Maya Torres stood in the employee breakroom and looked at herself in the small cracked mirror above the sink.
The crack ran diagonally from the upper corner, splitting her reflection into two slightly misaligned halves, so that her face never quite lined up with itself. She had complained about the mirror once, a year ago, the way you complain about weather. Peterson had written it on his notepad and nothing had ever happened, and now she was almost grateful for it. A whole mirror would have shown her a whole person. This one showed her the truth in pieces.
Her uniform was crisp. Black vest, black skirt, white blouse with the collar starched into obedience, hair pulled back into a bun so tight it pulled at her temples. The Grand View estate required its staff to look professional, presentable, polished — and underneath all three words, the fourth one, unspoken: invisible. Maya had become very good at invisible. She could set a table for twelve without a sound. She could cross a crowded ballroom with a tray of champagne and brush past silk gowns without a single guest turning around. She could smile at being spoken through, ordered at, waved away, and the smile never reached anywhere it could be damaged.
She was twenty-four years old, and some evenings she felt fifty.
It was Friday, and the Grand Ballroom was being prepared for another charity gala, which meant twelve hours on her feet, which meant her shoes were already, preemptively, an enemy. Her feet ached on a schedule now, the way old injuries ache before rain. Her back ached from trays. Her face ached — this was the one she never said out loud — from the pleasant, professional smile she had worn for almost two years, six days a week, until the muscles around her mouth belonged more to the estate than to her.
She picked up her notepad and her pen. She took one breath, the way she always did, the breath that put Maya Torres away and brought out the server. Then she pushed through the swinging doors into the service corridor, and her footsteps echoed off marble that had been polished that morning by a man she knew by sight and had never once heard speak above a whisper.
The Grand View estate was built to make people feel small, and it worked on everyone except the people who owned pieces of it. The ceilings rose three stories and disappeared into gilded shadow. Crystal chandeliers hung like frozen fireworks. Gold-trimmed mirrors gave back endless versions of the ballroom, so that one party became a hundred parties, extending forever, none of them yours. Fresh flowers stood in vases the size of children. Their perfume mixed with beeswax and old money and the faint metallic smell of very clean air.
Tonight's gala was for a cause. Maya no longer learned the causes. In the beginning she had — she had read the programs while folding napkins, moved by pediatric wings and scholarship funds and the clean water initiatives. Then she had understood the shape of the thing. The cause changed every month. Everything else stayed the same: the same caterers, the same auctioneer, the same guests writing the same beautiful checks with the same beautiful pens, and the staff working the same twelve-hour shifts for wages that covered rent and not much else, in a county where rent was a rumor that went up every spring.
She was assigned the east side tonight, tables one through nine. She checked the place cards against the seating chart with the care of a woman defusing something. In this room, a misplaced senator's wife could end a career.
At five the other servers arrived in ones and twos, shaking off the evening chill, trading the small change of staff gossip. By five-thirty the room stood ready in its ranks — silver polished, candles wicked, the long white cloths falling without a wrinkle — and the whole apparatus of other people's pleasure hummed at idle, waiting for its operators to disappear into it.
And then, on her second pass toward the kitchen doors, she saw it, the way she saw it every single shift, no matter how she arranged her route to avoid it.
The Steinway stood on the small stage at the far end of the ballroom, black and gleaming under its own light, the lid raised, the keys covered still with their fallboard closed, patient as an animal that knows it will be fed eventually. The hired pianist would arrive at six. Until then it simply waited, and Maya simply looked, because she had never once in two years managed not to.
She made herself stop. That was the discipline. Look, count to three, put it down. The piano was not hers. The music was not hers anymore. That life had been weighed against her family's rent and her mother's medicine and her little brother's textbooks, and it had lost, fairly, in a contest she herself had judged. Thinking about it every night was a tax she paid to a country she no longer lived in.
She turned away and went to count the wine glasses.
But her hand, passing the last table, brushed the cool edge of the tabletop in a rhythm — thumb, second, fourth, second — an arpeggio her fingers played on furniture when her mind was elsewhere, the way other people hum. She caught herself doing it and flattened her palm against the wood until the fingers stopped.
Tonight, she told herself, was just tonight. Set the tables. Serve the dinner. Smile. Go home. Tomorrow the ballroom would belong to a wedding, and the Steinway would play wedding music, and she would be at table nine with a water pitcher, not looking.
Maya aligned the last wine glass to its mark, straightened the last fold of linen, and went to help carry in the flowers.
The piano in the Torres apartment had not been a good piano.