Lulu sucked in her lower lip and tapped her foot impatiently on the floor. How can that bastard just sit there with his back to me all this time? Who does he think I am? Some little nobody to be picked up and dropped whenever the mood suits him? Well, not this girl. Not Lulu!

“‘Lost Love’?” Marcel glanced at the set list she’d scrawled down for him.

“You’re damn right,” muttered Lulu. And then, loudly, to the packed room: “Here’s a song for all of you who have loved someone who doesn’t deserve to be loved. Some lousy, low-down swine…”

Readying herself to sing, she switched her gaze to the other side of the room—to her best friend, Genevieve, radiant as always, in an emerald green dress. She couldn’t see the shoes from here, but they’d match the outfit exactly. Genevieve would dress beautifully even for an afternoon alone at home. Lulu, whose personal style was vivid but haphazard, was strongly drawn to her friend’s aesthetic. But sometimes she wished she could catch Genevieve looking sloppy. Just once. Genevieve was a girl whose world needed to be shaken. Shaken enough so that people would glimpse the cracks.

“A truly fascinating female, that one,” said Betterson. “Just look at those eyes of hers…it’s like she’s seen everything there is to see in this world and felt everything there is to feel. And it’s all there—there in those heart-breaker eyes.”

Genevieve twisted round to look at Lulu, up at the piano. You could barely see her eyes through all that black Egyptian makeup and the thick cloud of smoke in the air. But Betterson was right. There was a quality about her. Something quite extraordinary. It was this quality that made men want to paint her and sculpt her and write about her. Everyone was rapt when Lulu sang “Lost Love.” Even Janine, the hard-as-nails barmaid with the scar and the broken nose. Laurent’s little poodle, down there on the floor, had stopped licking at a puddle of spilled drink in order to watch. Genevieve felt a pang of jealousy.

“Don’t you think it’s amazing how she takes her pain and turns it into something exquisite?” said Betterson. “That’s what writers are supposed to do, but so many of them just sit back on the sidelines of life, coolly observing. Novelists especially. It shows in the writing, you know.”

“Indeed.” Genevieve was struggling to suppress the jealousy, to squash it out of existence.

“There are books so cold, they’re like butterfly collections,” said Betterson. “A lot of dead, pretty, lifeless things stuck on pins. Maybe that’s why I’m a poet rather than a novelist. I’m a hot-blooded creature.”

“On the subject of writing,” said Genevieve, her voice falsely bright, “I’ve been thinking about a title for the magazine. What do you think of ‘The Gallery’?”