SHATTERED GLASS

WHAT MERIDIAN SMELLS LIKE

Vivienne Marlowe POV

Meridian City smelled like exhaust and money and something floral underneath that I later learned was the jasmine planted along the Boulevard Centrale by a mayor three administrations ago who had cared intensely about legacy.

I stepped off the bus at 11:52 a.m. with a duffel bag, a tote full of books I had convinced myself I'd read on the journey and had not opened, and the particular light-headedness of a person who had not eaten since the gas station granola bar she'd purchased in a panic somewhere around the state line.

Sol was waiting.

She was impossible to miss. She was five-foot-two and wearing a coat the color of a traffic cone and holding a coffee cup in each hand with the focused energy of someone who had arranged this like a military operation.

"Vivienne Marlowe," she said, when I got close enough. "You look terrible."

"Thank you, Sol."

"I mean it in the kindest possible way. Here." She pushed one of the coffees at me. "It's oat milk. I didn't know if you'd gone oat milk yet. You seem like someone who would go oat milk."

"I haven't gone oat milk."

"Well, it's too late now, you already have it." She looked me over with the thorough attention of a woman who worked in fashion and had never once in her life looked at anything without cataloguing it. "How was the bus?"

"Long. Loud. A man directly behind me listened to a podcast about cryptocurrency with no headphones for two hours."

"Welcome to Meridian." She grabbed the strap of my duffel without asking and slung it over her own shoulder, which was absurd because it was nearly half her body weight, and started walking. "Come on. I made space in the closet. Forty percent of the space. I want you to know that forty percent is everything I have that isn't actively in rotation."

I followed her. "Sol."

"Don't make it weird."

"I'm not making it weird, I just —"

"You're about to thank me and I swear to God, Viv, if you thank me I'm going to charge you rent." She glanced back over her shoulder. "You're my best friend. You got the job. This is what happens now. Can we just — can we just walk?"

I shut up. I walked. I drank the oat milk coffee, which was, infuriatingly, very good.

* * *

Sol's apartment was on the sixth floor of a building in the Aldgate neighborhood, which she described as "up and coming" and which I would later understand meant "the coffee is good and the noise from the bar on the corner doesn't stop until 3 a.m." It was small and bright and absolutely deranged with personality — fabric samples pinned to one wall, a rolling rack of clothes that functioned as a room divider, a kitchen table covered in mood boards and fashion week invitations and at least two issues of a magazine Sol both wrote for and appeared in.

She dropped my bag by the couch, which had been made up into a bed with actual effort — a real pillow, a folded blanket, a small succulent on the end table.

"I know it's not —" she started.

"It's perfect," I said, and I meant it in a way that had nothing to do with the couch.

She sat down cross-legged on the floor with her coffee and looked up at me. Sol's face did a thing when she was about to ask something real — the humor dropped, just slightly, like a screen going transparent. "How are you actually?"

I sat on the edge of the couch. Thought about it. "I'm scared," I said. "And I'm — I keep waiting to feel like I made a mistake, but I don't. I just feel scared."

"That's different from the mistake feeling."

"Yeah."

"Good scared or bad scared?"

I looked around her apartment. The mood boards. The jasmine smell drifted up from the street. The strange aliveness of a city that didn't know my name and therefore couldn't decide who I was before I'd introduced myself.

"Good scared," I said. "I think."

Sol smiled. "Okay. Then tomorrow we get you ready for your first day, and tonight I'm ordering Thai food and you're going to tell me everything about Theo."

"There's nothing to tell about Theo."

"There is always something to tell about Theo. The man called you exhausting, Vivienne. I have things to say."

* * *

Ashford & Cole Publishing occupied floors fourteen through nineteen of a glass tower on Meridian Boulevard that caught the light in the morning and turned the entire side of the building gold. I stood on the sidewalk across the street at 8:47 a.m. the following Monday and looked at it for longer than was probably normal.

My offer letter was in my bag. Editorial Associate, Creative Division. It had taken me four submissions over eight months to get an interview, and three rounds of interviews after that, and I still sometimes woke up in the middle of the night with the specific terror that I had misread the offer letter and the salary was actually a typo.

I had not misread it.

I crossed the street.

The lobby was marble and cool and very tall, the kind of space designed to make a person feel like they are entering something significant. There were enormous abstract prints on the walls and a reception desk that could have seated six people and was staffed by one woman who looked at me with professional warmth when I gave my name.

"Vivienne Marlowe. Editorial." She checked her screen. "Dr. Kwan will be down to meet you. Can I get you anything while you wait?"

"No, thank you. I'm fine."

I was not fine. I was standing very still and breathing very carefully and looking at the prints on the wall without seeing them.

The elevator opened and a woman walked out.

She was in her late fifties, silver-haired, wearing reading glasses pushed up on her head like she'd forgotten them there, carrying a stack of manuscripts under one arm and a pen she was clicking absently with her other hand. She had the energy of someone who moved through rooms at a specific frequency that other people adjusted to, not the other way around.

"Vivienne." She said my name like she'd been saying it for years. "I'm Roz Kwan. Come on, I don't do lobbies."

She was already walking toward the elevator before I'd fully processed the introduction. I followed.

"How was the move?" she asked, without looking at me, pressing the button for seventeen.

"Good. Fine. I'm staying with a friend."

"In the city?"

"Aldgate."

"Good neighborhood. Loud on weekends." The elevator rose. "You have the Harmon manuscript?"

"I — yes. I read it twice."

"Good. We're meeting on Friday. I want your notes before Thursday noon." She glanced at me sideways, a quick, assessing look. "Don't give me the notes you think I want. Give me what you actually think."

"What if what I think is wrong?"

The elevator opened. She walked out. Over her shoulder she said: "Then you'll be wrong with conviction, which is more useful to me than right without it."

I stepped out after her, and Ashford & Cole opened up before me — glass partitions, open desks, the low sound of keyboards and overlapping phone calls and someone laughing too loudly in a conference room — and I thought: okay. Okay. I can do this.

I almost believed myself.

Then I saw her.

The woman standing at the far end of the floor, speaking to a group of three people who were all angled toward her the way plants angle toward light. Tall, dark-suited, pale as winter. She was not looking at me. She did not appear to be looking at anyone specifically.

But somehow I had the absolute certainty that she had already clocked me, catalogued me, and filed me somewhere I hadn't been consulted about.

"That's Petra Ashford," Roz said quietly, beside me. "Co-CEO. She co-runs the company with Dominic Cole." A pause. "You'll meet her eventually. There's no rush."

The way she said it — there's no rush — sounded less like information and more like a warning she wasn't quite giving me directly.

I looked at Petra Ashford and Petra Ashford, without turning, smiled.

It was a beautiful smile.

It did not reach anything behind her eyes.