Maggie snorted. “It’s just the lack of humidity, I bet. My hairspray doesn’t melt off before it can set here.”
For a while they just sat, the Strip buzzing like a different planet below them. It was almost easy, falling into the kind of friendship rhythm they used to have before everything got complicated.
“How are things with Gwen? When we were there after…” Danica paused, as if she wasn’t sure she should remind Maggie about her mother’s funeral. Like it wasn’t always in Maggie’s mind. “Well, when we were there last time, I was worried about you.”
Maggie’s mind flicked through everything she could unload — the shouting match where she’d said she was done, the uneasy quiet that followed, the not-quite resolution of the guest room arrangement. All of it sitting just under her tongue, waiting, but too heavy to hand over tonight.
Maggie shrugged again. “It’s fine.” It wasn’t a lie. Things were fine. She was fine. She was dealing with everything just fine.
Danica gave her a long look. “I’m always here if you want to talk.”
“I pay someone a lot of money to hear about all that, don’t worry,” Maggie said. Her mind flashed to Dr. Elowen pulling her aside after their last session, suggesting she consider a personal therapist to work through her grief. She’d handed Maggie a list of colleagues. Maggie had tucked it into her nightstand, telling herself she’d revisit it after Vegas.
“I am always here. Not as an objective listener, but as a Team Maggie listener,” Danica added.
“I know.” Maggie nodded, pressing her lips together. “Tell me something good. How’s work?”
Danica’s expression softened in that way it always did when someone mentioned her job. “Quiet, for once. But it’s actually bad luck to say that. If you say the Q word, it never lasts long. You know how it is — one week I’m getting a full three or four hours of sleep, and the next it’s every isolette full, alarms going off down every hallway.”
“Jesus,” Maggie muttered. “And you just… handle that.”
Danica gave a little shrug, almost embarrassed. “It’s what I signed up for.” Then, after a beat, “Sometimes it’s a lot. But I love it.”
“Of course you do.” Maggie smirked, shaking her head. “You’re like the calmest person under pressure I’ve ever met.”
Danica laughed, bumping her knee against Maggie’s. “Hardly. You should’ve seen me lose it at the coffee machine last week when someone left an empty pot. I wrote a strongly worded Post-it.”
Maggie barked a laugh loud enough to echo against the glass railing. “Wow, slow down, you absolute lunatic.”
And for a second, it was simple again — the two of them, tipsy and honest, the night stretched wide open around them.
By the time she slipped back inside, Danica had gone to bed, and the suite was quiet except for the hum of the AC. The pullout couch looked almost inviting in its awkwardness,sheets rumpled, Gwen cocooned in them like she’d negotiated a truce with the hotel bedding.
Maggie set down her empty water glass, then crawled carefully onto the mattress beside Gwen. The frame squeaked a little, and Gwen shifted but didn’t wake. Typical. She could sleep through fire alarms.
Maggie lay there on her side, staring. Which was stupid. Creepy, even. But her chest ached with it — the soft line of Gwen’s jaw, the strands of hair fallen across her forehead, the shape of her breathing, steady and unbothered. It was like muscle memory, that pull toward her.
A massive pang of longing crashed over her, so sharp it left her breathless. All she wanted was to tuck herself into that curve, slide her arm around Gwen’s waist, pretend none of the last year had happened.
But then — on cue — her brain marched out the litany. Gwen the workaholic, gone more nights than not. Gwen, sitting stiff and silent when Maggie needed her most, like when they’d chosen to have an abortion. Like when her mom died and Maggie was the only one with her.
She’d shoved that afternoon into the basement of her memory — the blur of paramedics in the hallway, the metallic smell of oxygen tanks, her body shaking so badly she could barely hold her mother’s hand. And the guilt lingered, sticky and insistent: that in her mom’s final moments, she hadn’t been the calm, soothing daughter she thought she should be. She hadn’t been graceful or strong. She had been terrified, begging her mom not to leave her, and she still carried the shame of it like a hidden scar.
Gwen had never known that. Maggie had never let her. She’d never felt more alone in that moment, and all she’d wanted was Gwen to be there.
But Gwen wasn’t there. She’d been halfway across the world at a conference in Lisbon and hadn’t answered her phone for two hours.
Izzy had been on the first flight to Austin. Izzy was there, and then Kiera. Gwen hadn’t gotten home until the next day.
Deep down, she knew that expecting Gwen to somehow bend the laws of time and space to get home faster was impossible. She knew that her mother’s unexpected heart attack wasn’t something that Gwen had purposefully planned on missing.
And yet. Maggie’s resentment burned hot and familiar. They just had different priorities. Maggie would never come first to Gwen. They just didn’t mesh. Not anymore.
Still, when Gwen shifted in her sleep and murmured something soft — something Maggie couldn’t quite catch — Maggie felt the tether snap taut again, no matter how she tried to sever it.
She rolled onto her back, staring at the ceiling like it had answers. It didn’t.
She told herself to close her eyes, to just sleep. But of course her body had other ideas, keyed up and restless, hyperaware of the slow rhythm of Gwen’s breathing a foot away.
