Lady Eve's Last Con

by Rebecca Fraimow

Genres: LGBT Bisexual; Science Fiction Romance; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Space Opera

Synopsis

Hearts will race and anti-grav boots will fly in this scifi rom-com perfect for fans of WINTER'S ORBIT and THE RED SCHOLAR'S WAKE.

Ruth Johnson and her sister Jules have been small-time hustlers on the interstellar cruise lines for years. But then Jules fell in love with one of their targets, Esteban Mendez-Yuki, sole heir to the family insurance fortune. Esteban seemed to love her too, until she told him who she really was, at which point he fled without a word.

Now Ruth is set on revenge: disguised as provincial debutante Evelyn Ojukwu and set for the swanky satellite New Monte, she’s going to make Esteban fall in love with her, then break his heart and take half his fortune. At least, that's the plan. But Ruth hadn't accounted for his younger sister, Sol, a brilliant mind in a dashing suit... and much harder to fool.

Sol is hot on Ruth's tail, and as the two women learn each other’s tricks, Ruth must decide between going after the money and going after her heart.

Release date: June 4, 2024

Publisher: Solaris

Print pages: 368

Sample

CHAPTER 1

It wasn’t only the Mendez-Yuki money I was there for. We could have made it with the cash we had on hand. Ever since we got in on the luxury-liner gambit, money had been dropping into our hands like coolant from a leaky ceiling: a drip here, a trickle there, and the bucket filled up before you knew it.

I hadn’t figured then that I’d be spending it all so soon. This debutante’s wardrobe hadn’t come cheap; the people whose party I was crashing could spot imitation Io-spider silk a mile off. There couldn’t be any little sniff of imitation about me, not for this job. I had to look the real deal. The shopping would’ve been more fun if my sister Jules had come out to give me a hand with it. But Jules was still a galaxy away on Bellavu, suffering from nausea and a viral case of embarrassment, with complications induced by a broken heart.

 So I was here alone at the front door of the Mendez-Yuki manor on New Monte, dressed to the nineteens. The bell had already rung, and at a party like this, you didn’t ring twice. When the door opened, I was ready.

 You could tell the Mendez-Yuki were real money because the butler was a real butler. Most people these days went for steel-tech instead. Shiny, easy to design to spec, and they don’t eat, so you save money in the long run. I’d heard rumors they were starting to make them more realistic these days, but if this fellow was a robot then the Turing test was toast. He took one look at me in my six months’ income of fancy dress and ushered me graciously into the hallway. “If I may have your name,” he said, “to check you off the list.”

“Evelyn Ojukwu,” I answered, in my manufactured accent. I wasn’t worried about keeping it up; I could do over-educated provincial in my sleep.

The real Evelyn Ojukwu was from Kepler— one of the more distant colonies settled in the first panicked wave of the Expansion, when the waters started rising back on Earth. The most impacted often went the farthest and fastest, then, skipping past the first proto-settlements on Centauri straight to the K2 and HD systems in a bid to claim their fair share of galactic real estate before the rest caught up. As a strategy, that had its pros and its cons: once it started getting too hot for the big fish, they suddenly decided it was worth their while to clean up their home planet after all, and pretty soon it became clear that Earth wasn’t going to be giving up its position at the metaphorical center of the galaxy any time soon. Still, while Kepler might be a bit of a backwater, a planet was a planet, and resources were resources, and people like the Ojukwu had more than enough simoleons for their scions to go party in the Sol system.

I’d never been to Kepler myself; I was a satellite brat through and through. Still, my father had been from there—at least, so I’d been told—so it had seemed as good a place as any to start looking for lookalikes. Miss Ojukwu’s skin tone was more or less the same brown as mine, and her

nose had undergone so many refinements over the years that I wasn’t too worried about someone calling me out over an old glossy-pic. More importantly, she had crashed her shuttle on a joyride recently and would be in the hospital recovering for months, so there would be no new news to show me up. The Ojukwu were keeping the accident on the down-low, as little Evelyn might have been a little tipsy at the time. There’s no blessing like other people’s bad luck.

The butler trotted ahead of me to announce the entrance of Miss Evelyn Ojukwu into the party. I made sure not to bat an eye at all the shine decorating the anteroom as we walked through it. It didn’t impress me much anyway. You got twice that level of sparkle and gold on the luxe-liners we’d been riding. Of course, none of the cruise deco was any more the real deal than I was. This stuff was probably the genuine article, but I couldn’t make out much difference without looking like I was looking. To my eye, the fakes had seemed a little brighter. 

There was a coatroom, where I left my coat, and a hatroom, where I left my hat—you didn’t need either in the manufactured climate of New Monte, any more than you needed two-thirds of the other junk it was de rigueur to wear, but I had them anyway—and then a mask-room, where you could leave your breather if you wanted, though almost nobody did. The satellite-side fashion these days was for little gemmed breathers on sticks, and you brought them into the ballroom with you and flirted over the tops of them. You could barely get any kind of decent vacuum seal on them, and one of these days there would probably be a tragedy and we’d all go back to carting around big old diving helmets, but in the meantime they were all the rage.

I’d picked a breather trimmed in a delicate silver filigree, studded all through with the tiniest of discreet diamonds. The dress had silver trimming, too, and swooped out extravagantly from waist to mid-calf before folding under itself to bubble demurely above the knees. The shine was meant to hint at the fact that the Ojukwu had bagfuls of money from the Kepler diamond mines. The fullness of the fabric was just fashion, if you wanted to be nice about it, or conspicuous consumption if you didn’t. I stepped out into the low-grav of the ballroom, and waited to see the reaction I would get.

The room was chock full of debs in every shape, size, and color. Some high-rolling hotspots

in the Sol system still skewed pale enough to make problems for me, but New Monte could be called a regular melting pot, so long as all the ingredients came from the same income bracket. I’d never seen so many baby billionaires together in one place. On the luxe-liners, they’d wallflower up, keeping a careful three feet between themselves and the rest of the world in case they breathed in some middle class by accident. Here you could barely move without tripping over them. They shrieked with laughter and somersaulted over each other in the ballroom half-grav, and most of them had even learned the trick of doing it without dropping their champagne.

Of course you’d never find the fellow I was looking for in any of the knots of people having actual fun. It only took me a few seconds to pick him out: standing stiffly by the drink table, back to the wall, clutching a cocktail-box (half-grav was hell on liquids in glasses) and squinting through his spectacles as if he’d rather be anywhere else on the satellite.

As far as I could remember, the Honorable Esteban Mendez-Yuki had looked more or less the same way the first time Jules and I had run into him on that luxe-liner. I hadn’t paid too much attention at the time. The glossies we read to ID our marks all said he was a real egghead—and not the kind that came hard-boiled, either. No matter how deep his pockets were, it wasn’t worth the effort to drag him to the gaming tables if he didn’t want to go. There were plenty of other moneybags on that ship who were happy to show a pair of pretty little airheads like us the rules of grav-dominos and wild-hand dreidel. Anyway, it always looked a little obvious if you made a dive straight for the biggest wallet.

It was better to keep it low stakes, on the luxe-liner gambit. As long as we didn’t bet too high, the fat cats practically fleeced themselves.

But that was before Jules had gotten a good look at the Honorable Esteban’s aristocratic nose, with a pair of old-fashioned glasses balanced awkwardly on top of it. My sister always did get weak for a whiz kid, and Esteban Mendez-Yuki seemed like the whole package: looks, brains, and cash coming out his ears. What really sealed the deal for her, though, was that fatal dose of awkwardness. Jules was too smart to fall for smooth, but anyone that bad at interacting with other humans

just had to be on the level, right?

She’d spent that whole first night trying to tease him into a game. Instead, he’d pulled her into a different one—and boy, had she ever bet reckless.

Well, this time around, it was going to be Esteban’s turn to bet high. A trust-fund tommy like Esteban could play around however he liked on a luxe-liner, but here on New Monte they had things like engagement agreements, and breach-of-contract suits. Any promises he made to proper Evelyn Ojukwu, he’d have to pay through the nose to get out of. I wasn’t asking much: just a reasonable return on my sister’s stakes, plus a nice cash bonus in the way of interest. You might call it vindictive, but given all the cards he held, I’d certainly say it wasn’t more than he could afford to lose.

Of course, first I had to coax him back into playing the game—and just like luring a mark to the card table, the surest way was to let him think it was all his own idea.

I snagged a cocktail-box from the nearest wait-bot and took a few elegant sips while I surveyed the landscape. On a luxe-liner, where the comestibles were always questionable, I’d have popped an anti-rad pill before ingesting anything, but that wasn’t something I’d have to worry about in the halls of the rich and well-regulated. Then I set off in the direction of the libations and tripped over the first deb I could find along the way, making sure to tighten my grip around my drink as I fell.

Bright red hooch blasted all over the back of the unlucky deb’s gilt-encrusted bodice. She screamed. The two girls next to her shrieked. Heads turned my way from all directions. I stammered out my apology—“I’m so sorry! I can’t think what I was doing!”—and made it a point to wither under their glares.

“Oh, it’s not so bad,” said the fourth person in the cluster. She was the only girl in the group wearing a slim-cut suit instead of a bubble-hem skirt or billowing breeches. The look was a little retro, but clearly on purpose, and no less obviously expensive; that kind of tailoring costs about an arm and a leg per limb. “It’s just over the back. Here, Gaea, mop up with this—” And she pulled off her jacket and held it out towards the unlucky lady.

Gaea stopped screaming

at once. “Your jacket! I couldn’t!”

“Well, wear it then,” said the other woman, carelessly. “It’ll hide the stain.”

 She draped the cream-colored silk jacket over Gaea’s shoulders, then took a step back and lowered her breather, making a whole business of surveying her handiwork. “It suits you,” she said. Her lips curved in a smile. “Of course, just about anything would.”

All three of the other debs giggled. I had to bite back a laugh myself. Miss New Monte Chivalry over there knew her lines. I almost hated to step on her scene, but she could vamp the debs any day of the week, and a girl only gets one first impression.

“I’m so very sorry,” I said again, and all four sets of eyes swung back to me. “I can’t think how I came to be so careless.”

Gaea scowled. “Careless is right. Maybe you’d better break in your heels a little before—”

“Never mind,” said the woman in the suit. “Some of us don’t mind pretty girls tripping over us.”

The line came packaged up with the same exact smile she’d been aiming at the other debs—not a bad-looking smile, on the whole, and why change things up when it clearly got results? I pulled out the big baby eyes and said, apologetically, “Kepler’s planetary. We don’t do so much grav-shifting.”

“If the problem is lack of practice on the dance floor,” said my new friend, “people will be lining up to help with that.” She held out a hand. “I’d be honored to get in before the rush.”

I looked down modestly, and took a second to run my odds. She’d made it a point to stand out, there was no doubt of that—taller than most of the other girls, with heeled boots that bumped her up even higher, and flashier by far in that cream-colored suit than the gentlemanly eligibles in their respectable black. If Esteban had somehow managed to miss the shrieking debs, it couldn’t hurt to cut a rug with one of the most noticeable people in the ballroom.

I lifted my eyes back up and gave her a smile of the blushing-flower variety. I was good at what I did; I’d have given fifteen to one against anybody catching onto the fact that mine was just as practiced as hers.

I was about to take her offered hand, but before I could, Esteban Mendez-Yuki grabbed my wrist, which was a better reaction than I could have possibly hoped for.

Esteban Mendez-Yuki doesn’t have the gift for making crowds part naturally. His father might have been hosting this shindig, and Esteban might have as good as owned the whole ballroom, but those little facts don’t make up for a certain personal presence that Esteban has not got. In order to make his way over to me, he’d had to shove through a whole lot of people who didn’t want to be shoved—which accounted for the delay, and also for how red and flushed he was now that he’d finally gotten here. The whole time we’d been on that luxe-liner, I’d never seen him this worked up. I honestly hadn’t thought he had it in him.

“What are you doing here?” he demanded, breathing hard. Then I turned to look at him, and his face turned an entirely different shade of red.

I look a lot like my sister, especially from a distance, but up close you’d never mistake us. My skin’s a little darker than hers and hair a little thicker, face a little rounder, lips a little thinner—small things, some from Ba’s people on Kepler North Central and some from Mame’s back in Brooklyn. Had Esteban Mendez-Yuki met me? Sure he had, a dozen times on that liner, though my hair had been relaxed then, and the makeup palette different. Had he ever really taken a good look at me? Well, why would he have? We’d been playing our usual demure angle, and he and Jules had only had eyes for each other that whole ride. At least until he decided she wasn’t worth looking at anymore.

Anyway, Esteban Mendez-Yuki wasn’t exactly noted for his keen attention to detail. Even a pretty girl had to go to an effort to make herself noticed—just ask Jules, who had pulled out every stop she had. Most people couldn’t afford to be that oblivious, but the Mendez-Yuki weren’t most people. If you asked Esteban Mendez-Yuki, he’d probably deny that he expected everything around him to sort itself to suit his convenience, but that didn’t usually stop it from happening.

It wasn’t happening now, but not even a Mendez-Yuki bats a hundred every day. “I think

there’s some kind of mistake,” I said, and lifted my breather to half-hide my face, which indicated in a ladylike fashion such sentiments as what are you, some kind of creeper? “I don’t think we’ve been introduced.” Evelyn Ojukwu wasn’t the kind of girl who knew a whole lot about the world, and she certainly wasn’t the kind of girl to make a fuss, but she was rock-solid on the notion that strange men probably shouldn’t be grabbing her at high-class parties. I glanced down at his hand, and waited politely for him to remove it.

“Hey, Esteban,” said my dapper new friend. That was all, words-wise. Face-wise, she was indicating pretty loudly that he was making a fool of himself, and she wished he would quit it already.

Esteban dropped my wrist like a hot rocket. “I’m so very sorry—I thought you were—” He coughed, stepped back, and did his best to pull together a credible bow. “It seems I’ve made a terrible mistake, Miss—”

“Ojukwu,” I said, and let my mask drop a little, to indicate a thaw. Four months ago, Jules would probably have said his bow was adorably clumsy. I might even have agreed then, but I was wise to that now. Evelyn Ojukwu wasn’t, though. “Evelyn Ojukwu. I’m just arrived in New Monte.”

“Hell of a welcome,” said the woman in the suit. She surveyed Esteban with an ironical eye before glancing back at me and sliding me another half a grin, inviting me in on a joke. “If it helps, Miss Ojukwu, you don’t remind me of anyone I know.”

Under other circumstances, I might have grinned back. It was clearer than ever to me now that she was the kind of girl who was used to having sweet little ingenues eating out of her hand before they knew what was what. If I’d been the kind of girl I was pretending to be, I might have been one of them. As for the kind of girl I really was—well, I’d been around the block a few more times than Evelyn Ojukwu, and the Don Juan special didn’t really do it for me anymore; I liked them with some more scratch to their polish. Still, there might have been

 some profit in letting her spin out her script for a little. She clearly had money to burn, and it was always more fun to play someone who thought they were playing you.

But none of that mattered today; today I was here for bigger stakes. I looked at Esteban, who said, with dignity, “It wasn’t anyone on New Monte I was thinking of.”

“Then who?” I asked.

“Someone else.” Esteban gave the middle distance what he probably thought was a wounded look. “It doesn’t matter.”

Gaea rolled her eyes.

“Miss Ojukwu,” said the woman in the suit, “will you let me apologize for my brother?”

I had to work hard not to show my surprise. Esteban had spent a fair amount of time complaining to Jules about his sister. Jules had said she sounded like a terror. To be fair, I wouldn’t be surprised if Jules had managed to give Esteban the same impression of me. “There’s no need,” I said, turning to look at her through limpid eyes. I could see the resemblance, now I knew what I was looking for: a certain set of the eyebrows and nose. “I’m sure Mr. Mendez-Yuki didn’t mean anything by it.”

That was a mistake. Her eyes narrowed; I’d missed a beat. I reviewed what I’d said, and could’ve kicked myself. Of course the Mendez-Yuki were hosting the party, and it might have been expected that a guest would be able to recognize them. Still, to be safe, I should’ve waited until we were introduced. It was a rookie mistake.

The only thing to do at this point was to brazen it out. Anyway, Esteban didn’t notice a thing. “I really am sorry,” he said, earnestly. “You could take it as a compliment. The person I mistook you for is—she’s one of the most beautiful people I’ve ever met, but now I come to look at you closely, your eyes are much kinder than hers.”

“Oh!” I lifted my mask again to cover the twist in my mouth, and told myself that this all looked awfully promising. I’d wondered how long it would take Esteban to forget his vacation fling, now that he was back in his native environs. Instead, it seemed he was getting his kicks out of wallowing, with Jules cast as a wicked girl what did him wrong. It was going to be a pleasure to show him what a real liar looked like.

“To make it up to you,” said Esteban, gallantly, “would you let me have a dance?”

 I did my best to look like a girl who wasn’t so sure about a fellow, who was being won over in spite of herself. My best has always been pretty good. “Oh, well, I suppose,” I said, and cheerfully blew off Esteban’s sister to follow him onto the dance floor.

The band was just striking up a love ballad from Luna. Some of the dancing debs, bored with the slower pace, stopped somersaulting and took themselves off to get some food. There was plenty of space on the floor for Esteban and me.

Jules and Esteban had done their fair share of dancing on board the Simoleon. They’d looked good, I’ll give them that. Well, she’d looked good—Jules can cut up a dance floor better than almost anyone—and he’d looked mostly stunned, as well he should have.

We wouldn’t dance like that here. Nice girls didn’t, at least not at parties where their parents might see. We swayed decorously around the room at the stiff-armed distance that a Mendez-Yuki grandma would’ve considered appropriate. I asked Esteban about himself, like you’re supposed to, and got the same spiel he’d given Jules on the Simoleon that first night and that Jules had repeated back to me—he was twenty-two, he was working on a doctorate, his research focused on the integration of Earth vegetation into other planetary ecosystems, he really didn’t enjoy the whole New Monte socialite scene, he wanted to do something real with his life. Then it was back to planetary ecosystems. Jules had teased him for it, and he’d blustered a bit, and then laughed along with her. Evelyn Ojukwu couldn’t follow the Jules playbook too closely, so I asked, naively, why he thought New Monte wasn’t real, and got rewarded with a long, rambling metaphor about artificial environments and stifling social illusions for my sins. I could hardly get a word in edgewise.

Not that I was really trying to, either. I was starting to get a good sense of my angle. Having bounced hard off Jules, Esteban was clearly ripe for the rebound, and this wide-eyed look of mine was working wonders on his ego. It wasn’t so hard to get someone like Esteban to think that

 you were their romantic ideal; all you had to do was present an attractive outline and leave plenty of space, and they’d fill in the rest all by themselves.

Speaking of attractive outlines, Esteban’s sister had found herself a spot where she could keep an eye on us and look debonair doing it. She was leaning her million miles of leg along the wall, sipping something from a cocktail-box, and tracking our progress round the room. As luck had it, the end of the slow dance deposited us back in front of her, and she didn’t hesitate to seize her moment. “Miss Ojukwu—” She handed the cocktail-box to Esteban and swept me a bow that was about ten times more elegant than her brother’s. “Mind if I claim that dance now?”

I murmured my delight, and left a flummoxed-looking Esteban standing on the floor behind us. I wasn’t here for her, but I didn’t exactly need to make that obvious yet.

I didn’t know the song that had just started playing. It seemed almost as slow as the last one; the band didn’t have much of a sense of pacing, I thought. “I don’t think I got your name,” I said to Esteban’s sister, as we moved around the floor in a stately fashion.

She raised an eyebrow. “You already knew my brother’s.”

I laughed, letting her see I was a little embarrassed, but willing to make a joke out of it. “To be honest, I recognized him from a glossy. We get all the Most Eligibles,
even out on Kepler.”

“Sure,” said Esteban’s sister. “Known and cataloged. No mystery about it at all.” The pace of the music was picking up after all, but her feet didn’t miss a beat. “While you have the advantage of entering our orbit as a beautiful enigma.”

She tipped me into a backbend, and I tilted my head to look up at her. “Do you know, I think I should maybe be insulted? It’s not like the Ojukwu aren’t anybody.”

She laughed. “Turnabout’s fair play, Miss Ojukwu. You don’t know my name, either."

“I guess I must’ve skipped your page,” I said. “You come on a little stronger in person.”

“Oh, I’m not eligible in the least.” She sent me into a spin, the bubble of my skirt lifting around me as I kicked out, then caught me in a dip and smiled down at me. “But I try to make up for it as I can.”

 It was that same charming smile as before, but this time it wasn’t anywhere near her eyes. She thought she had me pegged—matrimony-market warrior, just off the shuttle and going straight for gold—and it wasn’t like she was wrong, either.

“And me?” I said—playing with fire, a little, because I only halfway resembled the real Evelyn Ojukwu, but nobody on New Monte was reading up on glossies from all the way out on Kepler, and only a Kepler heiress would think that they possibly could be. “I am pretty eligible. What’s your excuse?”

“You caught me,” said Esteban’s sister. “I don’t read the glossies at all.” She spun me deftly out of the way of another couple. The corner of her mouth curled upwards. “I’d rather look at what’s right in front of me.”

Boy, was she ever laying it on thick!

The music was still getting faster, and debs and their dates were tapping out left and right around us. I had to give my partner credit. The pace we were going, most people wouldn’t have been able to hold a conversation, but her voice was barely ragged at all. “One thing’s for sure, Miss Ojukwu,” she said, “you’re quite a dancer.”

“I could always use more practice,” I said sweetly, and slipped a little extra shimmy into my swing-out somersault to show as much leg as the bubble-skirt would allow. She didn’t miss a step, but I could tell that she was looking. Well, I hoped Esteban was, too.

As it turned out, my efforts weren’t wasted. By the end of the dance we’d collected a circle of onlookers—including Esteban, who was looking more miffed than moony. I brushed down my skirt, just as demure as if I hadn’t been six feet in the air six seconds ago, and gave a polite curtsy. Thank God for manners; they gave you a chance to catch your breath, which was probably why they’d been invented. “Thanks for the dance,” I said, as I rose up again, and fluttered my lashes like a person who’d never heard of a leg in her life. “I hope I kept up all right.”

“Oh,” said Esteban’s sister, “you more than hold your own. If this is what you’re like

when you’re not used to dancing in half-grav, there’ll be no keeping up with you after a few weeks.” She swept a bow, then gave me a smile of her own, slightly sharp. “I’ll look forward to following your career.”

She stepped away before I could answer, which was probably just as well. “Boy, you Mendez-Yuki sure know how to sweep a girl off her feet,” I said to Esteban instead, and fanned myself with my mask. A real New Monte girl would never do that, but a girl fresh off the liner from Kepler ought to make one or two mistakes—as Miss Mendez-Yuki had pointed out.

“Well,” said Esteban, stiffly, “I can’t dance like my sister can.”

“Your sister seems awfully nice,” I said, “but I couldn’t go two dances with her.” That was one of the less true things I’d said that night. I glanced at him out of the corner of my eye, and added, “I like a pace that’s a little slower—a partner who doesn’t make you feel all used up at the end of the set.”

Esteban smiled at that. Jules had always said he had a nice smile, but all I could tell you was his teeth were the kind of white that made you figure someone had been flossing them for him since the day he was born, and I could have happily punched every one of them out of his mouth. “Well, there I think I can oblige you, if you’d allow me another dance.”

“I suppose I ought to give you a little more of a chance to make up for that first bad impression,” I said, and smiled back, to make it clear I was making a joke—mostly. I didn’t want to make anything too easy on him. I might be on the hunt, but I wanted him to work harder to be caught than any prey ever had before. I didn’t want him to have anyone to blame but himself.

We danced together plenty that night. A couple other people came up to ask me, most of them rich boys, and almost every one with ‘cad’ written plain to see right on his face. I danced with all of them, of course. Esteban, so far as I could see, didn’t dance with anyone else when I was off twirling around the floor with some Tom or Devere or Hikaru. That fit with what I knew of him. Esteban wasn’t the type to play the field.

 He thought of himself as a romantic.

His sister was another thing. Plenty of people, boys and girls alike, came up to ask her to dance with them. The boys, she turned down flat. I wondered that they still bothered—but she was still a Mendez-Yuki no matter what she’d said about not being eligible, so maybe they were just optimistic. She did dance with the girls. Not just the pretty ones, either; she saved her fanciest footwork for the plainest of Gaea’s cohort, a stumpy girl with a face like an etrog. They danced like they were daring each other into more complicated steps, with bursts of laughter in between whenever one of them tripped up. It was a lot less polished than the way she’d moved with me, but it looked like a good time.

That was about the only time she really let loose. The rest of the flirtations seemed almost perfunctory, and I could tell she was keeping her eyes on me and Esteban as consistently as the shifts of the dance floor would allow. She played a good game for an amateur—if I hadn’t been a professional, I probably wouldn’t have noticed. It was flattering, in a way. I’ve never minded being the center of attention.

Midnight hit. The dance floor was starting to open up a little—old folks going home, younger ones sneaking off into corners and back rooms to see what sorts of less respectable fun they could get going for the next couple hours. There was probably a mean game of drunken double-stakes bridge going on somewhere. I could’ve probably won back everything I’d spent on all these glad rags, if I wasn’t stuck being Evelyn Ojukwu.

But I was a good girl, ...