The Dark Glamour (666 Park Avenue 2)

passed for ‘design’ but now was just depressing. The hallway was unexpectedly wide, forcing Jane to wonder how much space had been wasted there that might have gone towards larger flats, and where its paint was chipped, she could see at least six colours of other paint underneath.
And who puts fluorescent lights in a place people actually have to
live? she wondered indignantly, turning away from the crackled mirror beside the unnecessarily wide staircase. There was, naturally, no elevator.
    The whole atmosphere reminded her intensely of the flat she had seen in her first vision, but walking into that very same flat was still eerie. Anne had cleaned up for her guest, but that just made the general shabbiness of the room more apparent. The walls were a boring, unadorned white, emphasized by the fact that Anne hadn’t hung anything on them. The floorboards had wide spaces between them, and they creaked ominously beneath Jane’s black ankle boots. Anne’s furniture all looked either flimsy or secondhand, and after a moment of indecision, Jane chose a scarred wicker armchair. It swayed a bit under her weight.
    Anne busied herself in the rust-stained kitchenette for a few minutes, returning with a tray containing an impressive spread of tea and tea-related items. She had assembled a variety of small, crustless sandwiches, scones packed with fat brown raisins, and sugars in fanciful shapes and colours. Jane felt her eyes widen a little at the incongruity of a Wedgwood teapot in the sad little apartment.
    ‘My best friend gave me that for my eighteenth birthday,’ Anne told Jane, following her gaze to the teapot. ‘She said it was to give me an alternative to some wild pub-crawl.’
    ‘I wouldn’t have pegged you for the “wild pub-crawl” type, anyway,’ Jane pointed out gently, accepting the teacup Anne offered her.
    Anne sat on her dusty floral couch and stared at the threadbare pink rug beneath her feet for a moment. ‘I’m not particularly wild,’ she replied softly, and Jane’s fingers tightened around her mug so fiercely that the dusky skin under her nails blanched as white as the half-moons at their base.
    ‘Well, that’s usually a good thing,’ she suggested. ‘And you said you moved around a lot when you were younger. It makes sense you’d want to feel more . . . stable, after that.’
I certainly felt a little wild after never going anywhere as a kid,
she admitted reasonably to herself. The opposite scenario seemed just as likely.
    ‘I guess.’ Anne stared down into her cup.
    Jane, worried about losing the fragile bond she felt they’d forged, leaned forward. ‘I so don’t mean to pry,’ she lied, ‘but you also mentioned a foster home. I don’t know why you were there, and you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to. I just mean that it’s probably quite reasonable for you to want some stability now.’
    For a moment, she thought that her transition might have been too abrupt, but Anne just took a gulp of her lapsang souchong tea and nodded thoughtfully. ‘I don’t remember a bit of that, though. Not a thing before I arrived at the orphanage. They said I looked five or six, and in good health, and that’s all I’ll ever know about . . . before.’
    Jane leaned a little farther forward, causing her wicker chair to creak unpleasantly. She plucked a piece of sugar shaped like a pair of hot-pink lips off its porcelain tray and dropped it into her tea. ‘You mean you didn’t remember anything? That can’t happen every day; surely the people at the orphanage must have investigated.’
Not to mention the entire population of the continent you were
supposed
to be on.
    Anne shrugged, although some visible tension remained in her shoulders. ‘Of course. And especially this girl, Kathy, who volunteered there. Her parents have all kinds of connections, but even they couldn’t find out where I came from. But eventually the government had to place me with a family, who were . . . lovely. Really.’
    Anne’s dark eyes welled up with tears, but they didn’t fall. Jane longed to tell her that it was all right; she didn’t have to talk about this if she didn’t want to.
I need to know what happened,
she reminded herself, closing her eyes just a bit longer than a blink.
Even if it’s hard for her.
‘You say that sadly,’ Jane encouraged gently, dropping her voice half an octave to sound more soothing.
    ‘The last time I talked to them I was throwing a tantrum,’ Anne