Chapter 5

Leander is already at the table. An almost identical hoodie, different colour, sunglasses somehow even larger than mine, and his head is resting directly on the table with the resigned quality of someone who has accepted his circumstances and stopped fighting them.

Our parents are seated. Our father has coffee. Our mother, Elara, has tea and the expression of someone who had a full night's sleep and finds the sight of her two children deeply amusing in a way she is making a gentle effort to conceal.

"Neither of you," our father says, "listened to a single word I said about pacing yourselves."

"Food," Leander says, without lifting his head. "Please just start the food."

"Leander told Mrs V to wake me up," I say, settling into my chair and reaching for the water. "I want that formally acknowledged."

Leander lifts his head. One eye opens. "I didn't have a choice."

"You had options."

"She was the only viable option and you know it."

"That," I say, turning to face both parents with the gravity of someone filing a formal complaint with the appropriate authorities, "is a lie. And I want you both to know that however he turned out is directly your responsibility. You raised him. You made every choice that produced this specific person."

Our mother sets down her tea with quiet composure. "He's right, sweetheart. You shouldn't have drunk that much."

I look at her.

Our father nods in steady agreement. He does not look even remotely pressed about the situation.

I look at him.

Mrs V walks in from the kitchen at the precise wrong moment, carrying the green juice and my morning supplements, and catches enough of the conversation to form a strong opinion. "Foolish girl," she says, not unkindly, setting the juice in front of me. "Twenty-five years old and shitfaced at your own party."

"You're fired," I tell her.

"You've said that," she says, with the placid certainty of someone who has heard this exact sentence for years, "for twenty-five years. And here we both still are."

I cannot argue with this. It is a clapback of the highest order and I respect it even while resenting the timing. She has never once in her life failed a vibe check, and I find it both admirable and occasionally inconvenient.

The green juice is, as it always is, a miracle. Mrs V makes it from a combination of ingredients she has never disclosed to anyone, and it is genuinely bussin on a level no other substance can compete with. It addresses hangovers, cramps, nausea, headaches, and at least two categories of existential difficulty with equal reliability. I drink it in long pulls and feel the hangover begin its slow retreat from behind my eyes.

I take my supplements. The cramps that arrive with the monthly and absolute consistency of a subscription nobody signed up for are already making themselves known, and I manage them the way I manage every physical thing I have decided to manage: with supplements and green juice and zero compromise. My body is mine. The decisions about it are mine. This is not up for discussion now or ever.

The scrambled eggs arrive. Soft and perfectly made, placed in front of me without being requested, because Mrs V has known what I want for breakfast since I was old enough to form a preference and has never once needed to be reminded.

"Mrs V." I look up at her. "Can I have an extra hash brown?"

She looks at me for a moment. Then she laughs, the warm specific laugh she saves for me that is different from every other laugh she has, and she goes back to the kitchen and returns with two extra hash browns and places them on my plate and touches my arm with one hand.

"Anthí mou," she says softly. My flower.

I smile back at her. As much warmth as my face currently allows, which given the hangover and the conversation in my father's office and the full weight of everything that is coming is not as full as I would like. But it is real.

I eat my eggs. Leander eats without making eye contact with any surface or person. Our parents talk quietly at the other end of the table and the morning light moves across the room the way it always has in this house. Everything in it is exactly as it has always been.

I chew a bite of hash brown and think about strawberry bubblegum. I think about a woman with an extraordinary ring who spent my birthday night matching me shot for shot and caught me when I fell and promised not to say a word, and who I already know is going to be the kind of friend that makes things survivable. I will call her this afternoon, not this morning. That is not a flop. That is wisdom.

And somewhere beneath all of it, sitting very still and very quiet in a place I cannot quite reach yet, is the memory of murky green eyes in a side street. Cold, and looking at me like I was nothing. And the tear I wiped away before anyone could see it, and the fury that rushed in to fill the space it left, which is still there this morning. Still hot. Still mine.

These men will never know that the woman they dismissed so completely is the daughter of Viktor Sorano. They will never know that the two men watching from across the room that night could have made their lives unrecognisable before morning. They are never going to know any of it, because I chose peace over retaliation, and that was the right choice, and I am not even a side character in their story. I am not even a thought they will carry tomorrow.

They are the ones living rent free in mine, and that, more than anything else, is what makes me the most salty.

I eat my hash brown. I sit in my family's dining room on the morning of my twenty-fifth birthday in Leander's stolen hoodie and my ridiculous party sunglasses, and I let myself be here, inside this life, inside this house, for one more ordinary breakfast.

Because tomorrow I start learning to leave it.

And I am, no cap, absolutely not ready.