The listing says five hundred dollars. Single delivery. Premium champagne—Cristal, 2008—to a private room at Velour Lounge on East 73rd. Corporate account, client name masked behind an LLC. The tip field reads one-twenty.
I do the math in the elevator down from our apartment. Six hundred and twenty dollars. Haisley's albuterol for six weeks. I tap accept before the doors open.
The subway smells like wet concrete and someone's leftover food. I stand with my back to the door and watch the stations blur past and I do not think about Bruno's face in the restaurant. I think about Haisley's oxygen numbers this morning. I think about the column in the notebook. I think about two hundred thousand dollars and what it looks like broken into pieces small enough to carry.
Velour Lounge has a marble lobby and a host who looks at my delivery bag and points me toward a service elevator without making eye contact. Top floor. Room seven. He says it twice.
The elevator opens onto a corridor with dark wood paneling and bass thumping through the walls. A woman in a headset checks my bag and waves me toward the last door on the right. Through the door I can hear laughter. Male voices. Ice in glasses.
I knock.
The door swings open.
The room is wide and low-lit, leather sectionals arranged in a horseshoe around a screen cycling through slow visuals. There are eight, maybe ten people. Bottles on the table. A security guard on each side of the room, arms loose, watching nothing in particular.
Bruno is on the center couch. Jacket off, collar open, the way he used to sit on Sunday mornings before everything. He has a glass in one hand and he is mid-sentence, not looking at the door.
Sapphire is looking at the door.
She sees me before I fully see her. She is already smiling—small, contained, the smile of someone watching a clock tick down to a number they already know. Her pale silk catches the light. The little gold cat charm swings once on her wrist.
My hand tightens on the bag strap.
I have three seconds before my body decides something my brain hasn't caught up to yet. I use them to breathe.
Sapphire rises. She crosses the room toward me in no hurry at all, heels soundless on the carpet, and lifts the champagne bag from my hands as though she is lifting a coat from a rack. She holds it up for the room.
"Look who they sent." Her voice is light and delighted, aimed at Bruno. "Isn't that funny."
Bruno turns. The same sequence as the restaurant—the confusion, the working-it-out, the eyes. The same arrival.
He doesn't say anything. He just takes a long drink.
"She should stay," Sapphire says. Sweet. Casual. "Pour for us. It's the least she can do after last week."
I turn for the door.
The guard on the left steps in front of it. He doesn't touch me. He doesn't have to. He just fills the frame and looks at the middle distance.
Bruno waves his hand—a lazy, dismissive arc, the gesture you'd use to shoo something from a table—and the room settles back into its noise. Someone laughs at something on the screen. Ice clinks. I am in the corner. I am furniture.
I stand there. I think about Haisley's face when it lights up. I think about six hundred and twenty dollars.
I stay.
For twenty minutes I am invisible. I refill glasses when Sapphire gestures. I keep my eyes on the bottles, on the ice bucket, on the middle distance. I breathe through my mouth so I can't smell the cologne that used to mean something.
Then Sapphire pours a full glass of the Cristal and holds it out to me.
"Drink it," she says.
The room doesn't go quiet. That's the worst part. Most of them aren't even watching.
"For the bottle you spilled last week," she adds, tilting her head. Her lip catches a small, practiced tremble. "I think that's fair. Don't you?"
I look at the glass. I look at the door with the guard in front of it.
I take the glass and I drink.
It tastes like money. It tastes like nothing.
She pours another.
"She's still so hostile," Sapphire says softly, to Bruno, not to me. Her voice has that particular note in it—wounded, bewildered, the voice of a woman who cannot understand why the world keeps being unkind to her. "After everything."
Bruno's eyes go cold in the way that has nothing to do with temperature.
"Drink it," he says.
I drink it.
By the third glass my throat is burning and the room has a slight tilt to it. Someone nearby makes a sound that might be a laugh. I fix my eyes on the label of the bottle—the gold lettering, the year—and I count the letters and I think about Haisley's smooth stones lined up on the windowsill and I do not put the glass down until it is empty.
Sapphire is watching me the whole time.
She is still smiling.
