Camille and I were unescorted that late December evening when the Park Avenue theater made its formal opening. The busy sidewalk glowed beneath a halo of innumerable neon lights, and all the way up the bustling lobby steps Camille regaled me with the ways in which the theater resembled the Paris Opera that had been its inspiration. She pointed out every gold embellishment, every frescoed cherub, and recalled the first time she’d been to the City of Light and how long it had been since last she’d gone.

“You’ll see,” she promised, patting the back of my gloved hand, our arms linked at the elbow. “We’ll get you off this island if it kills me.”

She couldn’t know that the following year I’d be even more captive, locked in the Vault underground with only the promise of reprinting to look forward to. She couldn’t know it then and neither did I, so instead of mounting a defense of the only city I’d seen outside of newsreels and Dolores’s memories, I agreed.

“Nothing compares to Paris, honestly, but—” and then she gasped, beholding the balcony view for the first time. “This certainly suffices for now.”

We’d come to see Virginia Valli in a story set in Paris, coincidentally or not. It was that picture, in fact, that inspired Camille’s long overdue decision to shorten her hair. Of fashionable women in society, Camille had been the singular hold out. Perhaps it was her ample frame that discouraged her, for fear that cutting her hair would expose her. But that evening changed her mind entirely.

“I’ve been told I resemble Virginia, you know,” she said, eyes widening the way they often did when it was just she and I. When free of men she became just a bit more enthusiastic, even daring. It was a security I understood all the more once I’d befriended Nurse Ettie. “I’ve a bit more roundness to my face, of course,” Camille was saying, still fiddling with her appearance. “But her hair is nearly as thick as mine and I think it looks darling, don’t you?”