She rolls her eyes. “You mean the notebook with the clichéd Viloki lavender field cover you stuffed so discreetly into my clutch? Straining the vintage fabric?” she says, nodding at the borrowed satin purse in my grip.

“It’s an invasion of privacy, Tai,” I say, wrenching the notebook out so it won’t strain the fabric, feeling petulant and wondering if closeness with Tai means dissolving into the pink froth of her. I certainly feel sticky and unclean.

She just shrugs. “You’re right,” she says, eyes sparkling. She seizes my hand and kisses it. “It would be assholish of me. If we weren’t blood, and, you know, almost the same person.”

And judging from her social media profiles, she clearly doesn’t believe it’s possible to trespass against oneself. I exhale just as the ancient elevator creaks open onto a sleek corridor.

“Did you get us a room?” I whisper. “Are you an escort?” My pulse stops. “Did they request sisters?”

“I didn’t know you could be this fun, Manon!” She smiles at the bespectacled man standing by a floor-to-ceiling library of leather-bound and gilded volumes, the likes of which I’ve never seen. She strides past the candlelit stacks, pressing on a not-so-secret sapphire button glowing in between rows of books, and the concealed wood-paneled doors of a second elevator slide open.

“How do you even know where you’re going?” I whisper, cradling her clutch in my arms as she stabs at P for penthouse. “You’ve been on Viloxin for less than a week in the past decade.”

“Never underestimate me,” she says, in that annoying falsetto.

This time, the elevator doors ding open onto double-height French windows overlooking Limatra’s glinting lights, its woolly treetops, that ancient crust of bay beyond. It isn’t a modern city, with imposing fields of steel and glass towers—the only skyscraper in sight, a massive, ugly white monolith, is the Hero Pharm headquarters—but it’s breathtaking, like standing on the roof of our building in the West Village at night, where my lonely soul could spread out and almost touch the warm twinkle of our neighbors’ old-fashioned homes. Here, that twinkle spills into the rolling dark mass of the Mediterranean Sea.

“Welcome to the Maltese Falcon,” Tai says, grinning and extending an arm, as if she—really, truly, unapologetically—owns the place. She swans past the maître d’, who tries to corral her with his own outstretched arm and fails. She slides into a pebbled leather high-top bar seat, plopping me next to her. Then she turns her attention to a passing waiter—young, buttoned-up, his face still swiveling in an immediate magnetic reaction to her batting lashes (Blue mascara, dahling)—and she orders a drink in Vilosh I can’t decipher, without a passing glance at the menu.

“You’ve seen the movie,” the waiter replies inexplicably.

“Many times,” she says, crossing her bare legs and grinning devilishly.