Cordelia stepped out of the building and buttoned up her coat, pulling her scarf more tightly around her neck to block out the cold winter wind. This was her first real winter out of California and it was nothing like she remembered from the ski trips her father used to take them on. Instead of clean white flakes of snow there was dirty gray slushy ice. Instead of ski lifts and sloping paths there were subways and endless sidewalks. And at the end of her trip she wasn't going to be greeted by a bubbling jacuzzi and crackling fire-- more like a claw foot bathtub and a radiator that never seemed to be able to manage adequate heat in her studio apartment.

It was a different life, for sure, but Cordy didn't regret her move to New York. There were other things that she was more than happy to have left behind-- things like demons, comas, and evil law firms. Those were the things that she tried her damnedest to try to forget about. During the days forgetting was easy-- between dance class, voice lessons, auditions, and her reception job she didn't have a lot of time to obsess about the complete crappiness of the last few years of her life. The nights were a different story. Cordy hadn't slept through a single night since waking up from the coma, the nightmares coming like clockwork. If she was lucky she didn't remember any details-- if it was a bad night, she couldn't scrub the feeling of warm, hot blood off of her hands no matter how much she tried. Those were the nights she woke up screaming.

Over the past year she'd found that the best method of scream prevention was complete exhaustion. Luckily, the frenetic pace of her life made that easy enough. She took dance classes 5 times a week and had weekly voice and acting lessons as well. In her "spare time", Cordy worked as a receptionist for a greasy little ambulance chaser who took too much interest in her breasts, but he only worked with humans and it was honest money, or at least as honest as it could be given the skeeziness of her boss. She was just glad she found an office job-- she may have changed a lot over the years but Cordelia Chase was never going back to retail. She preferred to spend her time on the customer side of a cash register, thank you very much.

Cordy pushed up her coat sleeve and glanced at her watch. She had about 10 minutes to get to her modern jazz class and she was running late. The audition she'd just left had gone pretty well. The casting director had told her that her choreography was strong but hadn't had much to say about her voice-work. She frowned, thinking about all the money she was spending on voice lessons. She knew she was improving-- Maria, her voice instructor, hadn't winced in weeks and had in fact told her she was ready to move on to some more difficult arrangements. It was a far cry from her first lesson when Maria had frowned and muttered that while she didn't seem to have an ear for music, at least she wasn't tone-deaf. Considering how hard she worked at it, Cordelia had been hoping for some kind words from the casting director but at least he hadn't said anything negative. She wasn't sure if she'd get called back or not but it was the best audition she'd had yet and Cordy knew she was going to get her break any day now.

As Cordy rounded the corner, a well-dressed young man thrust a sheet of paper at her. Cordy glanced at the flyer and smiled. New York might be cold but they had the best sample sales ever. She couldn't wait to tell Rafael about this one after class- it was painful to admit it but his fashion sense was even more finely honed than hers and he was the perfect shopping companion. Shoving the ad in her bag, she picked up her pace and raced the rest of the way to the studio.