Unvarnished (Norah's Memories)

Chapter XXVI: Unvarnished

The Cabana reminded Norah of the coat closet in her childhood apartment, a box with just enough space to hide, but not enough to breathe. The blue candle in the candelabra threw shadows on the walls that brought to mind unpleasant memories. She watched Sam watching her, the other woman perched on the edge of the bench with the cool patience of a therapist waiting for her patient to say it first.

Sam made a tiny come-on gesture, two fingers and a thumb. “Your turn, champ.”

Norah rolled her eyes, but that was the contract: she had to go next, because Sam had gone and already shown half her insides and most of her outsides. There was no way she would wimp out. She stood on tiptoes (how she hated this new height!) and reached into the smoke.

Cold. Always cold, but not like the wind-chill of a New York winter. This was the cold of ice melting on a kitchen table, leaking into paperwork and fingerprints and all the things people left behind.

The smoke rolled in, at first only a thin thread, then a billow so dense it rewrote the world. Norah felt the slap of cold tile beneath her heels, the sickly-sweet tang of spilled orange juice, the ancient whine of the refrigerator. Nine-year-old Norah, and the rest of the room returned in a series of punchy, overexposed details. There was the couch, rejecting its own stuffing from a side seam patched with duct tape; the overburdened third-hand IKEA bookshelf, double-stacked with romance paperbacks and trade journals; the window, forever bleary, lit turquoise and red by the traffic beyond. Each detail sharpened, then vibrated, as if the past itself were straining against its own limitations.

She caught a glimpse of herself—smaller, sharper, hair escaping its braid in wiry, defiant frizz. She wore the same oversized hoodie now as she had then, only the color had shifted from "optimism blue" to "laundromat gray." The library book in her hands, The Wind in the Willows, was as much a shield as a story, the pages already softened from dozens of borrowed readings. She remembered the specific feel of the plastic-wrapped cover, how the library’s glue had a smell that suggested both lemons and regret, and how she’d pressed her nose to it when she needed to block out the rest of the world.

Her father lay siege to the kitchen table—a siege well into its fifth year—with neat towers of bills, color-coded Post-Its, and a calculator so battered the 7 key stuck if you pressed it too hard. He wore slippers and a threadbare "Rutgers Engineering" sweatshirt, and though his hair had not yet surrendered to gray, the skin around his eyes told the story of a man who had already spent a lifetime in failed negotiations with entropy. Sometimes, when he thought no one was looking, he’d pinch the bridge of his nose and mutter prayers in a language Norah only understood through phonetics and context.

Her mother, queen of efficiency, patrolled the kitchen with a measuring cup in one hand and a cell phone permanently affixed to her ear. The conversations were always urgent, always the same: someone’s brother had lost his job, someone’s cousin needed a place to stay, someone’s father was dying and everyone needed to contribute. There was a rhythm to her mother’s stress, a metronome that set the tempo for the entire apartment. Even when she was silent, the anxiety rippled off her like heat from a sidewalk.

Tonight's dinner was couscous and frozen peas, the latter added for the benefit of Norah’s oldest sister, who had decided at age four that she hated vegetables but would eat anything shaped like a pea. The stove hissed and gurgled. Norah’s mother scolded the rice and pleaded with her sister, all while keeping an eye on the weather report playing from the battered radio above the sink.

Norah remembered exactly how she’d felt sitting at the edge of that world: not quite a child, not quite an adult, but already old in certain ways. She read her book by the flickering light of a flashlight jammed into the crook of her elbow, ignoring the sting where the battery compartment pressed against her skin. She wanted—needed—the story more than she needed the food, but she also knew better than to make herself the center of any argument. When her mother barked, "Help your sisters, ya’binti," Norah closed the book with a soft snap and folded it in her lap.

A groan from the living room signaled a sisterly skirmish. The twins, three years older, were arguing about the first to control the TV. They were wrestling on the floor. Norah intervened quickly, although she was the smallest. She separated the combatants, located a missing pink sock, and redistributed the couch cushions to minimize future casualties. Her hands moved fast, efficient, no wasted motion.

She heard her parents’ voices as they switched to Arabic in the other room. It was never a good sign. The argument was as predictable as a sitcom rerun: rent, tuition, groceries, someone’s cousin with a gambling problem. Voices rose, but never to the point of ****; Norah’s parents knew exactly how much drama the walls would tolerate.

She counted the laundry as she folded: one, two, three, four, five. Five towels, each one older than she was. Eight socks, no two alike. She sorted them by color, by thread count, by the intensity of the stains. She stacked them in perfect symmetry at the corner of the couch, then lined up her sisters to collect their rewards. Each time she completed a stack, a trickle of pride ran under the skin of her arms, but she never let it show on her face. If she was good enough, organized enough, maybe she could slow the entropy that always threatened to consume her family.

Her father raised his eyes from the bills and offered her a tired smile. "Shukran, Norah," he said, his voice as thin as the receipts he was tallying. "Someday you’ll be the one running this place."

Her mother’s voice, louder, followed: "She already is, God help us." It sounded like a joke, but Norah knew better. The hope and the pressure always arrived as a matched set.

The smoke rewound, then zipped forward.

Eid al-Fitr, maybe ten years old, sunlight streaming through the kitchen window, everything washed out in gold. Norah’s mother had spent the morning baking ma’amoul—those date-stuffed cookies with the powdered sugar that always found a way to get up your nose. Her sisters, three of them, were running circles through the tiny rooms, shrieking in a way that would have made American mothers call child services. Norah stood at the threshold, wringing her hands.

The gifts for Eid were wrapped in battered cardboard boxes, mostly hand-me-downs, but she’d been told there would be something special for her this year. She remembered the feeling in her chest, the ache of wanting to believe. Her father called them all in, lined them up by height, and handed out the boxes one at a time. Her oldest sister ripped hers open to find a brand-new white blouse, the tag still attached, from a department store Norah had only seen on the bus ride downtown. The other sisters unwrapped coloring books and glitter pens and a pair of shiny ballet flats.

When it was finally her turn, Norah took the battered cardboard box from her father’s hands, the weight of it no heavier than a loaf of bread but somehow infinitely heavier than that, too. She peeled the tape with slow, almost ritualistic care, feeling every molecule of resistance give way beneath her thumbnail. The hush of the room, the way her sisters leaned closer, the keen glimmer of expectation in her mother’s gaze—all of it pressed in on her from the inside of her own skin. After seeing the presents her sisters had received, she was so excited.

The dress inside was a soft cotton, faded like a memory of sunlight, the floral print already ghosting in patches along the hem. She recognized it at once. No effort had been made to disguise its origins: the neckline still held a faint contour of her cousin Hanan’s shoulder, a freckle-shaped bleach spot near the left sleeve from the Eid picnic two years prior. In the family archive of phone photos, Norah could recall every detail—the way Hanan wore the dress with a wide, gap-toothed grin, a scraped knee just visible beneath the hem, the background a blur of relatives crowded at folding tables, plastic tablecloths weighed down by Tupperware and wind.

Norah had envied that dress with a **** she would not confess, not even under threat. She’d watched Hanan twirl in it, the cotton skirt blooming out like the petals of the print itself, and had, for a moment, believed in the possibility of being noticed. That was before the hand-me-down ritual, before her mother’s whispered promise that “this year is different, habibti.” She had spent the previous night in a haze of imaginary reveals—maybe a new dress, maybe a tablet, maybe—God, just once—something that hadn’t belonged to another girl first.

She held the dress up, careful not to let her disappointment show at the way Hanan’s outline seemed to linger in the fabric. Her parents smiled, the brittle cheer of people who had once again bent the universe to bring their children something resembling joy. Her mother dabbed at her eyes with a napkin, blaming the flour dust in the air. Her father’s hand landed, heavy and brief, on Norah’s shoulder. “It looks even prettier on you,” he said, and Norah did what was required—she hugged the dress to her chest, she smiled, she said thank you in the chirpy, Americanized English her mother preferred in front of guests.

Later, after the gifts had been parsed out and the table cleared and her sisters had vanished to compare loot, Norah took the dress into the bathroom and locked the door. She didn’t try it on. Instead, she sat on the closed lid of the toilet, clutching the dress in her lap, the hush of the apartment finally settling in her ears like the quiet after a storm. The dress smelled of fabric softener faintly tinged with whatever air freshener her aunt had preferred, and beneath that, the ghost of Hanan’s house—cumin, incense, a note of sharp cleaning ****.

She sat like that for a long while, imagining what it would be like to have something new and untouched, something that belonged to her and her alone. But she also felt the quiet, unspoken gratitude for her parents, for the way they protected her from the worst of their poverty, for the careful fictions they constructed to save the family’s dignity. Norah understood, even then, that love was sometimes just the ability to hide disappointment from the people who needed to believe you were happy.

The memory snapped back. Sam’s eyes were on her, patient. No smile, not this time. Just a nod.

“Eid was always like that?” Sam asked, voice low.

Norah shrugged, but not because she didn’t care. “It got better, later. But I stopped hoping for new things.”

Sam gave a grunt of understanding. “I get it. My parents used to buy my brother model cars, and I’d get last year’s hand-me-downs. I didn’t even like cars. I wanted chemistry sets.”

Norah smiled, grateful, but then reached for the smoke again. It thickened, then shaped itself around her hand like a glove.

By the time university rolled around, Norah was already an old hand at hunger—literal and otherwise. Her first semester, she’d taken four jobs, three of them legal, and for a while she had lived on Turkish coffee and the kind of bagels you could use to repair infrastructure. She’d arrived with a suitcase that still had the security-tape from the thrift store on the handle, and a scholarship that paid for books and little else. She’d made do by learning to eat pride in the same way she inhaled cafeteria food: quickly, with practiced disinterest, while pretending not to notice the stares.

But university was over, and now Norah was fighting for a spot at the table. On this particular night she was at her desk, which was really just a repurposed door on cinderblocks, hunched over two laptops like a 21st-century oracle. The first belonged to her, the hinge barely holding after a semester of being slammed shut in frustration. The other was a battered loaner from the university’s IT guy, who had a soft spot for girls with too much ambition and not enough time. The blue glow from both screens made her skin look lunar, accentuating the hollows under her eyes and the way her knuckles protruded, white and tense, as she typed.

She was buried in spreadsheet hell: macros, regressions, model outputs. Each window on her screen another battlefield, the graphs and cells **** into compliance by sheer attrition. She sipped Red Bull through a bendy straw and willed herself not to blink until the run was finished. Every few minutes, she’d look at the clock and do the mental calculus—how many hours until the pitch, how many more lines of code she could debug before her brain liquefied. Somewhere, at the base of her spine, a muscle had begun to spasm, but there was no time to stretch. Not while there was a chance to win.

The simulation she was running was her own design, a Frankenstein made from a dozen class projects and more than a little borrowed code. Its sole purpose: to game out the best way for Lanternlight’s marketing team to capture a key demographic of upwardly mobile, second-generation immigrants. Her demographic, distilled into numbers: children grateful enough not to question the rightness of their place, but hungry enough to believe they should have more. Norah had spent months tweaking the variables until the projection spat out the answer she wanted, and then she’d started again, building in her own skepticism, her own shame. She knew the model would probably be thrown out, but she also knew it was better—faster, more flexible—than anything the Lanternlight team had managed all semester.

Sometime after midnight, the simulation finally finished its run, and Norah let herself collapse back in her chair. The apartment was so silent she could hear the radiator click, the city’s ambulances Doppler past, the faint tick of the clock on her kitchen wall. She was the last person awake in her building, probably in the block. She imagined all the lights in all the windows, extinguished one by one, until only hers remained. It felt both triumphant and absurdly lonely.

She scrolled through the final output, searching for the tiny imperfections that might be seized upon by someone with more credentials and less actual investment in the outcome. There were a few, but nothing fatal. She saved the file to six different cloud backups, then printed two hard copies for good measure. As the printer chugged and spat out the pages, she allowed herself to fantasize about the pitch: the conference room, the uneasy laughter of the interns, the way her hands would not tremble when she stood up to present.

She ran through the slide deck, rehearsing out loud for an audience of dying houseplants and the water stain above her closet. “Our model leverages emergent behaviors in socially aspirational networks,” she said, and then paused, wondering if the phrase sounded as stupid as it felt. She started again, this time trying it with less apology in her voice. “What you’re looking at is the future of targeted outreach, a framework that builds loyalty while respecting the cultural nuances of the target population.”

It was better, but not enough. She tried again and again, each time flattening the affect, erasing the parts of herself that might give away how much she needed to win.

At some point, the exhaustion dissolved into a second wind, and she found herself frantically rewriting the last section of the pitch, replacing the jargon with something that sounded more like the truth. She wanted the Lanternlight execs to see her, to know she understood both sides of the equation—how it felt to be the data point and the person doing the counting. She wrote until her head throbbed and her hands cramped, and when she finally shut her laptop, the sun was already threatening the horizon.

Her phone vibrated with a text from her mother: “Good luck today. Remember: nothing is impossible for you.” The words punctured her armor in a way that no whiteboard marker ever could. She left the phone face-down on the table, afraid of what else she might feel.

Six weeks after her badge photo was printed and laminated, Norah stood outside the Lanternlight conference room, feeling her pulse judder in her throat. The cheap blazer she’d bought on sale at Ross still had—she only noticed now, at the absolute apex of her nerves—a tiny security thread stitched into the hem. She yanked at it, flailed, then shoved her hands into the pockets, fingers slick with sweat. The glass wall of the conference room reflected everything back at her: a blurry, anxious shape, clutching a laptop like a life preserver, hair so aggressively flat-ironed she could see the steam-ravaged split ends.

Inside, the boardroom was a living diorama of everything she’d ever dreamed and feared about offices: the glossy table that looked like it cost more than her parents’ car, the grid of ergonomic chairs, the ficus tree in the corner, the smell of coffee that was somehow both expensive and burnt. A panel of six: two VPs in dark suits, a finance guy with hair like a Lego minifigure, a woman with a scarf so beautiful it seemed illegal, a friendly but distracted HR rep, and Andy Cooper, two seats down from the head of the table, tie knotted with the casual insouciance of someone who knew more about ties than he’d ever admit.

He was the only one who didn’t immediately look away when Norah entered. She thought he might smile, but he just blinked, nodded, and resumed his attentive stillness. She’d heard whispers about him: something about a start-up, a buy-out, a failed TED Talk. He was supposedly here on contract to oversee Lanternlight’s “youthful innovation pivot.”

The room’s temperature was at least 10 degrees colder than any other part of the building, and as Norah slid into her chair—positioned with cruel accuracy at the foot of the table—she tried to look comfortable, even though every muscle in her back was singing with tension. The execs gave her the standard up-down, the half-smiles that said, “You’re impressive for your age, but let’s not kid ourselves.” Even the coffee cups on the table were intimidating: sleek, heavy, probably designed by some Scandinavian sadist. This was it, though. At the foot of the table, perhaps, but she had a seat at the table, nonetheless. She knew her parents would be proud.

She opened her laptop with a trembling hand and queued up her slide deck. The title slide glowed: “Emergent Behaviors in Socially Aspirational Networks—A Predictive Framework.” The words looked so grandiose and fake she almost laughed. Instead, she cleared her throat and started.

The first five minutes were autopilot. She ran through the overview, cited the relevant literature, even landed a joke about social media trends that got a smattering of polite laughter. This was her comfort zone: high-level abstraction, word clouds, the illusion of control. Then came the data, the real meat of her pitch. She guided them through a sequence of animated charts—demographic breakdowns, trend lines that looked like rocket ascents, a heat map that shimmered in reds and golds. She felt herself relax into the rhythm, forgot her terror, and started to believe that maybe, just maybe, she belonged here.

At the ten-minute mark, she fielded the first question from the scarfed woman—something about bias correction in the sampling method. Norah handled it deftly, even adding a little quip about her own family’s “statistical outlier status,” which got a real, actual laugh from the room. The finance guy nodded, scribbled something in his notebook, and Norah could feel the tide shift: they weren’t just humoring her. She was nailing it.

That’s when Andy leaned forward, elbows on the table, fingers steepled at his chin. “If I can jump in for a second,” he said. His voice was exactly as she remembered it from onboarding: warm, a little dry, with a cadence that made every question sound both friendly and surgical.

“Of course,” Norah said, and instantly regretted how eager her voice sounded.

Andy gestured at the screen with a single, unhurried hand. “I’m curious about the sample composition for your control group. Slide four says you’re using a cohort of 600, but the regression table on slide seven lists only 558 records. That’s a pretty significant drop—was there an exclusion criteria you didn’t mention, or is that an artifact from the data cleaning?”

The air in the room changed. Not hostile, exactly, but alert. Waiting.

Norah’s mind raced. She remembered the late-night panics, the endless cycles of spreadsheet debugging, the last-minute merge she’d done just before printing the slides. She realized, in real time, that the number on slide seven was wrong. It wasn’t a catastrophic error—she had cross-checked the code, the outputs were still valid—but the inconsistency was glaring. Obvious to anyone who cared enough to look. Why had he cared to look?

She watched her own face on the inside of her mind, saw the tiny freeze, the way her hand twitched on the laptop trackpad. “That’s a good catch,” she said, forcing a smile that barely reached her lips. “I, uh, actually ran a final duplicate filter last night and didn’t update the text on slide four. The control group is 558, not 600. Sorry for the confusion.”

Andy nodded, but his eyes did not move away. “Got it. So the model’s confidence interval is based on the reduced sample?”

“Yes,” Norah said, her voice a little smaller. “All the regression outputs in the appendix are based on 558.”

The scarfed woman looked at Andy, then back at Norah. “That’s not a huge margin of error for this kind of modeling, right?”

Norah shook her head, too quickly, she realized. “Less than four percent. Statistically negligible.”

The finance guy frowned, tapped his pen on the table. “But your executive summary still says 600.”

Norah opened her mouth, closed it, then shrugged. “I can fix that. It was a mistake.”

A silence fell. It was not the silence of disaster, exactly, but it wasn’t forgiveness, either. It was the silence of a missed lay-up, a door closing with a soft, irreversible click.

The meeting ran five more minutes. Norah’s pitch ended with a limp suggestion that the model could be “iteratively improved,” and nobody asked her any more questions. The execs whispered to each other as they packed up. Andy gave her a polite nod, but she could see in the set of his jaw that something essential had passed between them—a moment of weakness, observed and filed away. As the last of them filtered out, Norah gathered her things in a numb daze, eyes fixed on the floor, cheeks burning as if she’d been slapped. She waited until the conference room was empty before she allowed herself to sit, head in her hands, feeling the tears well up and then subside, replaced by a dull, hollow ache.

When she finally looked up, Andy was still at the far end of the table, typing on his phone. He glanced over, caught her staring, and then, after a beat, crossed the room and sat in the chair beside her. Norah braced herself, expecting a lecture, but he only said, very quietly, “You know, nobody gets through their first pitch without fucking something up.”

Norah didn’t trust herself to speak, so she nodded, eyes on her hands.

He waited, then continued: “You did good work. Don’t let the small stuff take it away from you.”

It was the kindest thing he could have said, and Norah hated how much she needed to hear it.

She closed her laptop, wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her blazer, and managed, “Thanks.”

Andy gave her a wan, almost sheepish smile, and in that instant she saw the old scar of his own failures, the way he wore them like a second skin. Then he stood, said, “I’ll see you around,” and left her alone with the echo of her humiliation.

Norah remembered the heat crawling up her neck, the way her hands went numb. She’d never wanted to punch someone more in her life.

She pulled her hand from the smoke, heart racing.

Sam broke the silence. “That was brutal. He could have told you in private.”

“Yeah,” Norah said, surprised at how steady she sounded. “Turns out he tried. I was too scared to meet him. But he was right. I did mess up the control group.”

Sam nodded. “Doesn’t make it less of a dick move.”

Norah almost laughed, but instead she flicked her fingers through the smoke, sending it spinning. “I spent years blaming him for that,” she said, quieter now. “But maybe I should have thanked him.”

Sam made a face. “You don’t have to let him off the hook, you know. Men screw up all the time and call it ‘mentorship.’ It’s not your job to forgive him.”

Norah let the thought hover, then reached into the smoke again.

This time, she tried to summon something nice, but the blue fog did not listen. It built a scene from her first week at Lanternlight, after she’d finally landed a full-time spot. Norah at her cubicle, the only woman on her floor, meticulously overdressed to overcompensate. She remembered trying to laugh at the jokes, trying to fit in, trying not to be the office “diversity hire” even when she was told, out loud, that’s what she was.

But she did the work—better, faster, neater than anyone else. She solved problems before her bosses even knew they existed. When her team missed a deadline, she pulled the all-nighter and delivered. When the CEO dropped by, she stayed invisible, unless summoned.

But the memory refused to show the wins. Instead, it rewound to a Thursday night when she left at nine, exhausted, only to find a note taped to her monitor:

You’re not fooling anyone.

No signature. No context. Just that. She’d torn it off, shredded it, and gotten back to work.

Norah felt her real hands curling into fists.

Sam saw the motion. “Who did that?”

Norah shook her head. “Never found out. Doesn’t matter now.”

Sam looked unconvinced, but didn’t push. “You ever think about tracking them down, just to prove you did fool them?”

Norah smiled, tight-lipped. “I don’t need to. I won.”

The blue smoke faded. Norah took her hand back, folding it in her lap.

For a minute, the Cabana was quiet, except for the faint fizz of the candle.

Sam finally spoke. “You know, you don’t have to show them the scars. You could show them the muscle instead. The strength that got you through.”

Norah considered that. “Does that even matter? Isn’t the point to be… raw? Exposed?”

Sam shrugged, but her eyes were kind. “I think the point is to make Andy see you as more than a collection of wounds. You’ve got power, Norah. He should see what it looks like when you use it.”

Norah almost said something sharp, but stopped herself. She looked at Sam, really looked, and saw no trace of pity—just respect. It warmed something in her that she’d forgotten was there.

“So,” Sam said, “what are you going to do with the paint? You going to make him sorry, or make him wish he was you?”

Norah smiled, a real smile this time. “Why not both?”

Sam’s laugh was quick and bright. “Now you’re talking.”

Norah stretched her neck, rolled her shoulders, and was about to suggest they leave when the smoke curled upward, on its own, and gave her one last memory.

It was Andy again, but not the Andy of the boardroom, nor the Andy from the first morning on the beach, nor even the Andy who haunted her memories with cutting questions and unyielding eyes. This was a version of him she had only glimpsed once, two nights ago, and even then only in the uncertain, syrupy space between sleep and waking. Her mind conjured him from the blue smoke, rebuilt the entire scene with all the fidelity and shame of a dream played in high-definition. He was sprawled across the enormous bed, the sheets bunched around his hips, chest bare, the bones and scars of his body thrown into sharp relief by the lazy moonlight filtering through the villa’s gauzy curtains. He looked unguarded, at rest, something she’d never seen in the daytime. She, too, was there, in the memory—more herself than she could ever be in daylight, hair loosed from its bun, cheeks flushed, clad in just the lace bra she’d bought on a dare and never intended to wear in front of another human, much less him.

In the memory, Norah watched herself as if she were an actress in a film she’d already seen, but couldn’t bear to look away from. She saw her own hand, a traitorous, delicate thing, reach over to Andy’s sleeping form. With almost comical delicacy, she brushed the hair from his forehead—a gesture so intimate it made her real skin crawl—and then, after a moment’s hesitation, leaned in to press her lips to his cheek. The real Norah, the one watching from afar, could feel the phantom touch echo in her jaw. She’d done that, she realized with a sort of helpless horror. She’d actually done that. What was wrong with her?

The scene did not pause for her embarrassment. Memory-Norah snuggled up against him, nuzzling her face into the crook of his shoulder with the eager, wordless hunger of someone starved for warmth. Then, with a move that was at once calculated and completely out of her control, she reached down and tugged the bra aside, baring one breast. She took Andy’s lax hand and placed it gently—possessively—in the curve of flesh, curling around it as if rooting herself to the bed, to him, to this moment and no other.

In the blue-lit present, Norah felt her cheeks bloom with heat. She risked a glance at Sam, who was giving her a sidelong look that was equal parts admiration, mischievous glee, and a dash of envy. Norah didn’t dare speak first.

Sam broke the spell with a low whistle, soft and slow. “Damn, Norah. I didn’t know you had that in you.”

Norah made a face, half mortified, half defiant. “I didn’t know I had that in me, either. I must’ve been—” She struggled for the word. “—out of my mind.”

Sam grinned. “Or maybe just in it, for once.”

Norah almost snapped back, but she let the quip hang in the air, not sure if it was meant as an insult or a compliment. “You’re such a creep,” she muttered, but there was no heat behind it.

Sam nodded agreeably, chin in hand, eyes still dancing. “I mean, if you’re going to be in a harem, you may as well make a statement.”

Norah was not ready to interrogate that statement, not yet. She looked back at the memory, which was still looping, and found herself transfixed by how desperately her memory-self clung to Andy’s body. Not like a lover, not really, but like someone lost at sea clutching to driftwood. It was raw, embarrassing, but also—she had to admit—kind of beautiful. No one had ever told her, growing up, that there was a special kind of power in letting yourself want things.

She watched as memory-Norah pulled herself even closer, burying her face entirely in the space between Andy’s neck and shoulder. She could practically hear her own breath hitch, the tiny tremor of relief when he, even in sleep, drew his arm more tightly around her. For a moment, Norah felt what her memory-self felt: safe, wanted, anchored in a world that until now had mostly wanted her to disappear. It made her so angry, and so wistful, that she almost told the smoke to stop.

But it didn’t stop. The scene faded, replaced by a montage of smaller moments from the past forty-eight hours, all of them somehow colored by the same blue filter: Andy in the hotel corridor, apologizing for hurting her; Andy under the gazebo, looking at her with worry; Andy at dinner, catching her gaze across the table, and for just a second, not looking away. Each of these flickers was real, she realized, and not just the work of the Cabana’s magic. She’d lived them, and she’d wanted more.

Sam was quiet for a change. When Norah finally looked at her, she saw something almost reverent in Sam’s face—like she was witnessing a minor miracle. The two of them sat in silence for a full minute, the air between them charged with a kind of **** truce. Sam didn’t make a joke, or a wisecrack, or even a supportive sound. She just sat, letting the moment settle.

Norah was the first to break. “I don’t know what’s worse,” she said softly. “That I did that, or that I want to do it again.”

Sam shook her head, still smiling. “That’s not worse. That’s just honest. You know,” Sam added, voice low, “I’ve seen a lot of girls do stupid shit for guys, but you’re the first I’ve seen do it with style.”

Norah rolled her eyes, but she didn’t argue. She let herself imagine, just for a second, what it would be like to own her feelings outright. To be the kind of person who could reach for what she wanted without shame.

She turned the idea over in her head, weighing it against all the years she’d spent hiding, all the biting comments and silent humiliations. If this was the worst that could happen… if the price of being true was a little embarrassment, a little vulnerability… then maybe it was time to stop running from it.

She looked at Sam, who was regarding her with an open, curious expression. “So what’s the verdict?” Sam asked. “Ready to fight for him?”

Norah didn’t hesitate. “I think I am.”

Sam nodded, satisfied. “Thought so.”

They let the silence breathe, then Sam stood, stretching like a cat. “Ready to get painted up like superheroes?”

Norah nodded, her posture different now. Less armor, more air.

The beach was nearly empty now, Arabella had gone to check on the women, all the other contestants folded away in their separate orbits, leaving Andy alone beneath the vast, white curve of the gazebo. The last light of day slipped behind the volcano, and the sky turned from gold to something bruised and uncertain, the colors running together like wet paint on glass.

Andy leaned against the throne. From this vantage, the world looked hollowed out, as if the whole island had held its breath, waiting for him to make a move. He could see the path from the Memory Cabana, a ghost of footprints leading back toward the main house, but the women themselves were already gone. Only the chill in the air, and the soft clink of glass from the empty carafe, kept him company.

He tried to imagine how they felt. What they would show him tonight, what wounds and wonders they might bare for the cameras, for the Audience, for him. He wondered if he would be brave enough to see it. If any of them would forgive him for what happened next.

Footsteps, light but assured, touched the stairs. Andy looked up and saw Arabella, standing at the edge of the platform. Her gown caught the last threads of sunlight, turning the green fabric to pale gold. She looked at him with eyes that seemed older than the sky.

“It’s almost time,” she said, voice gentle.

Andy nodded, not trusting himself to speak.

Arabella glanced at the horizon, the colors fading fast. “They’ve done well. Your harem. I think you’ll be… proud, tonight.”

He almost laughed, but it died in his throat. “I don’t want to hurt any of them,” he said. “But I guess that’s not up to me.”

Arabella smiled, small and sincere. “You can still choose how you remember them, Andy. That’s a kind of mercy, too.”

He looked away, blinking back something sharp. “Does it ever get easier?”

She shook her head, hair catching the wind. “Never. But you learn to value the story over the ending.”

He watched her for a moment, searching for the mask, but tonight it was just Arabella. No Host, no spectacle, only a woman watching the dusk.

She gestured toward the throne, her hand graceful as ever. “It’s time, Andy,” she said, the old script restored, but not without kindness.

Andy straightened his shirt, wiped his palms on his jeans, and took his place. The chair felt colder than he remembered, harder, but it fit him all the same.