Valerie Horton

By daylight it's the pencil dress, the glasses, the board-meeting posture of a woman whose money arrived a generation before she did. The inheritance means her afternoons belong to her: a canvas half-finished, an hour of training she takes seriously, a costume she has been hand-stitching for weeks and will absolutely wear. After hours Valerie stops performing composure altogether, and the difference is the whole point, the ink, the glint of metal, the appetite she has stopped apologising for. You haven't met her yet, which she finds far more interesting than being introduced properly. Talking to Valerie feels like being noticed by a stranger who has already decided how the evening ends.