Evie spends the next forty minutes glaring at the crowd, trying to figure out what Misha is doing at the party, and what the deal is with Greg and Stewart. They hadn’t talked all night as far as Evie had seen: Stewart (with Misha’s help) carefully staying on the other side of the crowded party from his husband. She remembered a few years ago there’d been something in the papers about Greg throwing a phone at his assistant. Tonight, Greg was wound tight, voice loud, gestures bigger than they needed to be. Look at me, I’m having fun.

She stops when Claudia elbows her, hard. “Evie, you either start smiling or I’m sending you to collect dirty glasses,” she hisses. “You want me to ask for a raise, but how can I do that if the boss gets reports back from tonight that my bartenders are giving everyone the stinkeye?”

“Sorry, Claudia,” Evie groans. She grabs a plastic tub. It’s a good time to go clean up, anyhow. People will be sitting down for dinner in about fifteen minutes, and it’s important that the area is clear of abandoned glasses before it’s clear of people. Evie slips in between the laughing, chattering crowds in their $15,000 dresses and hand-tailored dinner jackets. She ghosts past hands wearing diamond bracelets and Swiss watches that cost more than her and Claudia’s whole year’s rent, more than her college education, and picks up the dirty, lipstick-printed glasses they discard.

Nobody seems to see her; nobody speaks to her. She finds herself at the small standing table where Misha and Stewart had been talking, and she grabs their now-empty champagne bottle and adds it to the tub of dirties to take away. Their two glasses are next to it: one is half-full and shows no sign of having been drunk from. The other is empty, and ringed with the smudges left by a man’s lips.

As she hefts the now-overflowing tub back towards the bar, she has a moment of clarity, and in the space of the next few steps she knows exactly what she must do.

“Hey, I might be an extra five minutes downstairs after I dump these. Is that okay? I want to make a phone call,” she says to Claudia.

Claudia looks around at the party guests slowly filtering away from the bar, towards the dinner tables, and shrugs. “Yeah, sure. What’s going on?”

Evie grins as she heads for the stairs. “I figured out a way to get up and stay up.”

The wide corridor at the bottom of the stairs is currently serving as the caterers’ staging area, and Evie shelves the tub in a tall metal bus cart racked with more tubs of dirties. She slumps against the wall between the bus cart and a wheelie bin of empty champagne bottles, concealing herself enough so nobody will catch sight of her and ask her to help with anything, and then she digs her phone out of her apron pocket. It’s quiet in the corridor, but there’s still the sound of the string quartet from upstairs, and the buzz of voices.

She scrolls down through her contacts and selects one she never got around to deleting, just in case. It rings and rings, and Evie thinks for one heart-stopping moment nobody will pick up, but then a slightly annoyed female voice says, “Hello?”

“Hi, Nicole?” Evie says. “I’m sorry to call you so late on a Friday. It’s Evie, your intern from two years ago?”

“Who?” says Nicole, sharply. Evie can hear the sounds of nightlife behind her; she dimly wonders if it’s still the bar at the Soho Grand, or her crowd had moved on to somewhere new. Gotham, the magazine for which Nicole Hamilton was features editor, was an incredibly New York-centric hybrid of lifestyle publication and long-form investigative journal, as likely to cover cultural bubbles like rainbow bagels and alpha/omega fanfiction as it was to investigate government corruption scandals and workplace harassment on syndicated talk shows.

She’d genuinely loved working there, and she’s bitter that Nicole, her old boss, has obviously forgotten her.

“Evie. Evie Cross,” she says. “Remember the story on the romance writer poisonings? I was the intern on that.” The article had won awards. Evie, uncredited, had done all the interviews.

“Oh. I thought you left New York. What do you want? I’m busy—”

“I’m at the Pickford engagement party,” Evie says, knowing from past experience that only name-dropping will get Nicole’s attention. “So yes, I’m still in New York, and I just saw something that would make a really juicy feature for the magazine. Can we meet early next week? It’s time sensitive.”

The sound of heavy footfalls coming down the stairs causes Evie to hunker even lower behind the bus cart. Nicole’s saying something, frantically trying to recalculate Evie’s social worth based on the wildly unexpected information that she’s at the party of the month and Nicole isn’t. Evie cuts her off. “Look, I don’t have a lot of time. Someone’s been hired to break up Greg and Stewart Pickford’s marriage. I have proof. You want to meet about it or not?”

There’s a slow exhale on the other end, and the noise of whatever bar she’s at fades away. “I don’t know if you heard, but we laid off a lot of staff last week and I can’t commission new freelancers right now, it just looks bad. Can you write it on spec? By the time you’re done I can probably get budget.”

A voice echoes down the corridor, the sort of short, sharp Hey! meant to stop someone in their tracks. Evie talks faster, more urgently into the phone. “I can’t write it on spec, Nicole. You know I won’t get people like this to agree to interviews unless I can use the magazine’s name,” Evie grits out. She’ll be telling the subjects it’s for a puff piece on fall fashion, of course, but their PR won’t even return her calls if the inquiry isn’t backed by a publication they care about. “It’s very Vanity Fair, though. Maybe they’re still commissioning—”

“I don’t think you understand, buddy. I ain’t askin’,” says a harsh male voice down the corridor, and the footsteps that were coming towards her stop.

“I prefer not to. We prefer not to,” another voice answers, low, sly and dripping with aristocratic disdain. It’s Misha, and he’s maybe five feet away from her.

Evie tenses. “I have to go. Do you want this or should I take it somewhere else?” The words come out sharp, the absolute terror of being discovered giving her a confidence she’d never managed while interning.

“I can see you Monday at noon,” says Nicole. “At the office. Bring proof.”

“Okay. Thank you,” Evie whispers, hanging up and pocketing her phone.

She edges forwards, peeking around the bus cart. Two security guards are slowly walking towards Misha, who is standing in front of Stewart Pickford-Jones, blocking the guards from him with his body. Stewart is shaking, white with fear.