The Nova Talent Agency occupied the third floor of a building that smelled of coffee and mild desperation. Lina took the stairs, her small suitcase still in hand, and told herself that a woman who had already died once had nothing to be nervous about.
The receptionist — twenty-something, phone in hand, expression professionally unimpressed — looked up. "Hi. Do you have an appointment?"
"No," Lina said. "I want to speak to someone about modelling work. Is the director available?"
The girl hesitated, then reached for her desk phone. "Ms Reed? There's a walk-in. Says she wants to model." A pause. "Yes, I'll tell her."
A few minutes later, Carla Reed emerged from the back office — forties, sharp bob, cigarette burning between her fingers in what was almost certainly a no-smoking space. She looked Lina over the way professionals in her line of work always did: quickly, comprehensively, and without apology.
"Good bone structure. Nice height." Carla took a slow drag. "The industry is full of beautiful women. What makes you different?"
"I'll work harder than anyone you've got," Lina said. "Give me a test shoot. If I'm bad, you've lost nothing. If I'm good, you've found a face that'll be worth remembering."
Carla snorted. A short sound that might, generously, have been called appreciative. "Bold. Most girls your age come in here crying about their dreams." She exhaled a thin stream of smoke. "We've got a sportswear catalogue test this afternoon. Nothing glamorous. Show up at three. Don't be late."
"I'll be there."
She had two hours. She found a cheap internet café two streets over, paid for thirty minutes, and sat at one of the battered terminals with the focused quiet of a woman who knew exactly what she was looking for.
She knew which photographers were about to have their breakthrough years. She knew which mid-size brands were sitting on the edge of a cultural moment, waiting for the right face to push them over. In her first life, she had spent years adjacent to this industry — attending Lucien's events, making conversation at fashion dinners, absorbing information she'd had no use for. Now she wrote it all down in the small notebook she'd bought that morning, in neat, deliberate columns.
This was not hope. This was a plan.
The studio was in a converted warehouse, the kind of space that looked chaotic until you understood its logic. A photographer named Mike — thin, irritable, running on what appeared to be his third coffee — was already working with another girl when Lina arrived and changed into the provided leggings and cropped top.
"Chin up. No, not like that — like you actually want to sell the clothes, not like you're waiting for a bus."
The other girl, a blonde named Cece who had been in the industry two years and made sure everyone knew it, cut her eyes to Lina as she waited her turn.
"First time?" Cece asked, not unkindly, though the look that followed was distinctly assessing.
"Yes," Lina said.
"It shows." Cece smiled. "Don't worry. Carla doesn't actually expect much from walk-ins. If you survive the day without crying, she'll probably give you something small to keep you busy."
Lina smiled back. "Thank you."
When it was her turn, she moved exactly as Mike directed — but she adjusted. Small things, barely visible: the angle of her shoulders, the tilt of her chin, the precise quality of stillness she'd absorbed from watching a thousand shoots in her past life without ever having participated in one. She had been a spectator for thirty years. Now she was spending what she had learned.
Mike lowered his camera partway through.
"You. Green eyes. Do that again — straight at the lens. Like you own the place."
Lina looked at the lens, and she thought about her daughter, and she thought about the woman she was going to become, and she let all of it into her face.
Mike didn't say anything for a moment. He looked at the screen on the back of his camera. Then he looked at her.
"Again," he said.
Carla appeared midway through the afternoon, arms folded, expression neutral. She watched for twenty minutes without speaking, then waved Lina over.
"The brand rep likes your shots. They want you for the full catalogue next week." She named a figure — modest, but real. "Fifteen per cent agency fee. No drama, no late arrivals. We'll talk about bigger things if you can prove you're consistent."
"I'm consistent," Lina said.
She signed the contract on the spot.
That evening she checked into a small apartment hotel, paid in cash, and stood in the middle of a room that contained a single bed, a desk, and a window overlooking a street lit by yellow lamp-light. Nothing like the Cole estate. Not even close.
She sat on the edge of the bed.
For a moment, alone in the yellow quiet of this small, borrowed room, the reality of it settled over her like a weight. She was twenty-three years old. She had no income yet, no professional contacts, a divorce she had forced on a man who hadn't wanted to give it to her, and a baby no one else knew about yet. She was building a life in six-week increments, from memory and from scratch.
She pressed her hand flat against her stomach.
"One day at a time," she told the room. "One day at a time."
Then she opened her notebook, smoothed the page, and started writing names.
In the Cole estate's home office, Lucien sat at his desk in the dark.
He'd had the lights off for an hour without noticing. The report had come through an hour ago — she'd gone to an agency, done a test shoot, signed a contract. He had read it three times. He had a video clip, too: thirty seconds of her looking directly into a camera with those green eyes like she had something to prove to the entire world.
He hadn't been able to stop watching it.
"She'll fail," he told himself. The words came easily enough. Three years. She'd come back.
He believed that less with every viewing.
He picked up his phone. Put it down. Picked it up again.
"Make sure the brand's main contact receives no interference on her booking," he said, when the man answered. "If anyone tries to move her out, handle it. Quietly. She doesn't know, and she doesn't find out."
He hung up.
He sat in the dark for a while longer, the whiskey untouched. The house was very quiet. Upstairs, the bed was too big, the way it always was when something was missing — though he had spent years telling himself that nothing was.
She had been pregnant, and she had still chosen to leave. She had looked at him with a kind of certainty he had never seen in her face before, and she had walked out of this house with a single suitcase like it cost her nothing.
Lucien stared at the frozen frame of the video. Those eyes. Direct, unflinching, refusing to perform anything for anyone.
He thought, not for the first time this week, that he had spent years looking at Lina without ever actually seeing her.
He didn't know what to do with that yet.
But for the first time in a very long time, the numbness he had always trusted to keep him even had developed a crack — and through it, something uncomfortably like feeling was beginning to seep.