Chapter Text
Call Andy emotional, but there's something strangely nostalgic about moving out of this apartment, helped only by Lily.
Not many people have been in Andy's life long enough to see all versions of her. Lily is the one person who's stayed the longest; she's seen the shy, ambitious university student who was editor-in-chief of the campus newspaper, she's seen the confident, hard-working Runway Features Editor who'd chase an interview for days without sleeping, and she's seen everything that existed in between. This apartment is the next best thing.
She'd moved in back in 2012, the first time she'd come back to New York for more than two weeks since she'd left to travel.
It was, objectively, a crappy apartment. She hadn't even seen it in person before signing the lease, just approved it sight-unseen off a handful of badly angled, half-black-and-white photos - her old laptop, from Moscow, where she'd been posted as a special correspondent, had long since given up on rendering colour properly.
The faucet still doesn't work unless you hit it at exactly the right angle: left hand, forty-five degrees, standing at the very end of the counter. The paint on the ceiling never stopped peeling. She'd repainted it herself a few times, and when that didn't work, she saved up for months to have it done professionally, which didn't work either. She'd wake some nights to a flake of paint landing on her face, or scream in the shower because she'd mistaken a curl of it for a white, strangely flat, spider the size of her hand. It was freezing in the bathroom, where the ventilation ran straight down to the underground car park, and unbearably hot in the bedroom, where the window let in every hour of sunlight but was irremediably blocked and wouldn’t open to let any wind into the room.
Yes, the apartment is crappy. But it's been Andy's for just over a decade now. There's a hole in the wood floor in the living room from the time she dropped an iron after burning her thumb, mid-panic, trying to fix a crumpled shirt for an interview she was already late for. There are hair-dye stains in the bathtub from that disastrous stretch in 2015 when she read an article - from Runway, of all places - informing her that her hair colour was wrong for her skin tone. She'd also paid good money to cover the mustard-yellow paint in the loo with something more neutral. Mind you, Andy was by no means one of those minimalist people whose entire apartment is beige, the kind where the sofa you've just sat on turns out to be a very expensive art piece you've just ruined, and everyone looks at you like you've set the house on fire. But the loo really was mustard yellow. With a neon green toilet bowl. A woman has to draw the line somewhere.
And the new apartment is good, really. Close to Runway. Gigantic. Luminous. Working faucet. And she is excited to move in. She is.
It's just that seeing all those boxes sitting in the middle of her old apartment - empty now, echoing, barely recognisable - with only Lily here to help her move them across New York… Andy is a bit emotional.
They rent a van instead of hiring movers; it’s cheaper, even if Lily protests the whole time, pointing out that Andy can easily afford the luxury now, Runway being nothing if not generous with its managers' salaries. But Andy won't hear it. There's no sense paying more for something you can do yourself for less. And Lily, good friend that she is, helps anyway.
It takes them twenty round trips to get every box down into the van. Oh, right. Andy forgot to mention she lives on the third floor, and that the lift's been out of service since the twelfth of December, 2012. Andy moved in on the eleventh. Because of course she did. It was a crappy apartment.
By the last trip, there's only one box left, and Andy takes her time, lets herself look slowly around the empty apartment before she picks it up. KITCHEN — MUGS, in red Sharpie across the top, in her own handwriting. She hikes it against her hip and starts down the stairs, and she's two steps down when the sneeze hits her out of nowhere. Sudden. Violent enough that her arms jerk before she can stop them, her nails raking four white lines down the cardboard as the box slips entirely out of her hands. It doesn't just fall. It rolls, end over end, gathering speed, and by the time it hits the wall at the bottom of the flight, the crash is unmistakable: ceramic giving way to more ceramic. Andy's already running, taking the last few stairs two at a time, and when she picks the box back up she can see her own nail marks scored into the cardboard, right where she tried and failed to hold on. She doesn't need to open it to know. She can hear it: the small, settling shift of broken things finding new positions inside a box that used to hold whole ones. "Shit," she says, to no one. "Shit. Shit." There's no point opening it here, not on a stairwell, not with Lily waiting in the van. She carries it down the rest of the way and sets it with the others. She'll see what's survived once she's somewhere with a working lift.
At the new apartment, the mug box is the first thing she carries in. Everything else can wait. She sets it down in the middle of the empty living room floor, sits beside it on the bare boards, and opens the flaps before she's even taken her coat off.
Nothing has survived. Not one piece. She sits there a moment, cross-legged among the wreckage of a decade, and lets herself be quietly, stupidly sad about it.
She picks up a shard first - sharp enough that she almost cuts herself with it - half the face of an alarmingly orange beaver still visible on the curve. This used to be a Northwestern University mug, the one she bought on her very first day on campus. Her parents had just driven her up, unloaded the car, and left; she remembers unpacking immediately, if only to have something to do with her hands, before giving up and sitting down on the desk chair - the one with a suspicious orange stain already worked into the seat - clutching a sweatshirt and a notebook like a lifeline. She'd looked out at the window facing the woods and thought about her parents driving away, probably listening to Depeche Mode, and wondered, for the first of what would turn out to be not so many times, whether she'd picked the right university. It was the best offer she'd gotten in journalism, but she'd turned down law at Stanford, fifteen minutes from her own house, for this, three hours away. She was still sitting there twenty minutes later, crying and spiralling about the decision, when Lily walked in and immediately apologised for interrupting what was clearly a private existential crisis. Andy dried her face, helped Lily haul her boxes down the hall - some things, apparently, never change - and then, instead of unpacking either of their stuff, they went straight out to see the campus. There was a pop-up stall selling university merch on the plaza. She bought the mug there, that first afternoon, before she'd unpacked a single sweater.
Without putting the half-beaver down, she picks up what's left of a handle with her other hand, a piece of the mug from her Runway days, back when she was still second assistant. Marketing had produced a whole run of mugs for some campaign that never happened, and rather than warehouse them forever, someone was quietly binning the samples. Andy had asked for two before they went in the trash, and nobody had cared enough to ask why. She'd kept one and given the other to Emily. She wonders, turning the broken handle over in her fingers, whether Emily still has hers. Maybe she'll ask next time; they're bound to see plenty of each other in Milan, for fashion week.
The third piece that catches her eye is one she knows on sight: red, with a scatter of yellow flowers. The mug Nate gave her for their first anniversary, back in second year of uni. She'd dropped it a month after he gave it to her, chipped a small piece clean off the rim, and kept it anyway, chip and all. It isn't that she still has feelings for Nate - she doesn't, hasn't in years - but the mug was never really about him by the end. It was about the four of them: her, Lily, Doug, Nate, crowded into whoever's dorm had the most junk food that week, each cramming for a different exam, united by the fact none of them had studied ahead, all drinking bad instant coffee out of their own respective mugs.
Andy blinks a few times, hard, and feels a little ridiculous for it. They're just mugs, broken bits of fired clay, and grieving over ceramic doesn't get her anything back. The memories were never really in the objects; she still has every one of them, whole, intact, hers. She'll buy new mugs. It's not the end of the world. She sets the box aside, gets up off the floor, and goes back down for the rest of the boxes instead. This building has a working lift, at least, so there's considerably less at stake this time.
⋆☕︎ *
Ironically, it doesn't start when Andy works at Runway. It starts when she leaves.
It starts on a Sunday, at one in the morning, in an office that Emily has told herself she is only sitting in because the trains are unreliable this late and there's no point going home for four hours just to come back. She hasn't slept properly in thirty-six hours - this will, in time, come to feel almost quaint, a warm-up for what Miranda will eventually be capable of asking of her - and Andy's been gone two months now. Emily is somewhere past exhaustion, reached a point she’s not sure the English language has planned for. Her hands still move, but nothing behind her eyes is doing much of anything, and she does something she has never once allowed herself to do at this desk. She stops. She opens a new tab, and before she's even decided to, she's typed Andy's name into it. Not out of longing, she tells herself, out of something closer to accounting. She wants to know if it was worth it. Whether Andy, wherever she's landed, has it better now than this.
Andy has landed at The Vanguard, it turns out, and has published, at the time of searching, exactly five articles. The first one that comes up is four thousand words on a municipal water district somewhere in the Midwest that has missed a decade of deadlines to replace its lead pipes. Nobody, Emily thinks, is going to read four thousand words about pipes. But Andy has written it as if the fate of the Republic hinges on it, every sentence built like she's daring someone to tell her it doesn't matter. Emily reads the whole thing. Then she closes the tab and goes back to work, because there is always more work, and because this is not a thing she is doing; this is a thing that happened once.
It happens a second time.
Three weeks later, and this time there's a reason for it, a specific one: Miranda, in front of the whole floor - around fifty people - over some scheduling error that was not remotely Emily's fault, says, without even raising her voice, "Andrea never made me repeat myself twice." Just that. Not shouted, not even particularly cruel in tone - Miranda rarely bothers with tone - just noting a trivial fact. Which is why it feels like Emily’s been stabbed by six small words that still manage to carry both the insult and the name. Emily makes it back to her office before her face does anything unforgivable. She sits down. And for the first time in longer than she can remember, she can't stop the tears. This time it isn't an accident; she opens the tab on purpose, types the name on purpose, goes looking for it on purpose. The second piece is about garment workers: a supply-chain exposé, factory floors, hour logs, the actual human cost stitched into the linings of things Emily has spent her whole career being paid to make desirable. It should feel like an attack, especially coming from Andrea, with her background at Runway. It doesn't. It feels, uncomfortably, like being seen by someone who isn't even in the room, and Emily reads it twice before she goes back to her tasks.
After that it simply becomes a thing she does. Not every week. Not on a schedule (yes, on a schedule). But often enough that she starts buying the print edition, actually walking three blocks out of her way to the one newsstand that still carries it, and keeping the stack in a drawer at home that she only opens to shove the copy into. Not one copy has made it out again. She does not examine this too closely - not the stack, not the reason for the stack - right up until The Vanguard, same as Runway, same as everything, goes fully digital, and there's nothing left to buy, only tabs to open, quietly, at one in the morning, on Sundays that mean nothing. She never asks herself what it is she's doing. If anything, she does the opposite: she takes whatever this is, whatever's underneath it, and she puts it in a small unlabeled box, and she seals the small unlabeled box, and she shoves small unlabeled box to the very back of her mind, behind the marriage, behind Runway, behind Dior, behind Miranda, and she gets extremely good at simply reading, and not thinking, for the better part of twenty years.
And then Andy comes back into her life, and Emily doesn't have a choice anymore. Because Andy is not a tab you can close now. Andy is in the room, in the elevator, at the end of the hallway, on the other end of a phone call about a magazine that used to belong to both of them, and there is no version of surviving proximity like that with the small unlabeled box still sealed. It comes open whether Emily wants it to or not - she doesn’t - and what's inside is not complicated, and it is not new. What’s inside is very simple, and very old.
She loves her. She has, it turns out, for twenty years, since two girls were handed the worst job in the whole company, the whole industry, and somehow survived it side by side. And it is not a gentle thing to discover about yourself at forty-two. It is raw in a way nothing else in Emily's carefully managed life is allowed to be. It is the single least controlled feeling she has ever had, and she has had it, apparently, for two decades, filed under something else, called by another name, and it does not care, now that it's out of the small unlabeled box, that it is completely and entirely unreciprocated. Whatever this is sits entirely in Emily, all of it, all twenty years of it, and there is nowhere left to put it back.
So she wrecks it. Milan, the deal, the reckoning she told herself was about Miranda and was, if she's honest with the inside of the small unlabeled box, at least partly about needing Andy to finally, finally see her as something other than an afterthought. She wrecks it, and some small, cowardly corner of her is relieved when it lands as badly as it does. Because now Andy hates her. Now Andy will stay exactly as far away as she's been for twenty years, and Emily can go back to loving her from that safe, familiar, gigantic distance, the only distance she's ever actually been any good at.
But a bigger part of her - infuriatingly, inconveniently bigger - wants Andy anyway. Wants, at minimum, to not end like this. Distance, safe, familiar, gigantic distance, but with closure. So she calls, and she asks for lunch, and despite everything, Andy says yes.
Of course Andrea had said yes to being friends, or "pals" - Emily still cringes, remembering it, that this was the best she'd managed to come up with in the moment - because Andrea is Andrea, and even after all these years she still doesn't understand that some things should be unforgivable, especially the things Emily does. Whatever. She probably believes in the redemptive power of friendship, the way she believes in earnest four-thousand-word pieces about pipes nobody's going to read. It’s fine.
It's at that lunch that Andy offers her hand across the table, and Emily says, "I don't want to hold your hand, but yes," and it's a lie. It’s a lie, because there is nothing on this earth she wants more in that particular second than to hold Andy's hand.
But Emily is a realist. A planner. She has spent twenty years - no, scratch that, a whole life - constructing an entire architecture for surviving want for something she’ll never have, and the foundation of it is this: you do not let yourself have the memory of a thing you will only get to have once. What happens after, when the hand is gone, and she's left holding nothing but the specific, precise, unbearable knowledge of what it felt like, with no reasonable expectation of ever getting to feel it again? She would carry that forever. So she lies, and she doesn’t hold Andy's hand.
Even so - even after Andy says yes to being “pals”, even after Andy proves once again that she believes in those types of things: redemption, friendship, forgiveness - Emily is not prepared for the text.
It comes two days after their lunch, in the middle of a meeting that has already run forty minutes past its scheduled hour, in a room full of men who are explaining her own job back to her with the particular confidence of people who have never once had to be right about anything, unaware that in an hour none of their aggressive, over-slidedecked convincing will matter in the slightest, because the decision was never theirs to make, it was hers. Her phone lights up on the table, face-up, and Andy's name catches her attention before she's even registered she was looking at it.
dinner friday night?
No hello. No capital letters. No context whatsoever. Extremely, infuriatingly Andy.
Emily stares at it for long enough that another one lands underneath it.
there’s this great Italian place that just opened u still like risottos right
It's something of a shock that Andy commits to it, to this so-called friendship like this - like it's a real thing, worth planning around, not just something said in the moment because Andy can't stand sitting next to someone visibly upset and carry on lunch. That would be an Emily instinct, not an Andy one. Andy has never once done something solely because it was the only socially acceptable thing to do in the moment. She's passionate, indiscriminately, about whatever she's currently doing and saying, and so she invites people to restaurants, even the people who, not so long ago, stabbed her in the back over a magazine.
The third text arrives before Emily's even worked out how to answer the second, because waiting for a reply has never once slowed Andy down in her life.
nothing b4 8, miranda scheduled a meeting at 6:30 because it never occurs to her that other people have a life. YKWIS…
That last one is what makes Emily laugh, actually laugh, before she remembers she’s in a room full of people, and then she transforms that laugh into a fake cough. Not because she thinks people will believe it -they won’t, and she doesn’t care - but because it’s the socially acceptable thing to do. It's the way Andy texts: no punctuation, half the words missing their capitals, abbreviations Emily is sure Andy picked up from spending too much time on the internet. The girl writes for a living. The girl is, by Emily's own twenty-year assessment, genuinely good at it. And she types a text message like she's fifteen and bored in a lecture hall. She types a message like Emily’s kids.
Emily thinks about it. Briefly, seriously, considers saying no. Because what happens if she says yes to this - one dinner, one table, one evening - and there's never a second one? Will she spend the next twenty years sitting in that restaurant in her head, replaying the exact sound of Andy's laugh, the movement of her throat when she drinks her wine, the face she pulls at anything on a menu that resembles a proper adult meal? But Emily wants to say yes far more than she's frightened of the aftermath, and so she does what she always does with a want she doesn't fully trust: she reframes it until it's manageable. Dinner is, functionally, the same as lunch. Two people, a table, food. They've already had lunch once. This will simply be having it a second time. And if there's never a third, well, then it will already have happened twice, which is one more time than she'd ever let herself expect.
She says yes to dinner. Friday. Eight o'clock.
The restaurant, when Friday comes, is unfairly, unnecessarily romantic: low light, a table for two set against the window in the quietest corner of the room, one candle, one small flower in a glass too narrow for it to really need holding up. Nobody consulted Emily on the seating, and if they had, she'd have asked for anywhere with worse lighting and more traffic noise, because this - the candle, the hush, the two of them tucked into a corner like something out of a film neither of them would ever admit to watching - is very nearly enough to finish her off before the bread even arrives. Andy doesn’t seem to notice.
For the most part, she lets Andy narrate her own stories and nods and smiles in all the right places, because Andy has always been the one who talks, and Emily has always, secretly, without exception, loved listening to her do it. Even twenty years ago, in the Runway years, Andy used to try - over long silent car rides, standing in freight elevators, hovering by Emily's desk with some story she was clearly dying to tell someone - and Emily would almost never answer her. She'd let the silence sit there, cold and professional, because that was the only version of herself she trusted around anyone at Runway. But she listened. Every time. She just made sure Andy never once found out that she had.
"And it's the last box, Em. The last box. And I sneeze. And I promise you, it is the single most violent sneeze you have ever witnessed a human being have. The box just flies. Out of my hands. Down an entire flight of stairs. Actually crashes into the wall at the bottom."
"Did any of the mugs survive?"
"No. None of them. There were like fifteen of them in there, all gone. There was even the one from Runway. Do you remember that one? With the logo, and the thing. Do you still have yours?"
Emily feels something in her chest go very still. Andy's looking at her so hopefully, so happily, at the shared memory, and Emily doesn't want to be the one to tell her that she doesn't have it. It’s not lost, not broken accidentally in some move of her own. No, Emily stood in her kitchen one evening, looked directly at it, and dropped it into the bin, unceremoniously, on purpose, years ago, after Andy left Runway, after Emily herself left Runway.
"I don't know, actually. I haven't seen it in a while."
It's safe, that answer. It doesn't confirm the mug exists, and it doesn't confirm that it doesn't. It simply removes her from the question entirely.
Andy nods, apparently unbothered, and carries straight on.
"Anyway. It sucks. All fifteen of them. I told Lily I was going to buy new ones, and I actually went to the store, I swear, but then it's just rows of these sets where all six mugs look exactly like each other, and the thing is, mine all came from somewhere. They all had a memory attached. Those don't have anything attached; they're just six of the same grocery-store mug, and I could not stand looking at that every morning. So now I'm drinking things out of cups and bowls depending on what feels right at the time, which is honestly a bit fun; it's very back-to-uni, very four-friends-three-plates-and-two-forks of me. You never told me about uni, by the way; did you actually live in halls? Is that also a thing in the UK?"
She says the entire thing in one breath, no pause built in anywhere for Emily to answer, not that Emily minds. She never has.
"You drink your coffee from a bowl?" she asks, because she genuinely cannot fathom it: a grown woman, drinking her morning coffee out of a soup bowl, apparently as a lifestyle choice.
"Gee, Em, I wonder what your opinion on that could possibly be."
"You're a grown woman, Andrea. Grown women own mugs."
Andy's mouth does something between a pout and a scowl, her whole face going soft and put-upon at once, like she's been personally wronged by the suggestion that owning matching drinkware is a basic adult responsibility. And then she's off again, an entire fresh monologue on the moral importance of a mug having history, of nothing in a kitchen being allowed to mean nothing, and on the history of each individual bowl she currently owns.
The evening carries on like that, easily, and Emily doesn't think about the mug again for the rest of dinner.
When they step out of the restaurant, to Emily’s horror, to Emily’s pure beatitude, out on the pavement, Andy pulls her into a hug, and Emily stands there and does absolutely nothing, arms flat at her sides, entirely undone by the fact of it. Andy doesn't seem to notice, or mind, or register it as anything other than a hug. She says goodnight and walks off toward the subway, and Emily is still standing on the same square of pavement, a complete wreck, ten minutes later when her phone buzzes with a text saying Andy just walked past a place that looks perfect for next week. And Emily has to physically stop herself from making a sound in the middle of the street, because that's it, isn't it, that's what it reads like: not a one-off, not a kindness extended once and then quietly withdrawn, but the first of something ongoing, more than one Friday, stretching out ahead of her. Except she's spent a whole life being wrong about exactly this kind of hope, and she doesn't quite dare believe she's read it right.
Later, lying in the dark, she thinks about the hug. About the whole night. About next Friday, and the one after that, if she's allowed to want one after that. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, her mind snags, unhelpfully, on the mug. On Andy, drinking her coffee out of a soup bowl, or one of those transparent plastic cups they hand out at festivals, like a woman in the middle of some minor personal collapse she's decided to find charming. Emily has never once in her life left a problem lying there unsolved. It isn't in her. It isn't who she is.
So Andy needs a mug.
She reaches for her phone on the nightstand, unlocks it, and adds it to her list for the week, right there between dry cleaning and call Patrick.
⋆☕︎ *
The Practical Mug
If you were to ask Emily what happened, she would tell you it was a complete coincidence; an opportunity that simply presented itself, and one she saw no particular reason to turn down.
She would be lying. Buying Andy a mug had been sitting on her to-do list for three days by then. She woke up every morning and looked at it, sitting in its own small purple box - purple was for personal tasks, always had been, ever since she'd built the system, because she liked the colour - nestled among an alarming quantity of blue and yellow and pink and green.
She's at Hermès for work, in one of their Fifth Avenue shops, when it catches her eye. She hasn't gone in looking for it - that part, at least, is true - but it's the colour that stops her mid-stride. Somewhere at the back of her mind, that exact shade snags on a memory twenty years old: Andy and her, in the small kitchen behind the second assistant’s desk, every Tuesday morning before Miranda arrived at noon. Emily leaning against the counter by the microwave, never sitting, because sitting would have tipped the whole scene over into something dangerously close to the B-word. Andy folded into one of those plastic high chairs designed to look good and, God forbid, never to actually be comfortable. Every Tuesday morning, Andy comes up with a new personal story to share, usually featuring Nate - and Emily finally understands why she used to hate those specifically - while she drank bad instant coffee out of a plain, round, wisteria-purple mug.
The mug on the shelf in front of her now sits between a horse-head doorstop priced somewhere north of Emily's monthly rent and a set of picnic napkin rings that no one who has ever actually been on a picnic would go near, and it is the exact same shade. The shape's entirely different. Andy's mug had been rounder than a mug ought to be, and larger than good taste generally allows. This one is slim, straight-sided, tapered in at the base, the handle reduced to the thinnest possible suggestion of a handle, built for someone who takes an espresso and takes it seriously, not for someone who treats coffee as a beverage best measured in pints. That's the entire difference, really, between a mug found half-price at Goodwill and a mug that costs what this one costs.
Emily almost takes it. She reaches out, gets as far as brushing the handle with the very tips of two fingers, and then pulls her hand back, because she's just remembered, with sudden and uncomfortable clarity, that this is a task. It's on a list. It is a thing to be completed, ticked off, closed out, the way she closes out everything. Except now that she's standing here with her fingers an inch from it, she finds herself questioning the task itself, not just the object. Is this actually something she should be doing? Is this what friends do for one another? Emily wouldn't know; she doesn't have the template for this. Or is it something else entirely, and Andy will read through it immediately?
She leaves.
She comes back.
She buys the mug.
By the time she's got her card in the reader, she's done the arithmetic and landed somewhere she'd rather not have: a hundred and forty-nine dollars does not, by any reasonable definition, qualify as a casual, friendly little gift. It's fine, she tells herself. Andy never has to know what it cost.
The mug spends the rest of the week on her desk, sitting in its own plain orange box, the Hermès stamp somehow facing out no matter how many times Emily turns it around. It feels, somehow, like it's watching her every time she walks past. Too much, it seems to say, every single pass, she'll know exactly what this is, she'll be disgusted by how transparent this is, and that will be that, you'll never see her again. And Emily finds herself rearranging the binders on her desk just so she doesn't have to look at it directly.
Then, a day later, she talks herself back round entirely: it's perfect, obviously it's perfect, it's plain, it's basic, it reads as nothing but practical to anyone who isn't looking closely. It’s chosen precisely enough that Emily knows Andy will love it, vague enough to pass, if it ever needs to, as a happy coincidence rather than a decision.
By Thursday night she can't stand having it in the flat a moment longer. She has one of those chutes in the wall by the kitchen, the kind that swallows the trash straight down to the communal bins in the basement, and she opens it and drops the box straight in before she can think better of it.
And regrets it the instant the little door swings shut.
So completely and so immediately that she's already down four flights of stairs before she's fully decided to go after it, prying open the building's actual dumpster in the alley behind the block, in her nightclothes, at eleven at night, digging through a week of her neighbours' rubbish for one small orange box. It is, by any measure, disgusting. It is, by every measure, pathetic. She does it anyway, and she finds it, and she carries it back upstairs, held slightly away from her body like evidence.
The mug goes back to sitting on her desk.
Three hours before dinner, she's standing in front of it again, trying, and failing, to talk herself out of caring this much about a mug. People have mugs. People give other people mugs, all the time, for no reason at all, and nobody involved ends up standing in a dumpster over it. It's normal. It means nothing. She should not, cannot, absolutely will not care this much.
The new restaurant, when Emily walks into it, is somehow even worse than the last one. Everything's pink and red, low-lit in a way that reads less as ambience and more as intent. Every single table she can see is a couple, heads bent together over candlelight, and right at the hostess stand, before Emily's even got her coat off, someone drops to one knee. There's a ring. There's a gasp that spreads through the whole room like weather. Half the restaurant starts clapping. It is, for one genuine, cowardly second, almost enough to make Emily turn around, mug still in her bag, and simply never come back.
Andy, of course, is completely oblivious to any of it. Or rather, she notices, but not the way Emily does. She claps along with everyone else, delighted, and then leans in to say she should pitch this place for Runway; actually, it's exactly the kind of spot that deserves a write-up: best hidden gem for catching up with your friend. She says it without a flicker of self-consciousness, entirely pleased with the phrase, and Emily has to look very hard at the menu for a moment.
She waits until they're seated, until there's a natural gap in whatever Andy's telling her - which, as usual, takes a while - and then she just puts the box on the table between them, sliding it across like it's an afterthought, like she's setting down a napkin.
"I was passing. Don't make this a thing."
Andy, inevitably, makes it a thing. She's got the lid off before Emily's even finished the sentence, and her whole face does something helpless and delighted at the sight of it, turning the mug over in her hands like it's worth twice what it is, which, unbeknownst to her, it very nearly is.
"Emily." She turns it once, catching the light off the glaze. "You didn't have to do this."
"I know."
"No, I mean it. You really didn't." Andy sets it down on the tablecloth and looks at her properly now, some of the delight folding into something more careful. "This looks expensive. Where did you even find it?"
"A shop." Emily reaches for her wine, mostly so she has something to do with her hands. "Downtown."
It isn't quite a lie. It also isn't quite the truth, and she can feel the gap between the two of them sitting there on the table next to the mug, praying Andy doesn’t ask a follow-up question. Andy, mercifully, doesn't.
"Well, it's too much, whatever it was," Andy says instead, already pushing it an inch back across the table, a token gesture more than a real one. "Let me get dinner, at least. Or send you something. I don't like owing people."
"You don't owe me anything. It's a mug, Andrea, not a kidney."
"It's a very nice mug."
"It's a mug that happened to be in a nice shop." Another half-lie, laid neatly on top of the first one. "Stop making a production out of it."
Andy huffs, but she pulls it back toward herself anyway, both hands around it again, and that's when Emily understands she isn't actually going to win this. Andy was never going to give it back; the protest was only ever the shape good manners are supposed to take before you get to keep the thing you already know you're keeping.
"I still think it's great," Andy says, admiring it from another angle now, tilting it so the light catches the glaze differently. "I love the colour. It's so - " she pauses, searching, and Emily's stomach does something unpleasant while she waits for the end of that sentence. "It's really pretty. Understated."
"It's purple."
"It's a nice purple." Andy sets it down again, still looking at it, and then her eyes light up, and Emily thinks maybe those cartoon characters with a light bulb above their heads were inspired by Andy. "Wait. You know what's funny? It's the exact same colour as the one I had at Runway. Before. The one I had in the kitchen. Do you remember it?"
Emily's whole body goes quiet. It's the mug, the same purple, the same one from every Tuesday morning in that kitchen twenty years ago, the one Emily built this entire evening around without once saying so out loud, and Andy's found her way to it completely by accident, no idea what she's actually looking at, no idea she's holding the answer to a question she never thought to ask.
"I know you like your things with memories attached," Emily says instead of answering, too fast, reaching for the version of this conversation she can survive. "Just - keep this one in the meantime."
It's safer, this redirection, than the version where she actually answers the question, where she has to sit across from Andy and pretend to search her memory for something she never once let herself forget. But it costs her something anyway, saying it out loud like that. In the meantime, like the mug is only a placeholder, like whatever she is to Andy is a placeholder too, not solid enough yet to earn a real memory built around it. She hears the sentence land and immediately wants it back.
"Are you kidding?" Andy says, immediately, like the idea's absurd to her. "This is a memory already."
And something in Emily's chest, ridiculously, eases, just slightly, just enough at being told, however lightly, however unknowingly, that she already counts.
⋆☕︎ *
The Celebration Mug
Practicality escalates to occasion.
Andy - and Emily is not surprised by this, not remotely - turns out to be an excellent Features Editor. So good that by August, two months after Milan, Features breaks every interaction record the site has ever kept, by a margin large enough that even Miranda notices. One piece in particular gets credit. A woman running a state agency gives testimony on a crisis that's cost real lives, and by the next morning half the coverage isn't about a word she said; it's about the blazer. The colour. The cut. Whether it read as "too polished" for the gravity of the room, whether it read as "not polished enough,". Maybe it makes her too fat too, and that’s inappropriate for a public woman. Andy writes four thousand words tearing the whole pattern apart, pulls up decades of the same men in the same navy suits saying far less and never getting questioned on the colour of their tie. Andy openly recognises it as what this is: sexism, when a woman's competence gets replaced by a referendum on her hemline. It runs under a Runway byline, which is half the reason it detonates the way it does: a fashion magazine spending its own authority to say the clothes were never supposed to be the story. It gets picked up everywhere, argued about everywhere, and the woman herself, weeks later, references the piece by name in an interview. Emily reads it twice, the second time with something suspiciously close to pride, and tells herself it's professional respect and nothing more.
It comes up on a Friday night. Because yes, Friday nights have quietly become a fixture in Emily's life, to her own private delight, and thank God the restaurants have never again reached the heights of romantic disaster that the first two did. That's largely because Emily took over choosing them after the second one nearly finished her off. Tonight's find is a small family-run place two neighbourhoods over, sunlit even in the evening - this has become the main criterion in Emily’s choosing system - gingham on the tables. The restaurant mostly serves quiche, which Emily thinks Andy might not like, because it’s way too close to what you could define as adult food. But she books a reservation for two anyway, because of this article she read online about the restaurant’s best dessert, a brookie, half brownie, half cookie, baked as one deeply confused object. Emily finds the whole concept faintly offensive - a food should have the decency to commit to being one thing - but she already knows that Andy is going to love it without a single moment of critical thought.
"And Nigel showed her the stats for this month, at the meeting, in front of everyone. And Emily, get this: she nodded. Actually nodded." Andy's practically vibrating with it, delighted in the uncomplicated way of someone who has never had to learn to hide how much something matters to her. Emily understands the feeling completely. A nod from that particular woman is essentially a papal blessing, and God knows Emily spent years of her life that would have given anything for just one.
Then Andy's off on the next thing: a party, she's decided, a real one, at the new apartment, to celebrate the big win, and because she never got around to a proper housewarming, and this can double as both; three months late is still a housewarming, technically. It'll be casual, she says - plastic cups, whatever cheap wine and tequila the corner store has, a bowl of chips, some cherry tomatoes if she remembers to buy them, people standing around talking. Emily nods along politely and privately tries, and fails, to picture exactly what kind of crowd fills Andy's life now.
And then Andy says something Emily isn't remotely braced for.
"I'm thinking next Thursday. It's your week without the kids, right?"
Emily is, for a second, genuinely too stunned to answer. She hadn't expected to be asked at all, hadn't expected to be wanted there, in the middle of whoever else fills that apartment, possibly people from Runway, people who'd remember exactly who she was and exactly what she did. She'd assumed, without ever quite examining the assumption, that she existed in Andy's life the way a scar exists on a body: present, occasionally acknowledged, never introduced to company. It couldn't reasonably be any other way. She'd made herself a pariah at Runway with her own two hands; there was no version of the story where she also got to be someone Andy showed off.
She hesitates a beat too long, and Andy, misreading it, entirely, for a scheduling problem, immediately backpedals. "Or another day, if Thursday's bad, I haven't actually locked in the date yet; I wanted to check in with you first, obviously."
Obviously.
Emily gathers herself. "Thursday's fine. I'd love to come, if you'll have me."
That's how practicality escalates to occasion.
The occasion, first, is that this is a celebration. People give other people things when they've had a win. It's one of the oldest scripts there is, and Emily knows the choreography of it better than almost anyone: the flowers sent up after a good show, the bottle of champagne that arrives with a card nobody reads twice, gestures she has performed a hundred times over the years without feeling a single thing behind them. But the script, this time, isn't hollow. The script is just the cover she gets to use.
The occasion, second, is that this is a housewarming. People give other people things when they've moved somewhere new - or, in Andy's case, moved somewhere new an entire financial quarter ago and only just now got around to admitting it publicly. And what people generally give, at a housewarming, is whatever the new place is obviously missing.
Which brings Emily to last Friday, when Andy spent a genuinely remarkable fifteen minutes - has to be some kind of record, fifteen minutes on the subject of a single mug - describing, in detail, exactly how much use she's gotten out of the one she has. Somewhere in there she'd mentioned, almost as an aside, that it's still her only one. That Lily - who is apparently at the apartment often enough to have opinions about it, not that Emily's been keeping any kind of count - still gets handed her coffee in a plastic cup.
So. The occasion calls for a second mug.
Which is how, a month to the day after the first time it appeared there, mug for Andy resurfaces in its little purple box on Emily's to-do list.
This time, Emily lets herself actually think about it. This one has a reason attached, a proper, defensible, occasion-shaped excuse that doesn't announce anything it shouldn't, doesn't scream I love you and I am about to be entirely too much about it the way she was afraid the last one did. This time she's allowed to choose with Andy specifically, deliberately in mind, and not have to apologise to herself for it afterwards.
She spends the whole weekend on it, more options crossed off a mental list than she'd ever admit to out loud, and by Sunday night she's landed on something.
The next problem is what to wear, and it turns out to be a genuinely harder one than the mug. Emily knows exactly what to put on for a photoshoot, a board meeting, a gala, a benefit dinner where half the room will judge the outfit choice, and the other half will comment on how her face looks tired. She has never once, in her adult life, had to dress for a casual evening at a friend's apartment, and she spends two entire days paralysed by it before Bronwyn - twelve years old and already possessed of her mother's exact eye - takes pity on her and simply steps in and rescues her.
Bronwyn puts the outfit together in under ten minutes, pulled from the very back of a closet Emily almost never reaches into: black jeans, tight through the thigh and looser at the calf, cut in a way that does something extremely flattering tpo her arse, she’s been told; pointed wine-red cat heels; a satin shirt in the same exact shade; deep red lipstick and more jewellery than she'd normally allow herself for something billed as casual. It's undeniably good, casual in the specific way that still makes sure to be noticed -by Andrea, she hopes and immediately hates herself for hoping - and Emily prays, hard, that the noticing part wasn't something her twelve-year-old actually intended.
She arrives an hour after Andy said things would start. She hates being late to anything, on principle, but she's fairly sure a party billed as "a few people, plastic cups" doesn't genuinely begin at eight on the dot, and she'd rather not be there for the awkward early stretch, standing around with whoever else showed up too promptly. She's only here at all because Andy asked her to be, said so plainly, more than once, and somewhere on the walk over she's already decided that whatever she's brought stays in her bag until she can find a moment with no audience. This isn't something she wants performed in front of a room full of strangers, turned into a group moment, cooed over by people who'd read far more or far less into it than what's actually there. She wants Andy's real face when she opens it, not the one she'd put on for a crowd.
The party is exactly what she expected, and exactly what she'd dreaded. Everyone's standing. Small clusters, drinks in hand, the specific brand of studied casualness where it's genuinely impossible to tell who's known each other for a decade and who arrived twenty minutes ago. Someone's out on the balcony smoking, breathing it out slow and dramatic like they're auditioning for something. The apartment itself - open-plan, exposed brick along one wall, a string of fairy lights someone's clearly hung with more enthusiasm than skill, furniture that all looks slightly secondhand and none of it matching, a stack of unopened boxes still shoved in one corner because apparently unpacking has never been Andy's strong suit - is bigger and brighter than the old apartment Emily had visited exactly once.
She is, immediately, completely overwhelmed. She can't find Andy anywhere in the crowd. A few faces she recognises from Runway, which rules them out entirely - there's no version of that conversation she wants to have tonight. Everyone else is a total stranger, which rules them out just as thoroughly, for the opposite reason. For one genuinely bad thirty seconds she feels physically ill, and seriously considers turning straight back around and leaving. She reminds herself that she does exactly this, professionally, every single day: walks into rooms full of strangers and charms them for a living; does it well. But this is different, and she knows exactly why: this is her job. These are people. Andy's people. She has a sudden, vivid, unwelcome image of Andy at one of their restaurants, their booth, their window seat, except across from someone else entirely, laughing at a story about her told by whoever Emily's about to embarrass herself in front of tonight.
Before she can take a step in either direction - forward, back, she genuinely doesn't know which - someone gets there first. Lily, apparently, recognised her on sight from however Andy's been describing her, and she's kind about it, easy, staying at Emily's side for a good while, steering her gently from group to group. She's clearly clocked exactly how out of her depth Emily is, and Emily is embarrassed by how obvious it must have been, and grateful, in equal measure, that Lily's gracious enough not to say so.
She's mid-conversation with Lily and someone else - a mutual friend whose name and job Emily didn't quite catch over the music - when a man comes up and hugs Lily hello. He's taller than Emily, probably as tall as Andy; frizzy hair, three days at least of unkempt beard, cargo pants and a sweatshirt two sizes too big, the whole effect somewhere between an exhausted engineering student and a man who has simply stopped noticing mirrors. Except that he must be somewhere in his mid-forties.
"Nate! Long time, how've you been?" Lily says, pulling back from the hug.
Nate. Andy's Nate. Emily hadn't known he was still anywhere in the picture. She'd hated him, back in the Runway years, sight unseen, purely on principle; hated him for what she'd decided he represented, the anchor keeping Andy from the career and the ambition she was so obviously, infuriatingly good at. She's less certain now that it was ever really about the career at all. She understands her own feelings toward Andy with a great deal more clarity these days than she used to, and it isn't lost on her, standing here, watching this man laugh easily with Lily, that the old hatred might never have been quite as professional as she'd told herself it was.
"So you're the famous Emily," Nate says, turning to her, entirely too friendly, hand already half-extended. "From Runway. I heard a lot about you, back in the day."
"Did you," Emily says, and does not particularly try to make it sound like a question.
Nate, if today is any proof, has never met a silence he felt obligated to respect.
"Andy used to talk about you all the time, back when she was still at Runway," he says, entirely undeterred by Emily's tone, settling into it like he's got all night. "Well. Not all the time. Enough times that I knew your name before I knew half her actual coworkers. You were sort of a character in the stories. In a, you know, legendary way."
"How flattering," Emily says, in a voice that suggests the opposite.
"No, genuinely, it was -" he seems to be hunting for the diplomatic version of whatever he originally meant, doesn't quite find it, and presses on anyway. "You made quite an impression."
Emily is midway through deciding exactly how frostily to respond to that when an arm lands around each of their shoulders at once, and Andy's there, flushed, a little unsteady, clearly three or four drinks past where she started the evening.
"Nate!" She squeezes him in half a hug, then pulls back to point at him with mock severity. "Behave. Don't you dare tell her the pledge-week story." Then, lower, grinning, leaning in like it's a secret Nate's already fully in on: "She's mine tonight."
It's nothing. Three words, thrown out loose and easy the way Andy throws out everything, gone from her mouth before she's even finished saying it. It lands on Emily like a struck match on gasoline all the same, heat crawling straight up the back of her neck into her ears, and she has approximately one second to be furious with her own body for reacting like this before Andy's already turned, entirely, fully, away from Nate and onto her, like the conversation with him simply stopped existing.
It feels good. It feels absurdly, embarrassingly good, being chosen this plainly, this publicly, over the person who got to have her first - or at all.
Andy doesn't leave her side again for the rest of the night. She hooks her arm under Emily's and tows her from group to group like she's showing off something she's proud of, introducing her by name and nothing else, to a handful of actual Runway colleagues along the way, who, to their considerable credit, greet her like any other guest at the party and don't seem remotely interested in relitigating Milan.
Emily doesn't talk much after that. She doesn't need to; Andy's doing more than enough talking for both of them, and Emily's happy - genuinely, uncomplicatedly happy, a state she doesn't get to occupy often - to let her. She spends most of the night simply aware of Andy against her side: the warmth of her through two thin layers of fabric, the way Andy's noticeably taller than her tonight, for once, in the kitten heels Bronwyn picked out, taller despite the fact that Andy is wearing, with the new apartment and the Runway masthead and the twenty extra years, the exact same pair of atrocious white Converse she appears to have dragged, unwashed and increasingly grey, from apartment to apartment since roughly 2002.
Little by little the crowd thins. By the time it's down to the last handful of people, Emily's sitting on the sofa with both of Andy's hands still wrapped around her arm - not one, both, like she needs the extra anchor now that she's clearly several drinks past merely tipsy - deep in an animated argument with Doug and Lily. It's from them Emily learns the four of them - with Nate - go back to university, roommates even, one of those friendships that's outlived every apartment and job and haircut since. Tonight's debate is whether an old professor of Lily's - someone the other two apparently also know, on account of, Emily gathers without anyone quite saying it outright, Lily having dated him - qualifies as “a smash or a pass”. Lily, defending her own past choices with real conviction, and Doug are both firmly team smash. Andy is adamant: hard pass. She gets accused, loudly, of having a type.
"You do, though," Doug says. "You absolutely have a type."
Emily would very much like to know what that type is. She never finds out. The last guest picks that exact moment to gather their coat and say their goodbyes, and the sofa empties out around it.
Lily and Doug offer to stay and help clean up. Andy waves them off, insists she'll manage, still hasn't unhooked her arms from around Emily's the entire time she's saying it, and Emily has to look very determinedly at the empty wine bottles on the counter to keep her face from doing something it shouldn't, at being kept like this, without a second's hesitation, over two of Andy's oldest friends.
Once the door's shut behind them, it's just the two of them picking cups off every flat surface that could conceivably have held one: the windowsill, the top of a speaker, one abandoned, bewilderingly, on top of the fridge. It doesn't take long. When the last cup's in the bin and the counter's more or less clear, Emily reaches into her bag, where the box has been sitting since the moment she walked in.
"I brought you something." She sets it on the counter between them, no line rehearsed this time, no don't make this a thing. She's past pretending this one's an accident, and Andy’s lock of sobriety is certainly helping. "For the new place. And the article."
Andy opens it slower than the first time, careful with the paper, and then goes very still, because what's inside is unmistakable: mustard yellow, black stripes, the exact print of the blazer, reproduced across the whole body of the mug, loud and specific enough that anyone who so much as scrolled past a single headline that week would know exactly what it was on sight. Emily had tracked the fabric house down herself, had the print licensed for one custom run of one single mug, because a colour match alone wasn't going to say what she actually meant.
"Turn it over."
Andy does, and finds, stamped in small print, a line pulled straight from Andy's own piece. Ask about the crisis. Not the blazer. The sentence that got quoted back at her for a solid month afterwards.
Andy reads it once, silently, and then again out loud, quieter, like she's hearing her own words handed back to her from someone who clearly went looking for exactly the right ones.
She doesn't say anything for a second. Then she just pulls Emily into a hug, tight, over the counter, mug still in one hand between them, and holds on a beat longer than either of the last few times it happens.
Emily walks home that night, declines the offer of a cab, wants the air, wants the extra twenty minutes, and spends most of the walk simply replaying the whole evening on a loop, unable to help herself. She knows, clinically, rationally, exactly how much of tonight was the wine talking. Andy had been drunk by the second hour of the party and only got more so as it wore on, and Emily is not so far gone herself that she can't tell the difference between real and chemically assisted affection. She knows what it is, watching someone get handsy and warm three drinks in, knows how little it's supposed to mean. And it doesn't matter. She's happy anyway. Recklessly, indefensibly happy. Because tonight happened regardless of what put it there. Andy is, it turns out, one of those people who gets more tactile the drunker she gets: an arm looped through Emily's for an hour straight without once seeming to register she was doing it, a hand landing on her knee mid-sentence to make some point, that hug at the end that went on a beat too long. Sober Andy would never have kept her that close, that constantly, in front of that many people, without a single second thought about what it might look like. Drunk Andy simply did, easily, like it cost her nothing at all. And Emily knows the sober version will likely go back to being exactly the friendship it's supposed to be and nothing more. But she got tonight. She got held onto, chosen over an ex-boyfriend she’s clearly still good friends with, in front of a room full of Andy’s people, kept at Andy's side for four straight hours without interruption, hugged goodbye like it’s normal. Whatever tomorrow takes back, tonight actually happened, and Emily intends to keep it.
She gets home still smiling, alone in the elevator, mortified at herself and not remotely willing to stop.