ONE

Manhattan, 1925

The champagne was flowing in the Nightingale, poured out for the dancers who crowded around the bar.

Don’t tell, they agreed, toasting each other with sultry voices and bold laughter. Don’t tell. You never saw me here.

You couldn’t see the stars if you went outside. The city lights were too bright, the dingy clouds too thick. But inside, champagne stars fizzed in cut-crystal glasses, dancing like the couples who found their way through the back alleys and down the stairs each night.

I’ll dance ’til last call, they whispered at the door, all hoping to escape something. The monotony of wealth. The needs of a lover. The demands of family and work and sometimes just scraping by. The drudgery of a city where you would never see the stars at night.

Vivian Kelly knew what it was like to wish for those stars. She had learned not to look up, to find her freedom in the rhythm of the music, in champagne bubbles and dances with strangers, in the secrets they kept for each other. She could tell, just by looking, who was there on a whim or a dare, money flashing bright as the spangles on a dress, cares light as a whisper of silk. They kept the liquor flowing, the dance floor busy, the laughter loud.

And she could tell who was there for the same reasons she was. The ones whose shoulders relaxed as they came down the stairs, who slipped into their true selves like coming home. The ones who knew that freedom came with a price, that freedom wasn’t safe, and still decided it was worth the cost.

Don’t tell, they agreed when they heard what they weren’t supposed to know.

Don’t tell, they whispered when they saw someone they shouldn’t.

Don’t tell, they begged. Oh, please, don’t tell.

You never saw me here.



TWO

“Mrs. Buchanan’s not here.”

Vivian Kelly, twenty-four years old and feeling three times her age, her feet aching from trudging twenty blocks between deliveries and her arms limp from the weight of three dress boxes, bit the inside of her cheek. The housekeeper didn’t deserve her impatience or her anger. And the woman who did—the one who had insisted that her gowns be completed and delivered a week early—wouldn’t see anything but a polite shopgirl when she finally arrived, either. Not if Vivian wanted to keep her job.

She arranged her face into a smile. “Does she want me to leave the dresses? The hem and shoulders need to be checked, but if she wants her own maid to do that—”

“I don’t know,” the housekeeper said, already distracted by the sound of an argument in the next room.

Vivian stood in the tradesmen’s entrance, shivering from the wind that snaked around her ankles and crept up her stockinged legs. It could snow tonight, judging by that wind. She didn’t want to trudge back here in the snow.

“Just come in. You can wait a bit, can’t you? God willing she’ll be back soon.” The housekeeper cast a glance over her shoulder as the sound of the argument grew louder. “You, with the red hair! What’s your name, Lena? Take this girl to the upstairs parlor. And tell me the minute Mrs. Buchanan is back. She needs to—”

The shouting grew, along with something that sounded like a whole stack of pots toppling to the ground. “Lord almighty, I hate opening a new house,” the housekeeper muttered. “Go with Lena, young lady. I can’t be bothered figuring out what to do with you just now.”

Lena, a maid with brilliant red hair and the expected number of freckles scattered across her nose to go with it, pulled a face as the housekeeper disappeared. “Sounds like the new cook won’t last any longer than the first one,” she said, shrugging. “Hurry up, will you? I’ve got better things to do than play nursemaid.”

Quiet descended as they made their way upstairs, the sound of servants concealed, like their presence, behind closed doors. Vivian hid a yawn behind her hand as she followed.

Delivering dresses instead of making them meant she no longer spent hours hunched over a sewing machine or a tray of beads. But her days still started early, and her nights often didn’t end until two or three in the morning. She stumbled a little as her feet sank into the plush carpet that ran up the stairs, and she blinked rapidly, looking around to keep herself alert.

The Fifth Avenue mansion was like so many she had visited, deliveries in hand: sweeping ceilings, marble floors, glass windows like works of art. Most of them were gilded, decorated, and filled to within an inch of their lives, temples to success and excess both. But this one felt half-finished, its tables bare of ornaments, paintings leaning against the walls instead of hung on them.

Lena caught her glancing around. “New house,” she said, by way of explanation as they made their way to the second floor. “Well, old house, but new family in it. They’re still settling in.”

“Did you come with them?” Vivian asked, glad the other girl was willing to make conversation. She hated walking through big houses in silence. It reminded her too much of life in the orphan home.

Lena shook her head as she swung open a heavy, paneled door. “Most of us are new, too. Which is why they’re all shouting at each other downstairs.”