“Hullo,” she said. Her voice was low for a woman, and her fingernails were painted a bright blue. She tapped one against the door and then her hand dropped. Around her wrist, another slim circle of blue. I squinted. A tattoo, little stars inked in a faded denim color.

“Can I help you?”

She flipped her sunglasses to the top of her head and studied me for a moment. Her dark eyes were bright but flat, the way I’d always heard sharks’ eyes described. Behind her ear, I could still make out the faintly tattooed outline of Perfect Alignment Massage’s logo on our door, the business that had owned the joint until the Lady came along.

“No,” she said, “I don’t think you can.” She didn’t move. I didn’t, either.

When the Lady had taken over the lease, back when Lou’s and my little side project had gone wrong and we’d needed cover, she’d registered our business as a staffing agency. It gave us cover for the shuffle of girls coming by the office, and more importantly, it gave us respectability. We’d created our cover so well that occasionally, we got mistaken for a real staffing agency. Sometimes, when business was slow and Lou was bored, she’d even take jobs and place girls for the hell of it, adding the seventy-five-dollar check to her rainy-day fund.

Half distracted, digging through my purse for the key and wondering how quickly I could reasonably expect Ellen to reschedule with Klein, I started to say, “Are you looking for a temp? Because I’m about to—” But she held up a hand. She hadn’t blinked since she’d taken off her sunglasses.

“Be a dear and give this to Lou for me,” she said, handing me a white envelope embossed with a blue fleur-de-lis. My scalp began to prickle. “I’d prefer it go to her unopened,” she added as she sashayed past me down the stairs, and I stepped automatically out of her way, then wished I hadn’t.

“Excuse me,” I called after her, but she held up a hand so I could see each cobalt almond perfectly. The diamond on her ring finger, big enough to anchor a small yacht, caught the sun, and little sequins of light burst across my face. My scalp prickled again, harder.

I dropped the croissant and followed her down the stairs, not sure what I meant to say, but she turned before I reached the bottom, one hand on the driver-side door of the Mercedes, like she’d been expecting me to follow, like it was a script, and said: “Lou told me you were pretty, but high hopes are such a bitch, aren’t they? Nowhere for them to go but down.”

And then she turned the engine and drove away.