After I got the shoes all packed up and lugged the damned package to the post office—and paid twenty-plus bucks in postage, thank you very much, Reid Wolfe—I headed into work early to have some repair work done on my costume. Several of the opulent beads had come loose during the last show, and that was a recipe for disaster.

Beads falling off and rolling on the floor while we’re all dancing in stilettos…

Not good.

Tonight was a topless night for me. We took turns baring ourselves. That way, we all knew all the dance moves for all the parts and could substitute for anyone with no notice. Revue shows like the one I was in were a dying breed in Las Vegas. Sure, topless shows were available in smaller venues in the city, but our show, Best of Sin City, was one of the last large revues that featured nearly a hundred showgirls. Celebrities like Donny and Marie Osmond and Celine Dion, among others, were taking over the biggest venues and drawing huge crowds, making traditional Vegas shows a thing of the past.

Consequently, I was lucky to have this gig. Many showgirls weren’t so lucky and had resorted to stripping and lap dancing at local clubs. Each night, I thanked the stars that I had this job. I didn’t know how to do anything else. My childhood foray into acting had proved I was no actress, and my modeling days were long over. My medical career had gone up in dust years ago. I was just too old. Too old, too tired, and too scarred.

Topless nights no longer bothered me. My scars were well hidden with creative makeup and costuming. Plus, the bright lights on stage made the leering men invisible to me, if they even existed.

I was, simply, grateful to be alive, even as the wreck I’d become.

“Good thing you came in,” one of the seamstresses said to me. “This needs to be taken in anyway. You’ve lost an inch around the waist.”

“I have?”

“Yeah. Have you been eating?”

Hmm. Had I? No, I hadn’t. Not really. Only the barest sustenance since that PI for the Wolfe family had found me.

“Well,” I said, instead of answering her question, “I don’t think any woman alive worries about taking off a few pounds.”

“You should,” she said. “You dancers are all muscle. If you lose weight, you lose muscle.”

Not in the mood for a lecture, thanks. I didn’t reply.

I sat at my dressing table—not mine, actually, the dressing table I shared with several others, though none of them were in yet—while the tailor finished working on my costume, checking my phone, when the star of our show, Candice Hall, whisked by, cigarette in hand, leaving a mixture of smoke and Chanel hovering in the air.

“I need a seamstress, stat!” she yelled in her raspy voice.