde hair with the emerald highlights—Elowen's idea, applied last week with the cheerful conviction of someone who'd been lobbying for it for months, and I'd sat in her shop chair pretending to be reluctant when actually I'd wanted it the moment she described it—is coming loose from the updo. Not destroyed. Softened. Little curls at my temples and a strand across my cheek, and against the color of the gown it looks like I belong in it, which is information I was not prepared for.
The shimmer mark glows faintly in the cabin light. Gold with green sparkles, catching the low warmth, tracing along my collarbone and shoulder in a sweep that Elowen spent an hour on with a brush and an artist's patience, and the observation that I never let myself be pretty in public, which is not entirely fair but is not entirely wrong either.
My dark eyes—almost black in low light, but right now, in this particular amber, there's something else in them.
Something I don't see in the mirror above the bar sink at Hannigan's at 2am.
An essence I don't see in my phone camera when I'm running inventory at the café and accidentally catch my own face.
