“What does change it?”
“The person who created it is coming in here and taking responsibility for it.” I let that land for a moment. “Which you’ve done. So.”
“So?”
“So, I accept the apology.” His eyebrows rise slightly, and I hold up a hand. “I’m not finished. I accept it because it was real, specific, and you didn’t once try to soften it with an excuse. But I need you to understand something in return.”
“Tell me.”
“What broke wasn’t the photos, the blogs, or even Lena specifically.” I find his eyes and stay there. “What broke was me looking at the fallout and thinking, this is it.The other shoe. Thething I’d been bracing for since you walked into this studio on a dare. The part where the outside world gets loud enough to make something good go wrong.” I take a breath. “I pulled back because I was afraid, and I’d rather have you know that clearly than have you think I left because I stopped caring.”
The studio is very quiet.
“You didn’t stop caring?” he asks.
“No.”
“Neither did I.”
“I know.”
He looks at me for a long moment. Then, with the careful deliberateness of someone making a choice rather than a move, he asks, “Can I stay? I’m not asking for a conversation or an answer to anything. I’ll sit in that chair and read the back of a shampoo bottle while you finish your transfer. I’d just like to be in the same room.”
The corner of my mouth moves before I can stop it. “You’d read the back of a shampoo bottle?”
“I’d read literally anything. I’ve been in this lobby for sixty seconds, and I’ve already memorized your price list.”
“The sleeve consultation rate went up in February.”
“Noted. Very reasonable for the caliber of work.” He glances at the waiting chair near my station. “Can I stay?”
I look at the screen. The wing commission waits, half transferred, feathers precise and patient in the program grid. My three o’clock is coming in two hours. Zoe is eating something aggressively healthy at the café down the street, probably composing a full debrief of this interaction in her head.
The studio is mine.
My space.
My territory.
And for the first time in two weeks, it doesn’t feel diminished by the noise outside it.
“There’s water in the fridge under the front desk,” I say, turning back to the screen. “Don’t touch the ink bottles.”
“I would never.”
“You touched one in October. You moved it six inches to the left.”
“I was looking at the label.”
“Put them back exactly where they are.”
“There’s nothing near the ink bottles.”
“Preventatively. As a policy.”
He laughs, and the sound fills the studio the way it always has, rough-edged and warm, nothing performed about it. I hear him cross to the front desk, hear the soft sound of the mini refrigerator, hear him settle into the waiting chair with the comfortable ease of someone who has made peace with exactly where he is.
I turn back to the wing.
