Gemma left the party early. She always knew she would.

The music was too loud, the lights too dim, and the conversations too shiny with pretension. Everyone seemed to know someone, or be someone, or want something. She didn’t know what she wanted. Not yet.

Outside, the night air slapped her cheeks cold. New York didn’t care if you felt out of place. It just kept moving. She stepped up to the street, the pulse of the city alive beneath her boots. The underground loft, some converted art gallery in the Lower East Side, buzzed behind her like a beehive she was done trying to fit into.

She lit a cigarette with trembling fingers.

Small-town girl, big city dreams. That cliché again. But wasn’t it true? She’d come here to study illustration, but maybe she was really just trying to draw herself into a life that didn’t feel borrowed.

She exhaled slowly. Smoke curled into the dark like a thought unspoken.