4

The airport was loud, too many people moving in too many directions, all of them somewhere urgent to be. Victoria stood near the departure gate with her carry-on bag hanging off one shoulder and her boarding pass folded between two fingers, trying to look like a person who had everything under control.

Emily was not making it easy.

"Are you absolutely sure?" Emily asked for what had to be the fourth time in twenty minutes. Her arms were crossed tight over her chest, the way they got when she was trying not to cry and losing the battle. "I mean it, Vicky. There are design firms here. Good ones. I looked some up last night. There are at least three that would be lucky to have you."

"Emily."

"I'm just saying there are options."

"Emily." Victoria set her bag down and turned to face her properly. "You know I can't stay here."

Emily's jaw tightened. She looked away at the crowd moving past them and didn't say anything for a moment.

"This place is closing in on me," Victoria said, softer now. "Every time I step outside I feel it. Like the city itself has his name written into the pavement and I can't stop reading it." She shook her head. "That sounds insane. I know that." 

"It doesn't," Emily said quietly.

"I need somewhere that doesn't have Alexander Sterling in it." Victoria picked her bag back up. "Aldenvale has that. And it has Lucas Chen."

Emily made a sound somewhere between a sigh and a scoff. "You and Lucas Chen."

"It has been my dream since my second year of university and you know it." Victoria managed a small smile. "Getting to work under someone like him, even as an assistant that is not a small thing. I would be an idiot to walk away from it just to stay here and watch your brother get married."

Emily flinched. She pressed her lips together and looked at the floor for a second before meeting Victoria's eyes again. "If only I could do something. There has to be something."

"There isn't." Victoria said it plainly, without bitterness. "He is in love with Vanessa. That much was clear. It would be stupid of me to think it could have gone any other way, and it would be even stupider to stick around hoping." She swallowed. "I want to move on, Emily. I actually want to. So let me go somewhere I can try."

Emily stared at her for a long second. Then she stepped forward and pulled her into a hug so tight it was almost painful.

Victoria hugged her back and said nothing. There was nothing left to say.

"Call me the second you land," Emily muttered into her shoulder. "And send pictures of the apartment. I want to see everything."

"I will."

"And if it is terrible, you are coming straight back and I don't care what you say."

"It won't be terrible."

Emily pulled back and pressed her lips together firmly, refusing to let the tears go further than the corners of her eyes. "You better not disappear on me."

"I won't."

Victoria picked up her bag, gave Emily's hand one last squeeze, and walked through the gate.

The flight to Aldenvale was three and a half hours. Victoria had the window seat, which she had been glad about until she was actually sitting in it, thirty thousand feet in the air, staring at a stretch of clouds and thinking thoughts she absolutely did not want to be thinking.

She kept her hands folded in her lap. Calm. Normal. Like a completely normal person flying to a new city for a new job with no complications whatsoever.

Except for the complication currently taking up permanent residence in her body.

She had not been able to do anything about it in Merrath. Grandpa's reach there stretched into every corner the clinics, the private practices, even the pharmacies where she might have tried to quietly figure something out on her own. There were eyes everywhere she turned, and the one thing she could not afford was for that information to travel back to him before she had made it out of the city. So she had waited. She had packed and smiled and hugged Emily and waited, and now she was in the air, and there was a strange, completely irrational fear crawling around in the back of her mind that had no business being there.

Was it safe to fly? In this condition?

She had no reason to worry. She wasn't even far along. It was barely a month. She didn't even she was going to take care of it the moment she landed. That was the plan. That had always been the plan.

So there was absolutely no reason to be sitting here with her hands pressed against her stomach like some kind of protective reflex that her body had developed entirely without her permission.

She moved her hands back to her lap and turned to look out the window.

The clouds looked soft from up here. She thought about nothing.

The air hostess came down the aisle with a cart, offering drinks and a tray of food. The smell reached Victoria half a second before the cart did and her stomach flipped immediately, a wave of nausea rolling through her so fast she had to press her fingers to her lips and breathe very carefully through her nose.

"Something to drink?" the hostess asked with a bright, practiced smile.

"Orange juice," Victoria said. "Please. Just the juice."

She left the food.

The juice helped. She sipped it slowly and watched the clouds and thought about Lucas Chen's studio, which she had only ever seen in photographs and one very long documentary she had watched twice during university. Clean lines. Natural light. The kind of interiors that felt like rooms that understood something about the people living in them.

That was what she was flying toward. That was what mattered.

She folded up the thought about the other thing and put it somewhere at the back of her mind and left it there for the rest of the flight.

Aldenvale announced itself through the airplane window as a wash of city lights spread wide and low across the evening dark, nothing like Merrath's tight, vertical skyline. It was bigger than she had expected. More spread out. Glass and steel and the soft orange glow of a city that ran on business and kept moving through the night.

She was through baggage claim and out of the main terminal doors before she remembered to breathe properly.

The air outside was different. That was the first thing she noticed. Cooler and sharper, carrying the particular smell of a city she had never been in before, all concrete and evening and something faintly green underneath it.

She pulled out her phone and recorded a voice message for Emily.

"I landed. I'm outside the airport, everything is fine, I'm getting a cab now." She looked around at the lit-up terminal entrance, the queue of taxis and rideshares, the stream of travelers pulling cases across the pavement. "It's bigger than I thought. I'll send pictures once I get to the apartment. Don't wait up." She paused. "Thank you for coming to see me off. I mean it."

She ended the message and flagged down a taxi.

The apartment building was in a part of the city called Halcyon Terrace, which sounded like something out of a property brochure and turned out to be accurate. The streets were clean. The buildings were the kind that had actual lobbies with actual lighting, not a single buzzing fluorescent in sight. Trees lined the pavement in neat rows.

The rent in this area would have eaten her salary whole and spat out the bones. She knew that without having to look it up.

Grandpa had arranged the apartment. Of course he had.

She stood on the pavement outside the building for a moment after the taxi pulled away, looking up at it. It was a nice building. Generous windows, good bones, the sort of place that felt like it had been maintained by people who took the work seriously. She should have felt grateful.

She did feel grateful. That was the complicated part.

Because it was a generous thing and a surveillance thing and both of those were true at the same time, and she had learned a long time ago that when Grandpa gave you something, it always came with the shape of a hand around your throat.

But the rent in this area would have been impossible. That was also true. And she was going to need money more of it than she had counted on, for reasons she was still sorting through and refusing to name directly. So at least this was something. At least she could save.

She pushed through the entrance doors.

The lobby had a marble floor and a front desk and a young man at it who looked up and gave her a professional nod. She gave her name. He found the key. Fourth floor, facing the street.

The elevator was quiet and clean and when she stepped into the apartment and turned on the lights, the first thing she saw was a window that took up most of one wall and showed her the Aldenvale skyline stretching out in every direction, lit up against the dark like a city that didn't intend to stop.

She set her bag down.

She took a picture and sent it to Emily with no caption.

Emily's reply came back in under thirty seconds: I hate you. It's gorgeous. Are you okay?

Victoria looked at the skyline for another moment.

I will be, she typed back.

She meant it, mostly.

She went to find the kitchen, filled a glass of water, and sat down on the floor of the empty apartment with her back against the wall and her knees drawn up and the glass balanced on her knee, and she let herself sit there quietly for a few minutes without thinking about anything at all.

New city. New job. New start.

That was enough for tonight.