Chapter 1 #2
"Good. I'll be there bright and early. You finish your bar shift, take a power nap—yes, a real one, lying down, not ten minutes on a break room chair—and come in at eight instead of six.
I know how to open. I've watched you do it enough times.
" She turns me by the shoulder toward the kitchen island.
"Now sit down and eat before your food gets cold. I know you hate cold food."
She's right. I hate cold food with a conviction that is probably disproportionate to the actual stakes of the situation.
I sit on the island stool.
The plate she made is simple—scrambled eggs, toast, half a sliced avocado, a small pile of cherry tomatoes that I will eat despite not being in the mood for tomatoes because Elowen put them there and ignoring them feels ungrateful.
The scent of the food hits me before I even reach for the fork.
Butter, warm and slightly golden. The soft sulfur of good eggs cooked low and slow the way I actually like them, not rubbery, not dry.
Elowen knows how I like my eggs.
That's not a small thing either.
"Oh—" she starts, turning back toward the counter. "You have mail."
Of course I do.
She hands it over without comment. I don't need to open it to know what it is—the government envelope is distinctive at this point, that particular shade of official beige that I have developed a Pavlovian response to. My jaw tightens.
I set it next to my plate and pick up my fork instead, because I am not doing this before food. I have limits and those limits begin at addressing correspondence from the Omega Integration and Support Services on an empty stomach.
"Another mixer invitation," I say flatly.
Elowen leans against the counter, watching me the way she does when she's building toward something.
"If I get invited to one more," I add, "I'm going to lose my mind. Actually, lose it. It'll be a whole thing."
"Why don't you actually try one?"
I give her the look.
She gives it right back.
"Didn't Rosemarie meet her pack by going to your mixer invitation? The one you forwarded her when you were sick?"
She had to bring that up.
She did not have to bring that up…but then I just brought it up…and now I’m remembering again that my friend is living the dream just like my other friends who are now in amazing loving packs…and I’m…here…alone...
I stab a piece of egg with slightly more force than the egg requires.
The thing is, Elowen is correct, and she knows she's correct, and I know she's correct, and the correctness of it is genuinely irritating because now I have to sit with the image of Rosemarie—Rosemarie who went to my mixer invitation as a favor when I had a fever—now glowing, radiant, walking around Oakridge Hollows looking like a woman being thoroughly and comprehensively loved by three Alphas who are actual, functional adults rather than grown men who borrowed my future for startup costs and forgot to pay it back.
Real Alphas.
The door-holding, bill-paying, showing-up-when-you-need-them variety that used to feel like a genre of fiction I had no business reading.
Don't be bitter about Rosemarie. She deserves it. You're happy for her. You're completely and genuinely happy for her and also slightly unhinged with jealousy, and both of those things are true.
I look at the envelope.
It looks back.
"Just try it," Elowen hums. She disappears around the counter and comes back with a glass of milk, which she sets beside my plate with the absolute confidence of someone who has decided what's happening and doesn't require my input.
I arch an eyebrow at the milk.
"Really."
"You need more protein in your diet. Not more alcohol."
"Alcohol is made from grains. Grains are technically a food group."
"That is not a nutritional argument."
"It's a philosophical one."
She rolls her eyes in the specific way that means she's not actually annoyed, and I drink the milk because she's right and I'm not going to say that out loud.
It's cold and clean and tastes like someone who cares about me decided to intervene in my self-neglect, which—that's just milk from a grocery store but somehow it lands that way at midnight when you've worked since seven in the morning and you're about to do it again.
"Maybe you'll meet some rich Alphas who actually want to take something from you instead of leaving something on you.
" Elowen is back at the counter now, tidying, the way she always tidies while she talks—hands occupied, voice light.
"The kind who pay bills instead of creating them.
Who holds doors. Who do those ridiculous romantic things you read about in those books you pretend you're not obsessed with? "
"Those are just books," I say.
"Are they."
"Yes, Elowen, they're fiction, they are literally by definition not real—"
"Mila."
"I know what the fantasy is, okay? I've read enough of them.
" I pick up my toast. "Any Omega wants to believe it.
The whole thing—the Alpha who looks at you like you matter, who shows up without being asked, who would rather build something with you than extract something from you.
The domestic, quiet miracle of it. The part where the Omega just—exists—and that's enough. That's more than enough."
You've read every one of those books that Hazel keeps stacked at the café counter. Every single one. You've read them in the fifteen minutes between orders when it's slow, and you close them like someone who's been caught doing something private.
"But that's not what my life looks like.
" I set the toast down. "My life looks like a plank that trips me.
It looks like a government envelope on a kitchen island.
It looks like double shifts and blockers and a savings account that could be described, generously, as aspirational.
" I gesture at the envelope. "That's real life.
The books are fairytales. Or maybe just luck. "
"Maybe you're right," Elowen says. She doesn't sound defeated about it—she sounds like someone taking a tactical pause. "But." She holds up one finger. "St. Patrick's Day is coming up."
I narrow my eyes at her.
"And maybe it's your lucky season." She's smiling now—small and specific, the one that means she's already three moves ahead and is simply waiting for me to see the board. "Think of it like that Bridgerton show. The masquerade one. Emerald silks, candlelight, the whole thing."
"That is a streaming drama, Elowen."
"And the envelope is a real thing sitting right next to your milk." She tilts her head toward it. "One night. That's all. Eat, get ready for your shift, and when you're done—I'll have something for you."
"Something."
"A lucky heirloom." She winks. "Maybe it'll turn things around."
I look at her. Then at the envelope. Then at the milk, which I've somehow finished without noticing.
Then at the eggs, which are perfect, which she made at midnight because I texted from the street that I had thirty minutes.
She believes in this more than you believe in anything right now.
She drove here on a Tuesday night and cooked eggs and didn't even make you ask.
I shake my head slowly, the way I do when I've already lost an argument but haven't been willing to confirm it out loud.
"Eat," Elowen says, already moving back toward the living room to retrieve her jacket. "We'll talk about the envelope when you're back."
She disappears around the corner.
I pick up my fork.
The apartment settles around me—small and messy and mine, smelling like scrambled eggs and Elowen's lingering peonies and the faint vanilla-warmth of my own scent underneath it all, honey and whiskey and lime zest, the signature I've carried since I presented and have never quite figured out what to do with.
I look at the government envelope on the counter.
A mixer.
Another curated, government-sanctioned parade through the humiliation of standing in a room full of Alphas who look at Omegas the way investors look at properties—potential or liability, asset or overhead.
Another night of my scent being read by strangers and found either appealing or wanting, of navigating the particular social physics of a room where your biology is the entire premise.
Rosemarie went and came home with a pack who loves her.
I eat the rest of the food, I drink the last traces of milk from the glass because Elowen put it there, and the message in that matters more than my opinions about dairy at midnight.
I sit in the small kitchen of my small apartment and I look at the fifty-thousand-dollar debt that isn't in the room but might as well be, and at the envelope that represents someone's optimistic theory about my romantic future, and at the plank in the hallway floor that I am going to fix, genuinely, this weekend, which is not a lie I'm telling myself, it's a plan.
It's a plan, Mila.
Elowen comes back around the corner, buttoning her coat, smelling like florals and goodnight and the specific warmth of a person who is not going to let you give up without a fight on your behalf.
"I'll be at the café before eight, and I’ll leave your lucky item in your jacket pocket," she says.
"Go be brilliant at the bar and try not to trip on anything on your way out. "
"I will absolutely trip on something," I tell her honestly.
She laughs.
The door closes behind her, and the apartment is quieter without the peonies, just me and the eggs and the envelope and a shift that starts in twenty-two minutes.
I get up. I pull on my jacket. I find my keys in the third place I look, which is an improvement.
I walk toward the door, and I look at the government envelope one last time before I leave, sitting there under the kitchen light in its official beige, the return address like a small, persistent argument I haven't answered.
Lucky season.
Emerald silks and candlelight and the whole Bridgerton production.
Sure.
I step over the plank.
Successfully…this time.
I'll need all the luck in the universe to get me out of this maddening financial disaster.