She had positioned her hand, tentatively, on the bar between them. Brice wordlessly put his hand over hers.

“Am I the unfinished business?”

“Among other things,” she replied, lifting her eyes to his.

“What other things?”

“The city,” she began, then hesitated. How could she possibly explain the way she felt about New York? She loved it, in that strange way you can love something that never loves you back, because it has left its imprint on your soul. Calliope belonged in New York, or maybe she belonged to New York. She’d been so uncertain when she came here—like clay that couldn’t hold its shape—and now she had form, had texture; she could feel the fingerprints of New York all over her the way she felt Brice’s touch on her skin.

There was so much here, so much color and taste and light and motion. So much pain and so much hope. The city was ugly and beautiful at once, and it was always changing, always reintroducing itself to you; you couldn’t look away even for a moment, or you might miss the New York of today, which would be different from tomorrow’s New York and next week’s New York.

Brice flipped her palm over to hold her hand in his. “What’s your plan?”

Calliope took another sip of her coffee, wishing she had a spoon so she could stir it around, whisk it with more force than was necessary. She felt brimming with new purpose.

It dawned on her that today was Monday. “School, I guess?” The idea of going to a multivariable calculus lecture right now felt a bit ludicrous. “I need to figure out some things. Figure out myself,” she said slowly.

“What is there to figure out?”

“My personality!” she blurted out. “I don’t know who I am anymore. Maybe I never did.” She’d spent the past seven years slipping seamlessly from one role to another, being clever or stupid, rich or poor, adventurous or afraid, whatever the occasion demanded of her. She had been everyone but herself, lived every life except her own.

But this time, she could be whoever and whatever she wanted to be.

“I know you,” Brice said stolidly. “It doesn’t matter what story you’re telling or what accent you’re using. I know who you are and I want to keep on knowing you, Calliope, Gemma, whatever your name is.”

Calliope hesitated.

She had never—well, almost never—told anyone her real name. That was the central tenet of the rules they lived by. Never tell anyone your real name, because it makes you vulnerable. As long as you protected yourself with fake names and fake accents, no one could hurt you.

But no one could ever know you that way either.

“Beth,” she whispered, feeling a seismic shift within the world. “My real name is Beth.”

Her contacts lit up with a new flicker, from a sender registered as Anna Marina de Santos. Here’s to this time.

Tears gathered at the corners of Calliope’s eyes, and she let out a strangled laugh. It was Elise, of course, already operating under her new name.

“Here’s to this time,” Calliope whispered, and nodded to send the reply. “I love you.” She imagined her words translating into text, darting all the way up to a satellite and across the world, to flash across her mom’s brand-new retinas. If only she could reach through the intervening miles and hug her just as easily.

Love you too.

“Beth,” Brice repeated, and held out his hand as if introducing himself. His eyes were dancing. “It’s nice to meet you. Please allow me to be the first to welcome you to New York.”

“The pleasure is all mine,” Beth said and grinned.

RYLIN

RYLIN SAT AT her kitchen table, her tablet arrayed before her in composition mode, trying unsuccessfully to focus on her NYU essay. But her mind felt far too scattered to stay pinned on any one topic.

She hadn’t seen Cord in class today. After all the commotion over Avery Fuller, he was hardly the only person to have missed school. In spite of everything, Rylin found herself hoping that he wasn’t taking the news too hard. He’d known Avery practically his entire life. And of course, this wasn’t the first time that Cord had lost someone he cared about.

Rylin hadn’t known Avery especially well, yet they had been pulled together by a set of exceptional circumstances: Eris’s death, the Mariel investigation . . . and the fact that they both cared about Cord.

Sometimes Rylin had wanted to hate Avery, just a little. She was always so perfectly put together, her smile just so, while Rylin ran around with sloppy ponytails in a perpetual state of uncertainty. And Avery and Cord had been friends for so long. It was intimidating, the way they had all those shared memories, a lexicon of jokes that ran between them, something private Rylin could never hope to crack.

She had wanted to hate Avery, and yet she couldn’t, because even amid all of that Avery was invariably nice. She could have been the world’s greatest mean girl, Rylin thought, but she never chose to be.

Then again, it was probably pretty easy to be a nice person when you had everything in the world you could possibly want. Or at least, almost everything.

Rylin was still shocked by what Avery had been hiding. To think that beneath her pristine porcelain veneer, she had been in love with Atlas, the one person the world would never let her have. Ultimately Avery had died for it. What had she been thinking, Rylin kept wondering, to just give up like that—to burn her family’s apartment while she was still inside it?