Kathleen rolled her eyes, adjusting her sleeves. She had changed from a qipao into a buttoned shirt. She was attending another Party meeting immediately after this and she needed to look the part, and if she picked up a few stains from waitressing away the few hours beforehand, then so much the better.
“I know everyone forgot,” Kathleen answered, “but I do work here.”
“Oh, no, that’s not what I meant.” Aimee wrung her rag cloth, then pushed a tray of freshly washed cups down the bar where Eileen was drying. “Miss Rosalind said she was off to eat dinner with you. She left almost an hour ago.”
Kathleen froze. A serving boy brushed by, almost colliding with the elbow she had jutting out. Had she forgotten her plans? Had Rosalind asked to meet? Almost frantically, Kathleen searched through her memory, but all she could conclude was that Rosalind certainly had not made plans to eat with Kathleen, and it was unlikely that the barkeeping girls had misheard for someone else instead, because the only other possible contender was Juliette, and Juliette was out of the city.
“I . . . think she might have misremembered,” Kathleen said.
Eileen didn’t pick up on Kathleen’s confusion. She grinned, making fast work of wiping the glass in her hands. “Or maybe she’s off to see her foreigner.”
Her . . . what? Kathleen felt like she had stepped into a film without watching the first half. Aimee hushed Eileen immediately, but her mouth had a quirk to it, as if the thought itself was amusing.
“Chen Ailing, don’t spread rumors.”
“About a foreigner?” Kathleen asked, finally recovering from her shock. “What are you talking about?”
Eileen and Aimee exchanged a glance. One of their expressions said Now look what you did. The other said How does she not already know?
“Lang Shalin has been sighted with a man who might be a lover,” Aimee reported, entirely matter-of-fact. “Only rumors, of course. No one’s gotten a good look at his face. They can’t even decide if he is a merchant or the son of a governor. If you listen to the messengers running it, the same ones would say that Miss Cai was seen embracing Roma Montagov.”
Which was . . . true.
Kathleen didn’t let her expression show her continued bewilderment; she merely quirked an eyebrow and turned away, making for the table at the back to begin clearing it. She hardly paid attention to the plates as she stacked them onto her arm, laying them one atop the other until she was balancing them all upon her wrist. Of late, this would be fully in line with Rosalind’s peculiar behavior. And Kathleen could not fathom it, could not pinpoint when her sister had changed.
For the longest time, it had been Kathleen and Rosalind against the world. Their antics together constituted some of Kathleen’s earliest memories: as toddlers climbing the mansion gates when Juliette’s Nurse was not watching; as children trying to hide the bump on Rosalind’s head after they failed to slide down the staircase railing; as just the two of them, playing pretend with dried leaves because there was nothing better to use. The Langs had been triplets, but hardly anyone would have known by watching the three of them interact. Even after they were sent to Paris, the dynamic remained the same. Their third sister was an empty seat at the dining table because she was in bed again fighting a cold while Rosalind and Kathleen whispered secrets beneath their napkins, giggling if the tutors asked them to eat properly. Their third sister was the empty middle seat, absent at all the events Rosalind and Kathleen crashed, leaning on each other in the back of the car and laughing louder if the chauffeur glanced back in concern.
And now . . . now Kathleen had known nothing of these rumors, though they had once shared their every secret. Of course, it was possible that there was no lover at all, merely another merchant Rosalind was accommodating for their father. Yet Kathleen still felt a suspicious chill sweep up her spine as she entered the kitchen, dumping the plates in the sink for the kitchen hands to deal with. Had they grown apart? Had Kathleen become too much of a stranger for her sister?
“What are you up to, Rosalind?” she muttered. “What aren’t you telling me?”
The kitchen door slammed. Serving boys moved in and out, bustling around her as they got to work. Kathleen stayed near the tables, wiping her hands on a washcloth.
Rosalind had always trusted Celia. Maybe that was the problem here. Maybe Celia was fading, forgotten under the layers of Kathleen that she had taken on.
Kathleen shook her head, picking up a clean stack of trays and hurrying back into the club.