“Can I ask you a question?” Bea asked.
Gage turned to her.
She held his gaze. It felt like peeling back a layer. “Would you move to London, if you were me?”
There was a pause.
She could see it in those blue eyes. The computation. The caution. He wanted her to say yes. But he respected her enough to be honest in his reply.
Finally, he said, “Only if I could build something in it.”
Bea nodded slowly. Let the words sit.
She wasn’t sure yet what she could build here. But maybe, to start…it was enough to help build him.
Chapter Thirty-Two
The Fringe was a low-slung, industrial-glass hideout on the west edge of the city, where the art students, nonprofit staff, and quietly subversive trust-fund kids came to exhale.
Inside, the walls were teal. The floor was green checkerboard tile. The ceiling was hung with massive green mesh pendant lights, glowing soft and low like jellyfish. It was nothing like midtown Northgate. And it wasn’t trying to be.
Bea stepped inside, and smiled to herself.
This place wassoLillian. Quietly offbeat, completely unpretentious. She slid into the corner booth just as Lillian arrived.
“Sorry I’m late,” Lillian said. “We had two intakes this afternoon. Siblings. One of them bit the translator.”
“What?”
“Just a warning bite,” Lillian said mildly. “Didn’t break skin.” She said it the way other people talked about printer jams.
Bea laughed, then shook her head. “You need a raise.”
“I’m in data entry,” Lillian said, unfolding her napkin. “I’d take a promotion before a raise.”
A server appeared with menus and a pitcher of cucumber-mint water.
“They know you’re a St. Ives student, right?” Bea continued. “You have so much more to offer.”
“Yeah. But I’m not sponsored,” Lillian said with a small smile. “So it’ll take a while.”
In the UR,sponsoredwasn’t supposed to meanwith someone important—but it kind of did. Women aiming for coveted roles in elite Northgate firms needed a name on their application. Technically, it didn’t have to be a man, it just usually was. It was why Bea had been passed over for the Monaghan & Stowe internship, until Gage.
Lillian, absurdly, was still single, and therefore, in Georgina’s exact words, an unaudited asset.
“How about Seth?” Bea asked, pouring them each a glass of water. “Did you end up giving your ‘maybe’ a try?”
“I did. Seth’s nice. But he still makes me want to run away.”
Bea sighed. She had a feeling there were only two kinds of men who could end up with Lillian: one who waited forever, and one who wouldn’t ask.
Their food arrived—grilled lamb, smoky eggplant, warm flatbread folded like letters waiting to be opened.
Lillian tore off a piece of flatbread. “You’ve been back for days now, and we still haven’t downloaded.”
“London,” Bea said, moving some lamb onto her plate and smothering it in hummus.
“How was it?”
