Any snootiness melts away like hot buttercream, leaving only bare vanilla admiration below. “You are even more beautiful than your mother,” he tells her, and my eyes roll so far back into my head I can see the Hero Pharm tower standing tall like a giant middle finger behind me.

Tai shushes him coyly and smiles, then orders something for me that I can’t understand in more rapid Vilosh (how did her skills surpass mine by leaps and bounds?) and reclines back into her chair like Lauren Bacall while the waiter runs off like a lovesick suitor fetching her smokes.

“I thought we were getting food,” I say, opening the as-of-yet untouched menu only to find page after page of exotic liquors steeped in frog’s milk and candied bark and butterfly wings at exorbitant prices.

“We’ll get food after,” she says, shutting the menu in my hands.

I sigh, stomach grumbling. “We can’t afford this. You spend money like a drunken sailor, you know that? You do realize our trust hasn’t kicked in yet? I hope you have a pla—”

“Manon.” She takes a weird yogic breath, then spins on her seat and gestures toward the rest of the bar, thrumming with energy from its impeccably dressed, preening patrons. “Can you just enjoy this? Can you just take a second to enjoy?” Barely containing her euphoria, she adds: “Mama came here.”

This glitzy world of image-obsessed people might have delighted her once, but it also ruined her, and it’ll ruin you too if you don’t acknowledge it’s nothing more than a beautiful dream, I want to reply, but our drinks arrive then—Tai’s foul-looking amber liquor and my “girly” drink in a martini glass (it smells like window cleaner meets bath soap, adorned by a little twig). After the fawning waiter gives her a cringe-worthy wink and leaves, Tai swaps the drinks and takes a big gulp of the girly one. I give her an exasperated look, and she flutters her alien-blue lashes at me. “You loved the chípí so much at home!” she says, faux innocently, and I tell myself to just shut up and take a sip because she’s not wrong and also the tipsy is wearing off just a little.

And it’s good, like oak barrels and stewed berries and sunsets and leather in a glass. Even better, no one around us registers our presence: The advantage to being in a painfully cool bar is that no one would dare show they recognize us, if they do. We are near invisible, despite—or maybe because of—the trendy outfits and the wigs. I am, at least.