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I wanted to be seen. Both of me, at once. The quiet one and the loud one, Agnes and Diablo, without burying either one to stay safe. The money ended up not being the end game. The end game was that room where for an hour or so each night, I got to be all of myself and have somebody appreciate it.

That want is still here. One trampled life later, it's right here in bed with me, flatly refusing to die just because it didn’t work out the way I was playing it.

So. New problem, and a much better one than "how do I survive the week."

I finally know what I want.

The only thing standing in my way is me, and I’m done being in my own way.

Sloane finds me on a Tuesday, which is impressive, because I have made myself very hard to find. New phone number. New address. I'm at a temp job I signed up for under a slightly wrong spelling of my name, betting nobody would check. I have, in a word, vanished.

She's waiting outside the dental office when I come out for lunch, in a coat that costs more than a month of my new rent, holding two coffees from the fancy place three blocks from Ardent. The sight of her hits me so hard in the chest, I stop walking.

Because here is the thing I have been carrying for three weeks, the ugliest item on a very ugly list. I decided Sloane was in on it. I decided the men told her, that her worry was pity, that every good coffee she ever set on my desk was her keeping one eye on the joke for them. I built her into one more person who saw the whole me and laughed. It was easier than believing anything else.

So when she holds out the cup, I don't take it.

"You've got some nerve," I say.

She doesn't back up an inch. "I have been calling you, Agnes. Your number's dead. You moved and didn't tell anyone. You quit without a word. I finally bribed a girl at the temp agency with a gift card to find out you were answering phones at a dentist’s office outside the city." Her voice catches, once, and Sloane's voice does not catch. "I thought something happened to you. I didn't know if you were okay."

"What did they tell you?" I ask. "Beck. Elias. Theo. What did they say about why I left?"

This should be rich.

She frowns. "Nothing. The three of them have been ghosts for weeks. Nobody at that firm tells me anything, Agnes, that’s more or less my entire problem there. Why on earth would the partners brief me on the receptionist?" She studies my face. "What’s going on with you?"

Nothing? They told her nothing? She never knew?

Every fancy coffee Sloane got me was just a coffee, a nice gesture. Every worried look was just the look of a woman concerned about her coworker. I took the one person in that whole building who was truly kind to me and made her a villain in my head, because I was so caught up in being sure everyone was out to get me.

"Okay. Let’s sit down," I say, and now it's my voice doing the catching. "I'm going to tell you something, and it's a lot."

So we sit on the curb, two grown women in a parking lot, and I tell her. All of it. The loan, the website, the red lipstick, Diablo, three men who paid a fortune to watch me and knew the entire time exactly whose front desk they passed every morning. I watch her face the whole way through, braced for the flinch. The judgment. Worse, the pity.

Neither one shows up.

What shows up, when I finish, is Sloane Whitaker going still, and then furious, a level of furious I have never once seen under the flawless skin and hair and silk blouses.

"Those," she says, "absolute sons of bitches."

And I laugh. Actually laugh, for the first time in three weeks, right there on the curb, because it is the first time anyone has joined me in my anger.

Then she tells me her story, because that's what this has turned into, two women on a curb finally saying what they’ve stuffed deep inside because they didn’t trust each other enough to share.

I heard how she's the "gorgeous associate" without a bit of irony. How they wheel her out for the clients and the pitch photos and never once hand her anything that matters. How Beck calls her sharp to her face and gives the real work to men half as good. Three years at Ardent being the decorative centerpiece, and she's a breath away from quitting and doesn't know who she'd be if she did, because pretty is the biggest job anyone’s ever really given her.

"God, we're a pair," she says. "You spent that whole building making sure nobody looked at you. I spent it making sure they only ever looked at the wrong thing."

"Then quit," I tell her. "You're the smartest person in that firm and they've got you holding a fruit basket. Go somewhere that wants your brain."

"And you." She turns and looks at me straight on. "Stop hiding. I mean it. I sat forty feet from a woman with more nerve than anyone I know, and she spent every day making herself invisible so nobody could hurt her. And it didn't even work, did it? They found a way to hurt you regardless. So you might as well be seen." She bumps my shoulder with hers. "You deserve to be seen. All of you. The quiet one and whoever the hell Diablo is. I'd genuinely like to meet her."

Holy shit.

Somebody looked at the whole two-in-one mess of me and didn't laugh at me, pity me, or look at me with disgust. All Sloane did was give me back my coffee and tell me to quit hiding myself.

And somewhere in the back of my head, quiet and sure, a plan starts putting itself together. A bad one. A brave one. The kind Diablo would sign up for in a heartbeat and Agnes would never in her life have dared.