“They referred to you as Queen Midas,” Rhiannon said. She felt a peculiar pride when her comment caused her guest to visibly blush. “But you never gave those reporters the secret of your success, did you?”

“I’m only as good as my guide,” Hyacinth confessed.

“Your guide? So, you do have some sort of an advisor?”

“Some sort, yes.”

A fine balance was required for Rhiannon to probe her guest further without seeming rude.

“Do you have a card for this person?” she asked. “Some way I can reach them?”

Hyacinth stared past her dinner companion, toward the restaurant’s front window and through it. Rhiannon wondered what, if anything, the gaunt woman might have been looking for on those miserable streets.

Whatever she was scanning the soggy night for, Hyacinth suddenly appeared to have found. Her eyes brightened with fresh inspiration.

“I like you, Rhiannon. I always have. More than that, I trust you. And so, yes, I will show you. I will let you in.”

With that, Hyacinth rose and tugged her long coat from the pole by their booth.

“You mean now?” Rhiannon asked, flustered by her own lack of preparation. The world suddenly seemed to be spinning too quickly.

“Of course!” Hyacinth gushed. “Come along. My car is just around the corner.”

“I…it’s just that…I mean, surely their business will be closed by now.”

Hyacinth was already halfway to the door.

The car Rhiannon was led to was far humbler than what she’d envisioned a woman of Hyacinth’s standing would drive. She squeezed into the littered cab and endured the deafening rumble of an unmuffled engine. Her head was aching by the time Hyacinth chauffeured them off the main roads and down a maze of bleak-looking side streets.

When she noted the house before which Hyacinth stopped her car, Rhiannon was bewildered. Could the woman be playing some type of joke? She’d never known Hyacinth to have a sense of humour.

This confusion cooled into apprehension once Rhiannon closed the car door and watched her guide scaling the cement steps that connected the ugly lawn to a residence that was not much larger than a storage locker, and every bit as tasteless. It was a frame house, stunted and misshapen. It was as if an unskilled carver had whittled this stingy dwelling from a greater house, then tucked their shameful creation on a poorly lit backstreet in hopes of concealing it. The roof bowed where it should not, and the walls stood in a manner they could not, and the patina was the grey of curdled mushroom soup.

Hyacinth unlocked the narrow front door and held it open for her guest.

With that, as if on cue, Rhiannon’s surroundings conspired against her. A pair of men rounded the corner and began shambling in her direction (their voices deep, their laughter at some imperceptible joke scary), the lone streetlamp on the block began to flicker, the rain resumed falling.