“You have a client at three,” I tell her.
She blinks. “It’s barely two.”
“Take a long lunch.”
A beat. Then she grabs her bag from under the desk with a speed suggesting she has been quietly rehearsing for this moment and didn’t want to be caught unprepared. “I’ll be at the café. Text me when…” She catches my expression. “I’ll just be at the café.”
The door chimes behind her.
The studio goes quiet.
Reece doesn’t move from the doorway. He stays exactly where he stopped, hands loose at his sides, and looks at me with the particular stillness he carries when he’s made a decision he’s not backing away from.
I stay at my station.
“You should be at the game,” I say.
“Yeah, I should be.”
“Which means tomorrow I’ll catch hell from the coach, the pitching coach, and probably the owner.” He shrugs. “You’re worth it.”
For a second, I forget what I was doing, then I look back at the screen.
“You should have called.”
“You wouldn’t have picked up.”
“I would have.”
“Would you?”
A pause long enough to be honest. “Possibly not.”
“Then showing up was the right call.” He glances around the studio at the designs on the walls, my station, the commission work on the screen, the stacked folders, and the sign above my desk that reads,‘Your bad decisions are my rent money.’His face does something complicated. “You’re working.”
“I’m always working.”
“The memorial piece?”
He remembers. Of course, he remembers. He remembers everything I tell him in the quiet spaces between everything else,filed and kept, pulled back out with a precision that has always unnerved me in the best possible way.
“The wing is nearly ready to transfer,” I say.
“Can I see it?”
I hesitate for exactly half a second, then I turn the screen toward him.
He crosses the studio slowly, making no sudden movements, giving me time to change my mind about every step he takes. He stops at the edge of my station and looks at the screen.
The silence stretches.
“Ava.” His voice comes out differently from anything I’ve heard from him before. Quieter. Stripped of every layer of Reece Steele, pitcher, persona, golden boy. “This is extraordinary.”
“It’s not done.”
“What’s on the screen right now would make people cry.”
“People cry at tattoos fairly regularly. It’s not a reliable metric.”
