Dawney, having walked through the doors of Rossini's, approached the bar counter with a weary step, then dropped down on top of one of the strawberry-red stools and sighed.

“What a night!”

“Has it been heavy?” Karin asked her, taking a cup from above the coffee machine and hurrying to make her a cappuccino.

“The hell,” Dawney merely replied. “Two suspected cases of Covid-19, which fortunately turned out to be simple common colds. A car against cow incident, with a patient who is now fine, but who arrived in the ER completely covered in manure and forced us to wear face masks to protect ourselves from a terrible barn smell. And a stripper, drunk, who arrived with a twelve-heeled shoe stuck in one cheek.”

The sister opened her mouth wide in surprise.

“Gosh,” she commented, placing the steaming cappuccino in front of her. “I didn't think that twelve-heeled shoes could be used as weapons. I mean, sometimes I heard it from men, when they were making a joke to tease or make fun of me.”

“Neither did I. It was the first time in my five years there that it happened to me. Oh, by the way, she was one of her “co-workers” who hit her, the shoe was hers. Thank you very much,” she said, taking the cup in her hand and bringing it close to her mouth. She took a sip of cappuccino. Mmm, her sister made it just right, rich, creamy and sweet the way she liked it. “Did you find an audition?”

“Yes, I have one this afternoon. It's for a new TV series for the streaming platform Phoenix.”

Karin had joined her in Los Angeles about a year earlier in hopes of becoming an actress. Twenty-five, she was the classic American beauty, with long, thick blond hair, which she kept tied back in a ponytail during her work schedule, a lean, slender figure, and two clear blue eyes that had already turned the heads of more than one customer at the coffee and pastry shop where she worked, as well as her boss, but unlike the many aspiring actresses who flocked to the city, she had a good head on her shoulders and a sweet, friendly disposition. As soon as she arrived from New York, where she had jilted her cheating former boyfriend after finding him in bed with her now ex best friend, she had been looking for a stable job and, once she had found one, she had started showing up for auditions and sending applications just about everywhere for that or that other movie or TV series.

For the meantime, she had appeared in a commercial for a hair shampoo and had acted as an extra in a film about the life of Greta Garbo, but now she felt that things were going to get better, since, as she was explaining to her, for that fiction she had been contacted directly by a major production company, which had seen her profile on one of the many portals crowded with aspiring actors and had emailed her to ask her to show up for an audition that afternoon.

“So yes, I will go, but until I have something in my hand for sure and earn my first ten thousand dollars from acting, I don't think I will leave Rossini's,” then she looked at her older sister, “Dawney, are you listening to me?”

Dawney snapped back to her senses.

“Yes, sorry, as I said, it has been a heavy night.”

Karin arched an eyebrow, then, without saying a word, went to the display case that was next to the bar counter and where cannoli filled with sweet ricotta cream, Danish pastries with cream and with raspberry jam were on beautiful display, brioche with chocolate, apricot jam and pistachio cream, rum babas, small Neapolitan pastries and, a novelty that Giancarlo Rossini, her employer, had decided to introduce to try to win over the most discerning palates: the Opéra cake, which he had decided to offer in an all-Italian version, replacing the heavy buttercream with a white chocolate and coffee ganache.

Shortly thereafter Dawney was faced with a mini portion of the treat in question, which was also her favorite dessert.

“This one is on the house. Go ahead, tell me what's going on. It's not like you to daydream.”

Dawney bit her lip, undecided whether or not to tell her about what had happened to her two weeks earlier, then took the teaspoon that stood next to the cappuccino and sank it into the Opéra cake. When she put it in her mouth, she let out a sigh of pleasure.

“Fabulous, as always. Give my compliments to Mr. Rossini.”

“Uh-huh, don't change the subject, Dawney,” her sister admonished her. “Come on, spit it out. We have always confided everything to each other, ever since we were little, and you know I keep secrets.”

Dawney sighed, then took a second teaspoon of dessert.

Which way could she start? It was complicated: when she had started following the Razor Edge and hanging out with Cole, she had dropped out of school and her mom, enraged, had kicked her out of the house.

She and her sister had not seen each other again until the year before when Karin, back in Los Angeles from New York, announced that no, she would no longer marry Robert, that he had cheated on her with her best friend, and that she would try to pursue a career as an actress in Los Angeles. In the meantime, she, in addition to reconciling with her mother, who had tearfully welcomed her back with open arms, had returned with her EMT diploma in hand and her first job in a small ER located in the suburbs, and, after three more years of apprenticeship, had applied to L.A Hospital's ER and had been hired.

“Do you have in mind when mom kicked me out of the house because I had dropped out of high school to follow the Razor Edge?”

Karin gave a whistle that, although not appropriate for a lady, was appropriate to describe that situation.

“And how I remember it! Mom was beside herself, she had recently started divorce proceedings. Yes, I remember that...you know how she later regretted it and didn't want to let me go to New York with Robert? She was afraid that then she would be alone.”

“Here's,” Dawney began, then bit her lip, before continuing, “in the two years that I have been away from home, I have had a relationship...with the guitarist of the rockband.”

“Hooray!” Karin exclaimed, flabbergasted. “Then what happened next?”

“Forget about it,” said Dawney, who did not willingly narrate that dark page of her life. That night when, after Cole had made her drink a purple-green cocktail during an after show, she had lost consciousness and nearly died, like Bon Scott, choking on her own vomit.

She could remember nothing else except what Mark, who was now her colleague, had told her.
He had just arrived with a code red in the ambulance when he had seen her lying on the ground in front of the ER door. At first he had thought she was simply drunk, but then, when he had approached her and seen that she was unconscious, he had not thought twice and, after telling his colleagues to take care of the code red, had taken her immediately to the Emergency Room. They had put her in a side position on a crib, this was to prevent her from choking if she vomited, then they had done blood tests to make sure that besides alcohol, she had no other substances such as drugs or the like in her bloodstream. Unfortunately, there were, and worse, if they had arrived two minutes later, she would not have been saved.

“Do you happen to remember what they gave you?”

She, who had meanwhile regained consciousness and discovered that she had an intravenous drip in her arm, had replied that she could not remember the name, but that it had two colors: deep purple below and fluorescent green above.

Mark had cursed between his teeth, then seeing her questioning expression, he had explained to her the reason for his reaction:

“You are lucky that you are still alive. They gave you the Deathzeer: it is a mix of alcohol, benzodiazepines, GBL, marijuana and ketamine. Unfortunately, although our hospital does at least three prevention campaigns a year on the issue, more and more young people end up falling victim to it. And unfortunately, it has also caused deaths.”

“However, after what happened, I decided to give that life an end. I went back to school, became a rescuer and, until two weeks ago, my life was normal. Then...”

“Then?” Karin pressed her.

“Then two weeks ago I saw Cole again on the floor of his luxurious mansion,” Dawney said. She took a deep breath. “Heart attack. My colleague Bette and I arrived just in time. He was unconscious and breathless and, at first, I didn't recognize him; I was too busy giving him CPR and thinking about saving his life. Then he came to his senses and recognized me.”

“Double gosh,” commented Karin, then, seeing out of the corner of her eye a customer cross the threshold of Rossini's and approach the counter, she nodded to Dawney. “I'll be right back.”

Dawney waited patiently for her sister to serve the customer and, in the meantime, enjoyed another bite of her Opéra cake.

Miraculously her boss, after that night which had been quite difficult for everyone, had decided to give her, Bette and Mark the day, and even the night, off. She had told them that they had more than earned it and that, the next day, they would start at two o'clock in the afternoon. The next day would be Saturday: the most difficult day of the whole week along with Sunday, because young people, on Saturday nights, went out to have fun and, often, drank too much and, when the evening was over, it was not uncommon for them to become victims of fights or traffic accidents.

Karin returned and, after placing the customer's payment in the cash register and stuffing the tip into a piggy bank that was nearby, incited her to continue with her story.

She sighed.

“At first I was shocked. But then I regained control and adopted standard procedure: I reassured him, saying that everything would be fine and that we were taking him to the hospital for a little checkup, then we took him by ambulance to the Emergency Room and, once there, we barely had time to hand him over to the doctor on duty that we were called out again, this time for a second-degree burn caused by a chemical. I don't know what happened to him after that.”

“What bad luck though,” Karin commented, picking up a rag. She moistened it with lukewarm water, then wiped it over the counter: it was now only a few minutes before the employees were due to enter Rossini's for their coffee break at ten o'clock on the dot, and at precisely ten past ten they would leave the cafeteria and pastry shop and return behind their desks. “What do you plan to do now?”

She raised and lowered her shoulders again.

“Nothing. The encounter with Cole has been a fluke, and it will remain so. My life is too hectic, too...busy to date a man, but even if it were freer, I certainly wouldn't date him. I risked my life because of him, and that is very serious.”

Karin, hearing that sentence, fell silent. She was frightened and, at first, wondered if she should find out more, ask what had happened, then decided to let it go.

Dawney's voice, when she had uttered that sentence, had hardened, becoming harsher: probably that episode still caused her a lot of pain and, for that reason, she did not wish to talk about it.

Dawney brought the last bite of Opéra cake between her lips, then, after drinking the rest of her cappuccino in one breath, stood up:

“I'll let you work now, I've kept you even too long.”

“Please don't worry, it's not a problem,” said Karin. Then she became serious. “Do you know that if you keep eating and drinking fast, by the end of the month you may end up with two extra pounds on your hips? I read this this morning in a magazine.”

“It will mean that, this afternoon, I will take the opportunity to go jogging on the beach,” Dawney replied in a joking tone. “Unfortunately for that I can do little or nothing about it, by now when you live in a state of continuous emergency, even relaxing becomes difficult,” and, having said those words, said goodbye to her younger sister, then left the coffee and pastry shop.

Remained alone, Karin shook her head:

“Sometimes it would be good for her to go at a slower pace. But I'm afraid it will take someone really special to convince her to do so.”