Page 82 of The Encore’s Crown

“Nah. She's always been loaded. That's fucking magic.”

Rafe’s mouth curves. Then he leans toward me, lowering his voice as if he’s about to reveal something profound.

“There’s your Eurydice back from the dead.”

I look at him. “My what?”

“Isn’t it about time you stopped playing a song no one's listening to, Orpheus?”

I stare at him. I know enough to understand that Orpheus played music and his wife died. Or went to hell. Maybe both. Rafe reads Greek mythology for pleasure and assumes the rest of us absorb it through proximity.

“What the fuck does that mean?”

“It means,” Ronan says, “he wants you to go talk to your ex, but he needed to make it pretentious.”

Rafe throws himself back against the booth in outrage. “Reducing myth to its least interesting interpretation is an actual form of violence, O'Shea.”

“Then call the police on me, Ashton.” Ronan locks his wrists together like handcuffs and Rafe laughs so hard I think whiskey might shoot from his nose.

Rithy doesn't pay attention to them. He's still watching Radhika.

“You need to go speak to her.”

“No way. It’s been almost ten years. I’m pretty sure if she wanted to speak to me, she'd have done it by now.”

Rithy considers that; then he puts down his drink and stands.

“Rith.”

He ignores me.

I catch his wrist before he clears the booth. “Don’t.”

“You said if she wanted to speak to you, she would. So, time to find out.”

“Sit down.”

He pulls free with a smile that, when we were kids, used to mean I was about to get blamed for something he did. Then he starts walking directly across the club.

“Fuck.”

I slide out after him.

Behind me, Ronan says, “Time to get a front row seat to the event of the decade.”

Rafe stands. “It's like we're the actual Fates.”

“You can be the mother, Rithy's the crone. I'm clearly the maiden.”

“That's a modern conflation of two different concepts. The Fates are—”

“Alright, Aristotle. We got the memo—keep up or we’ll miss the action.”

I catch up with Rithy halfway across the room, but grabbing him now would make more of a scene than letting him continue. People already notice us moving through the club. A woman says Rafe’s name behind me. Rithy doesn’t slow. Radhika sees him when we’re still several feet away. Her expression transforms. The guarded polish disappears, and for one moment she's the woman who used to sit cross-legged on studio floors at three in the morning, stealing Rithy’s cigarettes and arguing with Ronan about drum fills she didn’t understand.

It takes me right back to the first time she looked at me.

Chapter 34