On the subway, Evie googles Misha.

There are zero results. There’s an eighty-five-year-old retiree in Florida and a genetics lab in San Diego with similar names, but as far as the internet is concerned, Misha Meserov doesn’t exist. His company has no website, and no entry in the New York State business entity list. She racks her brain to remember if there was even a sign by the door. No social media, either, which strikes her as the most suspicious element of all. The few people she’d ever met who were as good-looking as Misha all loved social media.

It’s all very weird, and Evie files it in a box in her mind labelled Things to Investigate Later. There might even be a long-form story in it. She could title it The Break-Up Artist; maybe try to track down some of the people whose relationships he tore apart.

Her brief good mood dims when she realizes it would be nearly impossible to write that sort of story from her parents’ guest bedroom in Chicago. The things she’d need to ask people for it aren’t the sort of things she can ask over the phone. They need to be face to face.

From High Street to Nostrand she idly scans the Wikipedia entry on Georgia, and finds ‘Land of the Wolves’ a pretty appropriate name for the place that spawned Misha. It’s only when the C train pulls into Kingston-Throop station that she feels a stab of anger at herself for spending a whole hour looking up a hot guy she talked to for less than ten minutes.

She shoves her phone in her bag and resolves to consign Misha Meserov to the obscurity he so clearly desires. She has a catering shift to prepare for, anyway. And it will be a good shift, and there will be food, and rich people to mock.

Not for the first time she wonders if she should give up trying to have a legit day job. Maybe if she did something crappy like catering or waitressing it would force her to focus on making her laundry list of journalism projects actually happen. If she could write in the morning, maybe it would be different. Right now, she comes home after a day of temping so tired of screens and keyboards that she can’t face writing another word, even if it is for herself. Then she feels like a shitty friend, because for Claudia, catering isn’t “something crappy”. It’s her career. And there’s nothing stopping Evie from getting up and writing in the mornings now; she just… doesn’t. Evie pushes herself up the subway steps into the pitiless Brooklyn sunshine, feeling tiny and inadequate and certain of nothing, other than that her dreams are falling apart, right in front of her.

Only ten more hours until the day is over.

***

The gala they’re catering is for a daughter of the Pickford fashion empire, just engaged to some potbellied European who can trace his family back to the Holy Roman Empire. She’s rich and slim and her nose doesn’t look the same as the rest of her family’s. Cocktails and then dinner in the Temple of Dendur, an Egyptian temple ruin housed in a modern, glassed-in courtyard at the grande dame of New York’s art museums: the Metropolitan. The courtyard is a spectacular location, made even more so by the event company’s uplighting and the four-foot-tall pillar arrangements of pink and white peonies currently being placed on each table.

It’s black-tie, but the catering uniform is the standard white shirt, black pants and apron. And, underneath, the blessed relief of a sports bra and sneakers. Evie had wanted to burn her entire interview outfit when she had gotten back to her apartment.

The bar doesn’t take long to set up. Behind the main bar are stairs down to a corridor serving as a prep area where their spare supplies and clean glasses are stacked up. Beyond that is a loading entrance where the catering trucks are parked, ready to receive all the crates of dirties at the end of the night. The wealthy don’t do disposable cups. The glassware is all real crystal, and the flutes have long, hollow stems that make the champagne in them bubble prettily.

Evie snags plates of canapés for both she and Claudia and then leans against the bar and stares out at the display in front of them. Everything looks peaceful in the late-afternoon light. The May sun is only starting its descent to the horizon, but the canyons of Manhattan would swallow it soon enough. The lighting at the party is set to respond to the gathering dusk and gradually transform as night approaches, sculpting the space into something more intimate. It was already remarkably private in atmosphere for what is fundamentally a large, barn-like glass space. If Evie squints, she can even pretend not to notice the dozens of big guys with glasses and earpieces stalking the perimeter of the huge courtyard, safeguarding the super-rich from the unpleasantness of encounters with common people.

“Not bad, eh?” Claudia says.

“I guess,” says Evie, looking out at the golden shafts of sunlight striping the room, illuminating its vast luxury of space. New York was such a bitch. Just when you thought you could give her up, she offers you a glimpse of something magical, and suckers you right back in. But eventually the price gets too high for those slivers of strange joy. The city had her beat, and Evie should have admitted it a year ago, back when she still had savings. “Hey,” she says quietly. “I’ve been thinking some more and I’m going to head back to Chicago at the end of July. Would you mind if I split my room with someone for the next two months? Then I can pay you back for everything before I leave.”

Not that Claudia should be struggling to pay rent. In the few years she and Evie had been sharing an apartment, Claudia had moved up from being a part-time bartender for the high-end caterers to running the entire bar operation and reporting directly to the company’s owner. She’d thought up and executed lines of bespoke cocktails for receptions, which had become a major marketing angle for the company, getting them tons of press and lots of new work… and still, Claudia was struggling to make rent in the same neighborhood where she’d grown up.

Claudia slings an arm around her for a sloppy side-hug. “Yeah, you can split your room. Long as she’s not a jerk. But don’t rush into anything, okay? The city knocks us all down and you know what? It doesn’t matter, ’cause we’ve all been there. The important thing is how fast you get up.”

Evie smiles bashfully down at her sneakers, grateful for Claudia’s words of comfort even as she doesn’t believe them.