At first New York makes her feel like a child. As a brief stop on vacation it is no stranger to her. But spending summers at the Hamptons or a weekend on the Upper East Side is a completely different experience to living there.

It is overwhelming in its bustle and confusion and even though it is, on a map, the most ordered city in the world, she still manages to get lost. Her apartment is nice but a mouse haunts the kitchen and on the subway she shrinks from characters who are probably innocent but strike her as terrifying in their eccentricity.

It is work that knocks the rich girl out of her. Her colleagues at best are zany, at worst egocentric, temperamental perfectionists. She grows to love them. She is better informed about the news now than at any prior point in her life. Willingly she adapts to having her life dictated by big stories. She learns to run on a few hours of sleep with caffeine in her veins, learns to adore the teamwork that is a required ingredient of the bullpen.

Most of her work is in a quiet booth near the production suite, but because of her age, she finds herself making friends with the staffers; young, bright researchers with liberal arts degrees, who are fuelled by a determination to report the news and report it well. Most of their entertainment comes from gossiping about the anchors and produces that lie caught in a convoluted web of romance. Because she is Gigi Darcy, she is not satisfied with simply observing across the studio floor. Instead she learns to conveniently vanish in order to leave two people alone together, learns to drop names into conversations and to observe body language. In her mind's eye she can picture William's raised eyebrows.

She calls as often as she can, although long hours and late nights make Skyping difficult. Often she blows off steam at a popular bar across the road with her closest friend amongst the staffers, a Japanese boy to whom the city is equally new. They trade stories of San Francisco and Tokyo. He is a diplomat's son, so she does not feel the mix of insecurity and defensiveness that generally precedes her surname.

To him she finds she can say anything.

Even peaches and sandy haired boys, when enough tequila has been consumed, can be spoken of. In turn she listens to stories of a nameless girl with dark orbs for eyes and her banker mother who took against him.

He cooks for her and is impressed with her dexterity with chopsticks at which she laughs and points out that she was a constant fixture on her dad's business trips abroad. On nights where sleep deprivation mingles with the surreal world of US politics they get drunk together, laugh hysterically together, buy shawarma on the way to the Darcy townhouse together, because neither one is in any fit state to take the subway back to Brooklyn.

She doesn't realise how often she mentions him until William points it out, over the phone, in a tone she recognises as having been cultivated to be casual.

"Oh, he's a...a friend."

"Okay." Even over the phone, she can hear his smirk.

Lizzie asks her if she's seeing anyone over prepping Christmas dinner. Their smirks, she notes, have become synonymous.

"What? No, I've been so busy with work and ...stuff." She changes the topic to presents. Lizzie gushes over the bracelet Gigi hands her but there is a look in her eyes as she glances at the Tiffany bag that causes Gigi to seek out her brother that night.

"I think it's time you brought out Mom's ring."

"What if she says no?" His voice is hoarse. She throws her arms about him in an impulsive hug.

"Who could possible say no to you William?"

"I missed you."

"So did I big brother. So did I."

"So you're leaving for the wedding next week?" They are working late at his apartment, the windows open against the heat of a restless summer.

"Oh yeah." She reaches for her phone. "Take out?"

"I might have something lying around." She rolls her eyes because they both know that he never leaves anything edible lying around.

She is about to hang up when she hears him.

"Found something." Phone still against her ear she turns, eyes falling to a velvety peach clasped in his long, slender fingers. There is a question in his eyes and heart hammering, cell falling away, to the table she thinks, she stretches out a hand and takes it from him. She only takes a bite; it is late and neither really wants to eat. Food, that is.

She is not immune to symbols. And she marvels, later, at how a symbol can be changed dependent upon circumstance, upon people.

The wedding is an intimate affair but the tabloids manage, to absolutely no one's surprise, to get hold of a couple of photographs. The one splashed on most page sixes is of the groom's younger sister, the heiress, in the arms of a new beau. It makes her smile.

Unbeknownst to Gigi Darcy, a sandy haired figure catches sight of the picture in someone else's paper. He is too far gone to acknowledge the twinge within him, that which most would call regret.

She does not care. He is long gone from her head, perhaps not dead but vanquished certainly; the hole he left filled by another far sweeter.

"the taste of peach will subsist in quietness;
the night, in silence, turn to morning."

Tim Smith Laing, Omiyage: a souvenir