The cocktail portion of the evening had the unstructured energy of a formal event releasing its tension—people moving through the room with champagne and conversation, the orchestra softened to background, the careful choreography of the earlier hours giving way to the more organic choreography of people who had been on their best behavior all night and were finally allowed to simply be.
Aurora moved through the crowd alone.
She needed the bathroom and she needed two minutes of silence and she needed, specifically, to be somewhere that wasn't this room for a brief and merciful interval. She navigated the clusters of conversation with the efficient grace of someone who knew how to move through crowds without being stopped by them—a nod here, a brief smile there, the controlled warmth of a woman managing her social exposure.
She wasn't looking when she turned the corner near the service corridor.
