The weekend arrived the way weekends always did in the dormitory—not with any particular fanfare, but with a subtle shift in the quality of the morning light and the absence of alarm clocks going off in sequence down the hall. Saturday had its own texture in a building full of women who spent their weekdays chasing appointments and auditions and callbacks that never came. It was the one day the city felt slightly less like an opponent and slightly more like a place you could exist in without bracing yourself.
Kira was in the kitchen when she heard Emma's bedroom door open. She had been cleaning—not because the kitchen was particularly dirty, but because cleaning was the thing she did when her thoughts needed somewhere to go that wasn't inward. She had the radio on low, something instrumental and undemanding, and she was working her way along the counter with a cloth, her movements slow and methodical, the kind of task that kept the hands busy enough to give the mind a little peace.
Emma appeared in the kitchen doorway already dressed, which was unusual for a Saturday morning. She had her bag over her shoulder and her hair done, not elaborately but with intention—the way she looked when she was going somewhere that mattered. She looked rested, which made sense. She had been asleep before nine o'clock, an event so rare in the history of their friendship that Kira had actually checked on her through the door just to make sure she was all right.
"I can't believe it's the weekend already," Emma said, leaning against the doorframe with a particular lightness in her posture that had been there since Thursday evening, since the phone call and the audition and Mr. Jonas and all the things that had rearranged the furniture of her life in a single afternoon. "I'm going out, Kira. I'll see you later."
"Okay," Kira called back, running the cloth along the edge of the sink. "See you later. Have fun."
She listened to Emma's footsteps move down the hallway toward the front door, then the familiar sound of it opening and the building taking her in—the slight echo of the stairwell, the creak of the old wooden banister Emma always held onto on the way down.
Then, after a pause long enough to suggest something unexpected had happened, the footsteps stopped.
Emma had made it as far as the second-floor landing when she heard her name.
"Good afternoon, Emma."
She stopped on the stairs and looked down to see Mrs. Gavi standing at the bottom with one hand on the newel post, looking up at her with the particular expression she wore when she was about to deliver information she considered important. Mrs. Gavi was the building manager, a stout, sharp-eyed woman in her early sixties who wore house slippers at all hours and kept the dormitory running with the efficiency of someone who had long since stopped being surprised by anything young women in this city got up to. She had a fondness for the tenants she approved of and a brisk impatience with the ones she didn't, and she had, from very early on, decided that Emma was one of the ones worth approving of.