Chapter 4
Star
"...SUCH A GIFT," MILA is gushing. "Honestly, Star, I don't know how you do it. I had a shoulder massage last year at a spa in Milan, three hundred euros, and the woman practically dislocated my arm. But your hands." She holds up her own, fingers spread, and wiggles them. "Magic."
We're sitting in the staff mess at breakfast, which surprised me.
Mila doesn't eat in the staff mess. She's not staff, not exactly.
She's a consultant, which means she occupies the strange middle territory between guest and crew: guest-deck cabin, access to the fancy restaurants where I'm not allowed to breathe, but here on a work contract like the rest of us.
She could eat in the main dining room with the crystal stemware and the napkins that are probably worth more than my trousers. She could eat anywhere on this ship.
She chose to eat with me.
And I don't know why that makes my chest go warm, but it does.
Like being picked first for a team. Like someone surveyed the crowded room full of people who've been here longer and know each other better and thought, actually, I want to sit with the new girl who has an oil stain on her cuff and can't button her uniform properly.
"It's just practice," I tell her, tearing a croissant in half.
The pastry flakes across the table and I brush the crumbs into my palm because I don't want to leave a mess, because I've never left messes for other people to clean up, because when you grow up eating cereal standing over the sink in a studio flat, you develop a permanent relationship with tidiness that borders on compulsive. "Lots and lots of practice."
"Don't undersell yourself, darling. Kobe told me your practical scores were the highest he'd seen in years.
Years!" She leans forward, chin on her hand, those warm brown eyes studying me with a fascination that makes me feel simultaneously flattered and slightly on display.
"You must have been born knowing how to touch people. "
I wasn't born knowing anything. I learned because I had to, because my hands were the only part of me that anyone was willing to pay for, and because Madame Gilles took one look at my application and told me you have the fingers for it, now let's see if you have the patience, and I did, I had the patience, I had nothing but patience because patience is free and everything else costs money.
But I don't say that to Mila, because it sounds like a sad story and I don't particularly enjoy being a sad story, so I just say "Thank you" and eat my croissant, and she beams at me, and the smile is warm.
It is warm.
It is.
OVER THE NEXT FEW DAYS, Mila is everywhere.
Not in an intrusive way. In a generous way, a beautiful-woman-who-remembers-what-it's-like-to-be-new way.
She saves me a seat at the crew film night on Deck 4.
She brings me a coffee when I'm between clients, remembering without being told that I take it black with one sugar, which means either she asked someone or she noticed, and both options make me feel cared for in a way I'm not used to and don't entirely know what to do with.
She asks about my sessions, my clients, whether Mr. Green is being too hard on me, whether I'm sleeping okay, whether I miss home.
"Not really," I admit, which is true. Nice was never home.
Nice was a place I lived because I could afford it, barely, and because Madame Gilles's studio was there.
Home is a concept I've sort of... deferred.
Added it to the someday list, along with savings accounts and furniture that matches and a kitchen where I can actually sit down to eat.
Priority level: eventually. Status: pending.
"Oh, darling." She touches my wrist. Her fingers are cool, her nails perfect, and the touch is brief and light. "Everyone should have a home to miss."
I smile and change the subject and later, in my cabin, lying in my bunk with the curtain drawn and the ship rocking beneath me, I think about why that comment stung.
Not because it was unkind. Because it was accurate.
Mila has a way of finding the tender spot and pressing on it so gently you can't even call it pressure.
More like an X-ray. She locates the bruise and holds a lamp up to it and you think she's being kind because she's showing you where it hurts, but afterward you're the one standing there with the ache and she's the one who walked away smiling.
She does it again the next morning, in the corridor outside the Tranquil Antique Gallery. I'm on my way to the spa and she's unlocking the gallery, keys in one hand, a leather portfolio tucked under her arm.
"Star! Perfect timing. Come see this."
I should keep walking. I'm ten minutes early for my schedule, which means I have exactly ten minutes, and I've already learned that Mila's version of "come see this" can stretch to forty minutes and two coffees and a life story.
But the gallery pulls at me, same as it did on the tour. The dim light, the warm spotlights, the jade figure glowing in its case. I follow her in.
She leads me to a display near the back wall. A necklace, laid out on dark velvet under glass. Gold chain, fine as a hair, with a pendant: a single stone, pale green, teardrop-shaped, in a setting so delicate it looks like the gold was poured around the stone by hand.
"Eighteenth century," Mila tells me, her voice gone hushed, reverent by reflex.
"Russian. The setting is original." She unlocks the case, lifts the necklace out, holds it up so the light catches the stone, and the pale green flares and dims and flares again and I'm gone, I'm completely gone, because my hands are already itching to touch it and my throat is already doing that tight thing it does when I see something beautiful that was made by someone's hands a long time ago.
"Isn't it extraordinary?" Mila breathes. "The craftsmanship. Someone made this two hundred years ago with tools we'd consider primitive, and it's still perfect."
"It's beautiful," I blurt, and I know I sound like a child at a museum, but I've never learned to be cool about beautiful things and I've given up trying.
A perfectly glazed piece of porcelain or a hand-stitched seam or light hitting old gold, and something in me just goes oh and my fingers itch to touch and Madame Gilles used to say I wore my heart on my sleeves and my sleeves were always rolled up.
"Here." Mila holds it toward me. "Feel the weight."
I take it. The gold is cool and heavier than I expected and the pendant rests in my palm like a held breath.
My thumb runs over the setting, feeling the grooves where a craftsman's tool once pressed, two hundred years between my fingers and his, and my throat goes tight and my eyes sting and I don't even care if that's dramatic because this is a two-hundred-year-old necklace in a twenty-year-old palm and I can feel the person who made it through the gold and I will never, never get tired of that feeling, the feeling of someone's hands reaching across centuries to touch mine through the thing they created.
Mila's head tilts as she watches me cradle it. Her smile is warm.
"You appreciate things," she observes. "I noticed that about you. Most people on this ship see the price tag. You see the work." A pause, and her smile doesn't change but her eyes hold mine a beat longer than the smile warrants. "It's refreshing. Like having a child around."
I set the necklace back on the velvet. "I should get to the spa."
"Go, go." She waves me off, already turning to her portfolio, already somewhere else. "We'll have lunch later, yes?"
We have lunch later. She tells me about the gallery's collection, about the family that owns it, the Almazovs, who she refers to with the easy familiarity of someone who's been in their orbit so long she's forgotten that other people find them intimidating.
"Alexei chose most of the Russian pieces himself," she shares between bites of salad, "he has a very specific eye.
" She tells me about acquisitions and provenance and the art of authentication, and I listen because it's interesting and because she's interesting and because I like her.
I do.
But.
There's a but, and I can't locate it. It sits at the edge of my awareness like an off note inside an otherwise perfect chord, and you can't quite point to it but you can feel it and it makes your teeth itch.
She says something kind and I believe it and then ten minutes later I'm replaying it and finding the splinter.
Like having a child around. Was that a compliment or a measurement?
She bought me a coffee, remembered the sugar, but also told me yesterday, "You're so sweet, it's almost hard to believe you're old enough to be working here," and when I told her I was twenty she laughed.
"Twenty! To be twenty again," and her eyes did something I can't name.
They went somewhere else for half a second, somewhere cold and calculating, and came back, and the warmth was exactly the same as before. Exactly. As if she'd practised it.
Maybe I'm imagining it. I'm twenty and she's in her thirties and she's been on this ship longer than I've been a therapist and she knows the Almazovs by name and she probably thinks I'm a sweet, harmless kid who needs looking after.
Maybe that's all it is.
Maybe I need to stop overanalysing the only woman on this ship who's been kind to me and just eat my lunch and be grateful.
Note to self: stop finding splinters in gifts. Not everything is a puzzle. Some people are just nice.
I SEE THEM TOGETHER on Wednesday night.