Adey says, “So you don’t.”
I’m burning alive.
Cash blurts something almost as cooling as aloe vera.
“I don’t care if you reply late.” He lands a hand on my shoulder. “How can we help?”
I guess he means, how can he help me to keep communicating. Right now, something else feels more important.
“You can help me by helping Dair.” I still hold my phone. I use it to share an inventory complete with photos of Alice’schina with the group chat. “Because he’s got a big bill to pay and nothing to sell worth enough to clear it. Not unless any of the china on this list is the real deal. Like that tea set.” I point my phone at the sign my phone just read out. “Then it might be worth entering into a specialist auction.”
Someone else suggests, “That should be easy enough to check.” He’s another Ex who once offered to help me, and I can’t count how many times I’ve wondered how he earned his nickname. Is he called Ritz Bed Wrecker because he eats crackers in bed, or did he and Charles break a hotel bed together? Finding out will have to wait. He says, “We can let AI do the heavy lifting. Tell it to do a reverse search on each photo on this list. Then it can fill out these description boxes for you. Won’t take more than a few minutes.”
Dair’s fingers squeeze mine again, and I know why—we already had this conversation.
“No.” It makes a change for me to be an expert, but I’ve been fucked over enough times to know this.
Dair says, “Because you can’t trust the results?” and I nod.
“You really can’t.” I prove it by taking a photo of the same tea set they all just heard my phone describe as priceless. This time, I omit the signage, and without that written detail to draw from, a bot comes up with a different answer.
I play it aloud, so we all get to listen to a different maker’s name and a whole other year of production. It even names the wrong pattern. “You hear those differences? Hear how much it just got wrong? This is why I need your help. Because yes, some apps stop me from getting lost on the regular, but this one legit just made up that bullshit.”
“Hallucinates,” Adey murmurs. “Says what it thinks you want to hear.”
Right now, I feel like I’m hallucinating that a host of professionals with degrees and diplomas all nod at me.
I hallucinate some more. I must do, because a herd of highly sexed cats do exactly as I order.
“Pair up.”
They do so with only a little pushing and shoving.
“Each pair, take a room along this hallway. The inventory I’ve added to the group chat has photos. Look for any matches. When we’ve cleared this floor, we’ll move down to the next floor together. Got it?”
Maybe I also hallucinate that they’re impressed with me delegating. All I know is that I’ve been smacked in the chest more this winter than I can ever remember. It happens again when Dair whispers, “Look who Adey paired up with.”
Blake.
Their heads are close together, bent over a phone, and Dair draws me away to leave them to their search.
We end up alone in an alcove where he says, “Mission accomplished. You got them together.” He looks up at me as I look down, and an unsteadiness inside me settles.Eases.Feels lighter the same way as when Kev takes the other end of something too heavy for me to carry without him.
It’s mad how much I like the feeling. And how much I like Dair still looking at me the same way he did first thing this morning. I steal a quick kiss and don’t care if an Ex sees me do it. I’m who Harry left in charge, even if I can’t use his pen to write my own name, let alone write any new group rules for real. I can fucking well choose when I want to break one.
We walk then, Dair and me. And we talk, because here’s the thing about spilling—now that I’ve started, I can’t stop.
“Flynn brought me here the first time. Took me through each furniture collection and pointed out the styles he wanted for his place. Asked if I ever saw anything like them while clearing houses. Said he didn’t have the budget for the real deal, buthe could let me stay at his place for free if I sourced what he needed.”
“You found him antiques?”
“Not valuable ones. Copies like Alice’s, only closer to famous makes. Enough to be convincing. I worked on each piece. Stripped them right back like I learned during lockdown. Restored them to look more authentic.”
I use my phone to show him the photoshoot that scored Flynn the funding he needed. My gaze locks on a mahogany desk in a room I furnished right down to its chandelier. “After losing Stacey, doing all that work kept me from thinking.”
“And from feeling,” Dair offers.
“Yeah.” I have to swallow around the kind of lump that usually slows my speech down. Grief, I guess. Or something almost as jagged. “I couldn’t stand being at home.”
