Evie finds herself in the front office, heart thundering, as Gemma smiles modestly and brushes past her towards Misha’s office. She hears him murmur, “Miss Andrews, is it?” She simpers, “Please, call me Gemma,” and then there’s the click of the door closing and Evie is left with nothing but the vanishing tracks of Gemma’s knock-off Saint Laurent heels on the carpet.

She realizes she’s shaking, staring at the vicious brushstrokes of the Franz Kline above the sofa as part of her mind kicks into trauma response, listing all the things she’ll have to do to leave New York: call her parents. Tell Claudia. Get rid of everything she can’t fit into a couple suitcases. What she can sell; what she’ll have to donate or throw out. The orderly list is the only thing that’s keeping her from succumbing to the howling sorrow bubbling up inside her. That, and the wounded ache of an empty stomach.

She doesn’t know how long she’s been standing there, lost in the vortex of her own self-pity, when her phone beeps. Her roommate Claudia’s belated good luck message and its string of cheerful emojis are what sends her over the edge. She flees, out of the office, down the corridors, away from the elevators, from any witnesses to her shame, until at the end of a hallway near the bathrooms she finds a kitchenette.

She sits down at its little black table and dials Claudia. It only takes a couple rings, then there’s Claudia’s sleepy Puerto Rican accent as she mumbles a “hey, what’s up” on the other end of the line. “I’m not gonna get it,” Evie sighs.

“Are you sure?” Claudia asks, sounding a little more awake. “I mean, you were perfect for this—”

“I was perfect for all of them,” Evie says. She leans over and opens the kitchenette’s communal fridge as her stomach clenches with hunger pangs. Once when the agency was late paying her, she’d lived for a whole week on packets of powdered hot chocolate from the break room of a large accounting company. “Look, Claudia. I have most of this month’s rent, but I… I think you should start looking for someone else for my room.” Her voice catches, and the next words come out in a rasp: “Someone with a job.”

There’s nothing in the fridge except some half-finished hummus that’s so old it’s gone crusty, and a small box swaddled in a plastic bag. She pulls out the box and unwraps it: sushi, and not even past its sell-by date. Her sushi, now.

“What are you gonna do?” Claudia asks.

Evie presses her palm against her cheek, pushing the tears back in. “I don’t know yet.”

“You want a shift tonight?” Claudia’s voice is soft and kind, and that hurts most of all.

But Evie isn’t in a position to refuse her roommate’s offer, so she nods her gratitude, even though Claudia can’t see her, and says, “Please.”

“Okay,” Claudia says. “In theory we’re fully crewed up, but you know at least one of these idiots will bail at the last minute.”

“Where is it?” Evie asks.

“The Met,” Claudia says, a little smug. “I mean, it’s some fashion couple’s engagement party, but Dendur rules and the parking’s really easy.”

“Well, at least that’s dinner taken care of,” says Evie, as she tears open the packet of soy sauce and dumps it all over her stolen sushi.

“It’ll get better, baby. Something’s gonna happen. You’ll see,” Claudia says. “Oh, I gotta go! Event manager on the other line.”

Claudia hangs up, and Evie sighs her “I hope so” into the hum of the dial tone.

She puts her phone down and shoves the first piece of sushi into her mouth. It tastes heavy and bland, but she swallows it, and grabs for the next piece. The chopsticks are halfway to her mouth when she feels the air in the room shift.

Evie looks up, and there’s a white woman staring at her, clutching a mug in one hand and a teabag in the other. “Excuse me, is that my sushi?” the woman asks, her expression somewhere between shocked and angry. Evie hunches over the crappy tray of Salmon Lovers’ Special. “Can you afford to buy more?” she growls back. The woman opens her mouth, then hesitates a moment before closing it again and just… leaving. Guilt rolls through Evie, killing her appetite. She forces the sushi down anyway, as a sort of penance. It sits in her stomach like lead the whole way back to Brooklyn.