“I’ll tell you what’s a big job,” Maeve says. “Working your whole life with no easy template, just working blind and hoping something sticks. No pension, no security, nothing. What happens when we’re all seventy? Ever think of that?”

“I’m not defending her.”

Maeve comes out of her stall and looks at herself in the mirror, the white robe hanging open, her body exposed underneath. The exchange with Karo has left her hostile: a mix of angry and defiant and oddly ashamed, as though she were a much younger Maeve caught with a schoolgirl crush. She pops her hip, testing it, but the damage from her earlier fall is just a bruise. Rolls her hip one way and her shoulder the other. Everything works. Now she only feels the power of her recklessness in the studio. If she can harness that, control those big sequences?

She didn’t even get hurt.

“For God’s sake, I’m a grown woman,” she says to Anna.

Maeve leans against the sink, arms crossed. Anna lets the cubicle door bang shut behind her.

“You’re gorgeous. Let me use your lipstick.”

Maeve digs through her bag, then passes the whole thing over.

“I don’t do this, you know. I mean men. Not since my divorce. Maybe twice. That’s it.”

“You can do whatever you want,” Anna says, correcting the lipstick at the corner of her mouth with a finger. She catches Maeve’s eye in the mirror. “What would a dude do, Maeve? Would a dude be skulking around in the bathroom, Oh no, maybe I’ll get in trouble…” She caps the lipstick, hands it back. “No. Your body, your decision, your time in the mountains.”

Maeve gives her own lips a swipe of color—then leans impulsively into the mirror and presses them against the glass.

An open mouth. A kiss.

“I’m only here for twelve more days,” she says, admiring the print. “That’s no time at all.”

Out in the spa, there are accusations.

“Who’s the least drunk here? Who?” Justin wants an impartial judge, and it’s Maeve who steps forward, bold in lace underwear, before Sexy Sadie gets a chance. She can feel Karo’s eyes on her and pulls herself up taller. Sim merely juggling the little ball in his cup, playing innocent.

“He’s obviously a shark,” Maeve says to Justin. “You should never have put your money against him.”

Anna hoots with delight, pouring out a few more glasses of champagne, Dan and Sadie handing them around.