The mall was enormous in the specific, unapologetic way of American things.
Eliza stood at the entrance for a moment before following Lydia through the doors, taking it in the way she had been taking things in since she arrived in California — with the practiced inventory of someone assembling a picture from its component parts. The Westfield in Shepherd's Bush had been the one she knew best growing up: three compact floors, reliable signage, a Boots and a Marks & Spencer and a Pret. This was something else entirely. The ceilings were vaulted. The floor plan sprawled. There was a fountain. There was, at some distance, what appeared to be an ice rink.
London malls had the slightly harried quality of spaces that knew they were in a city and were making the best of the square footage. This one had apparently never considered the possibility of limitation.
Lydia moved through the entrance the way she moved through every space Eliza had observed her in — not as someone navigating an environment, but as someone who had decided in advance that the environment would arrange itself around her. She didn't consult the directory. She didn't pause at the map. She simply walked, with the unhurried certainty of a woman who had been here enough times to have formed opinions, and the mall received her accordingly.
Malia walked the way she walked everywhere: with her head up, her eyes moving, and the particular quality of alertness that Eliza had come to understand was not anxiety but simply the baseline state of someone who had once lived in the woods and never entirely stopped.
Eliza fell into step between them.
"The moment of truth," Lydia said, without turning. "Who is Eliza Lovelace?"
The question landed with more weight than it had probably been intended to carry. Eliza considered it for a moment — the honest answer, which was that she had no idea, that the person she had been before Chateau de la Nuit was a sixteen-year-old girl in a London park, and the person she had been inside it was not someone she intended to continue being, and the gap between those two things was currently unoccupied and waiting — and set it aside.
"I guess we're about to learn," she said.
Lydia smiled at that. The smile had the quality of someone who found this an acceptable answer and intended to hold her to it.
The department store was well-lit and well-stocked and entirely confident in its own aesthetic, which appeared to be: things that would look good on someone who already knew what she was doing. Lydia moved through it with the focused efficiency of a woman on a mission she had been mentally preparing for since the car park.
The clothes she pulled were beautiful. They were also, uniformly, not quite right.
Eliza watched a silk blouse in a deep burgundy join the growing pile over Lydia's arm and tried to decide whether she was being ungrateful or simply honest. The colors were good — Lydia had an eye, and the burgundies and forest greens and warm ochres she kept reaching for were at least suited to Eliza's coloring, which was more than could be said for the grey hoodie she had been living in. But the shapes were soft and feminine in the way of someone who wore softness as a deliberate statement, and Eliza had never been that person. She had been, before Lucien, a girl who wore leather jackets and dark jeans to the park. She had been, during Lucien, whatever he preferred. She did not yet know what she was now, but she suspected it was neither of those things.
She let Lydia continue.
Malia's approach was different in every possible way. She worked the racks with the single-minded practicality of someone who believed that clothing had one function, which was to cover the body while allowing for full range of motion. Jeans, dark and well-fitted. Plaid button-downs in navy and green. Basic tees in grey and black and a particular shade of rust that she held up against Eliza's shoulder with a critical expression before adding it to the pile.
"That one's good," she said, which was the most she had said about any of them.
Eliza trusted the rust tee.
She drifted, while they worked, toward the back of the floor, following the sight lines until the clothing racks gave way to the shoe department. It had the particular atmosphere of shoe departments everywhere — slightly hushed, the carpet thicker, the display stands arranged with an optimism about what the right pair of shoes could do for a person that Eliza had always found, in theory, a little much, and in practice, completely correct.
The boots were on the third display stand from the left.
Black leather, ankle height, with a low heel and a clean line that was neither trying too hard nor not trying at all. She picked one up and turned it over. Good construction. Not cheap.
"Can I help you find something?"
She glanced up. The salesman was young — mid-twenties, brown hair, with the slightly eager quality of someone who was new enough to the job to still mean it. His name badge said Trevor.
"These," she said. "Do you have them in a six and a half?"
He reached for the display model with the automatic gesture of someone who had done this many times, and then he looked at her, and the automatic gesture slowed down slightly. His smile came a beat late, and it was a different smile than the professional one he had been wearing a moment ago — less polished. More present.
"Yeah," he said. "Sorry — it's just, your accent. I don't hear that too often in California."
She looked at him.
He was, she decided, flirting with her. Or something adjacent to it — the particular, tentative version that people attempted when they were not entirely certain it was welcome and were prepared to retreat into professionalism if it wasn't. She had seen it before, in the years before Lucien, when she had been a girl in a park and boys had found reasons to sit nearby and say things like that's a good book and she had understood, without needing to be told, what the book had to do with any of it.
She thought of Derek in the kitchen this morning. The directness of it. I can't be someone you use to forget him.
She thought about what it would mean to let that sentence be the last word on the matter.
Then she thought: she had been in a room with Lucien Nox for eight years. She had been flirted with by a man who treated flirtation as a form of ownership — who had performed tenderness the way a locksmith performs his trade, precise and purposeful and entirely instrumental. She had never, in the years since she was fifteen and Jack had been alive and the world had been ordinary, had the experience of someone looking at her with no agenda at all. Just because.
She decided she was owed it.
"I grew up in London," she said, and let the smile come. "You like my accent?"
Trevor's expression did something uncomplicated and pleased. "It suits you," he said. "I'll go check the back. Don't go anywhere."
He disappeared through the stockroom door with more purpose than the task strictly required.
She turned back to the display and found another pair — brown leather this time, slightly taller, with a buckle at the ankle that she liked — and was holding one of them when Malia appeared at her shoulder with an armful of jeans and the expression of someone who had been watching for longer than was strictly necessary.
"What are you doing?"
"Buying shoes."
"You're flirting with the shoe salesman."
"I am not." Eliza set the brown boot down with perfect composure. "I'm trying the Cognac."
Malia stared at her. "There's no Cognac here."
Lydia materialized from between two display stands with her armful of burgundy and ochre and the expression of someone who had caught the relevant part of the conversation and had opinions. "I know you didn't ask," she said, "but come on, Eliza. You're way out of that guy's league."
"Not to mention," Malia said, "you're married. In case you forgot."
The word sat in the air between them for a moment. Eliza looked at the ring on her finger — the gold band that had been warm and cool and warm again in ways that had nothing to do with her and everything to do with a man in Paris who considered her an extension of his will — and felt the familiar, complicated weight of it.
She thought about that for a moment. Then she thought about the bartender at Nocturne, and the mercenaries in the Ironwood, and the way Lucien had watched through the ritual basin while four men went down and she had drawn the power to put them there from Derek Hale's grief.
"Lucien only knew where I'd be last night because the bartender from Nocturne set up a trap," she said. "This is way different."
Lydia tilted her head in the manner of someone performing the calculation. "That's a fair point," she allowed. "I just think if you're looking for someone, you could do considerably better than the man selling you shoes."
"I'm not looking for someone," Eliza said. "I'm having a conversation with someone who thinks I'm a normal person. Those are different things."
Trevor reappeared from the stockroom carrying two boxes with the particular energy of someone who had decided to be useful.
"Six and a half in the black," he said, setting the first box down, "and I checked — we have the Cognac as well." He glanced at her with the smile again, the real one. "It's a good color. I think it'd work for you."
"Cognac sounds lovely," she said. "You really don't mind grabbing it for me?"
"It would be my pleasure."
He went back.
Malia made a sound that was not quite a word.
Trevor returned with the Cognac, which was, in fact, a very good color — a warm brown that sat somewhere between the black and the tan and managed to suggest that the person wearing it had made a considered decision rather than a convenient one. She tried on both pairs — the black first, and the Cognac second — and while she was sitting with the Cognac on her feet and Trevor was telling her about the leather and the break-in period with the manner of someone who had found a topic that would keep him nearby, she said:
"I'm new in town, actually. I'd love it if someone could show me around."
Trevor blinked. Then he looked surprised in a way that was entirely genuine and, she thought, quite pleasant.
He pulled a piece of tissue paper from the shoe box, borrowed the pen from his breast pocket, and wrote his number down with the focused care of someone trying to make a legible impression. He folded it and held it out.
She took it.
She bought the black boots and the Cognac and the brown buckle pair, and four of the things Lydia had selected, and three of the things Malia had selected including the rust tee, and stood at the register with the quiet, slightly unfamiliar feeling of a person purchasing objects that she had chosen for herself, with her own money, because she wanted them. It was a small thing. It sat in her chest like something larger.
They carried the bags to Lydia's car in the late afternoon, the mall emptying around them, and Malia loaded the boot with the focused efficiency she applied to everything and Lydia arranged her own bags with the care of someone who knew how fabric traveled, and Eliza got into the back seat and set her bags at her feet and did not think about Derek.
Lydia pulled out of the space. Malia turned around from the passenger seat.
"I can't believe you got that guy's number."
"I can't believe it either," Lydia said, with what sounded like genuine admiration despite herself. "What exactly do you plan on doing with that information?"
Eliza looked out the window at the car park moving past, the afternoon light flat and golden against the tarmac.
"I plan on having a normal conversation," she said, "with someone who thinks I'm a normal person."
"Just a reminder," Malia said, turning back to face the windscreen. "You're not normal."
"I know."
Lydia turned onto the road that led back toward the castle, and the mall receded behind them, and Eliza reached into the pocket of her jacket and touched the folded piece of tissue paper with her fingertips. It was soft from being folded. Small. Entirely ordinary.
She left her hand in her pocket the rest of the way home.