“Literally.” She took her phone and pulled up a picture, sliding it across the table to me. “Feel free to swipe. I collected old pictures of my stuff in the space for the Housing Court. Guess I might as well level fully with you now. This is who I actually am.”
Jesus, she’d been living in a prison cell. My chest constricted painfully as I looked through the pictures—a small, windowless room, no obvious ventilation, grimy with a dirty, threadbare mattress on the floor. I wanted to believe there was a shower somewhere else, but the body wash and washcloths over by a laundry sink with a drain in the corner made it pretty obvious what her living situation was like.
Thinking of her going back to that at the end of every long day, her body starting to fail in the way it had been, and she got—what, a cot and a sponge bath? The fact that she’d even done half of what she’d done while living like this wasn’t… well, I didn’t think I’d have been able to.
“At least the housing authority caught the slumlord in the act,” I said icily. “This is disgusting.”
“Eh. I doubt it. He’s smart and has been doing this a while. He argued I was squatting, and the housing authority probably doesn’t have the resources to follow up and figure it out one way or the other, so he’ll drag it out until it gets buried.”
“If you’d told me earlier what was going on in your life, I’d have helped.”
“Why would you have?” she laughed, rubbing the back of her head. “If you found out at some other point that I’d been lying about my job, my life, my name, would you have been happier about it then?”
I frowned. She shrugged.
“Look, I’m not here to talk about me, I’m here to talk about you. Linyue’s putting you on leave?”
“I should have guessed Estelle was doing something like this.”
“What are you doing now? I know the Jewel work was really good for you…”
I snorted, looking away. “I was dumb and bored. There’s no romance in tech startups and that whole… everything.”
She leaned over the table, and my heart dropped when she took my hands, looking me in the eyes. “You,” she said, “are too good to let go to waste thinking like that. You’re smart enough you’ll do something good, and I want to make sure whatever you’re going to bring to the world isn’t going to get swallowed up by you forgetting how much you love your dreams.”
“I don’t—”
“You know this feeling isn’t you.”
My throat tightened. I wanted to believe it wasn’t, that this awful, hanging weight on me was something from the outside and not that everything actually was as meaningless as it felt right now. And something about the way Julie said it made it hard to believe anything else. “I… don’t know,” I said, quietly, honestly.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do now,” she said. “But I don’t want to quit just yet. Will you help?”
“You want me to help you?” I said, trying to hide the way my heart surged at the thought. She smiled.
“I’ve got a plan,” she said. “I don’t need you to like me personally, but we’ll pitch something big to Krysten, something that will force Linyue back into the fold, get us back on track with the event, and—I know this is going to sound like I’ve lost my mind—but we’re going to get Stephen Shale the deal of a lifetime.”
“Stephen?” I laughed. “All this is for that kid?”
She grinned. That gleam in her eyes was the same as ever. I couldn’t help thinking of what Estelle had said—that she really was the person I’d thought she was, just under a different name. “I wrote a very special song that he’s really nailed,” she said. “I think you’ll like it.”
She said something like how she didn’t need me to like her personally, but when she came in like that and dropped the songshe’d finally written me after all? Let alone dropping it in the form of a business plan?
Well, what do you know? I guess I’d found out my type.
“So, to get this straight,” I said, trying not to smile. I couldn’t stand this girl. Why was she so hard to be mad at? “You are homeless and unemployed, and you’re going to pitch a plan to impress a tech founder and the entire New York music industry, and it’s going to involve a song you wrote for a girl you were having casual sex with.”
“Pretty much.”
“Wow.”
“I mean, for a face like that, I’ll launch a thousand ships.” She frowned sharply. “Shit. No. Forget I said that. I’m trying not to flirt with you.”
“You’ve never been good at that.”
“Like you’re any better!”
“So, Estelle wasn’t taking me for a party, she was taking me to meet you and hear your pitch.”
