They went back inside eventually.
Not because either of them wanted to. But because the gala was still happening and Nora would be looking for them and the world didn't pause for balconies no matter how much you needed it to.
Daniel held the door.
Julia walked through without looking at him.
They rejoined the room the way two people did when something had shifted between them and they were both pretending it hadn't a careful distance, a deliberate attention to other things, the particular performance of normalcy that fooled everyone except the person you were performing it for.
Nora found them within minutes.
She had a butterfly painted on her left cheek in orange and yellow and was wearing the expression of someone who had experienced something magnificent and needed to report on i
