We pay fleeting attention to the details and concentrate, instead, on the ice cream. The flavors on offer are apricot, rose water, milk, lemon, peanut, strawberry, chocolate, and croquant. After we have been served, we leave the store as suddenly as we entered it. And the ice cream? It is everything the newspapers, the food blogs, and the social media posts boasted it would be. Rich, milky, ice-creamy.

We walk silently around the city with no destination in mind. Conversations flow around and through us, but we are quiet, none of us wanting to ask the question all of us want the answer to.

“Well?” Valentina is the first to break. She is an impatient sort, so we are surprised she has held out for this long.

“Shh, shh. Let’s not spoil the taste of the ice cream with conversation,” Paheli replies. “Give me a minute. No, an hour. Perhaps a week?”

“Paheli.” Valentina flicks her with a manicured nail. Her nails, if you are curious, are red.

“All right. Fine.” Paheli finishes her ice cream, licks her fingers, and leads us to the painted Saint Nicholas Stairs. She flings herself down on a step near the top of the stairs while we arrange ourselves on the lower steps. She gazes down at us, much like a queen gazing at her misbehaving subjects.

Some of us flinch and turn away, not wanting to see her displeasure. Others meet her eyes warily. She is our savior; without her intercession, we would have been lost. We will never forget this.

“Stop with the theatrics and tell us. Are we going to Byblos?” Valentina, of course, has no such compunction. She has been a Wild One for the longest time after Paheli. She takes liberties when none of us would dare.

“I have to. I don’t want to, but I have to,” Paheli says softly, looking down at her hennaed hands.

“We don’t have to do anything we don’t want to,” Valentina replies.

“This person, he was the one who gave me the stars. He gave me and thus you the escape without which… Where would we be right now?” Dead. Either by our own hands or someone else’s.

“So, we are going to waltz into what could potentially be a trap?” Etsuko says. She has sharp cheekbones, and a tattoo she doesn’t ever talk about peeps out from the short sleeves of the bejeweled shirt she is wearing.

“I owe him a debt. I need to hear him out,” Paheli says, and pauses. “It is not necessary that we all go.”

“Of course it is,” Sevda replies with a roll of her eyes.

“I have never been to Byblos,” Ligaya says.

“None of us have,” Valentina says, then stops and looks at Paheli. “You’ve been around long enough to have visited, right?”

“Are you calling me old?” Paheli stands up and puts her hands on her hips.

“You are old,” Valentina replies. “But like cheese…”