23 - Wren
The common area off the kitchen smells like coffee and whatever Sera prepped this morning — garlic and something sweet underneath. She cooks the way other people breathe. La Sirena at ten in the morning has this quality of exposed machinery: the chandeliers hauled up to cleaning height, the stage dark, the bar gleaming with bottles nobody’s touching yet. I find I like it better this way.
I finally left that day bed in Logan’s office. I'm on the couch by the window with my notebook and the pencil stub in my left hand, working on Marisol's face from memory. It's harder than I expected — that golden energy, the way warmth moves through her before she's finished a sentence. My left hand doesn't know its own pressure yet, keeps going too heavy on the smudging, and I've started the curve of her jaw four times.
A shadow falls across the page.
I look up.
Juliet Price. Soft hazel eyes, a little sleep-rumpled, the warmth in her face unguarded. She's carrying a mug in one hand and a leather-bound notebook in the other — the work she's been doing for Logan, numbers and annotated columns that she's been living inside for three days. She looks at my notebook with genuine attention — not the polite sideways glance most people give. She's actually looking.
"Can I?" A gesture at the chair across from me.
I nod.
She sits, sets both mug and notebook on the side table, pulls her legs up. "What are you drawing?"
Notis that your sketchbook, notdo you draw— straight to the real question.
I turn the notebook so she can see. The half-finished face, the smudged jaw, the graphite tracking too dark down the left side where I don't have the control yet.
She leans in slightly. "You work from memory?"
"Usually."
We talk about the sketches for a few more minutes. What I draw, whether the left-hand work feels different — it does, I tell her, it's like trying to write in a foreign language where I know all the words but the syntax is wrong. She asks whether I've always been an artist, and I sayI used to be,which is more truth than I planned, and she doesn't push on theused tothe way some people would.
Then she glances at her own notebook, that reflexive check of someone who has a deadline running in the background, and I see her register it and set it aside — choosing the conversation, but not forgetting the work.
The whole time, I'm aware of it. This morning, I watched Isa bring Juliet coffee. Not set it on the counter.Bringit — cross the room with the mug in both hands, say something that made Juliet smile, linger for a moment in a way Isa doesn't linger.
Isa still treats me like I’m furniture, or worse. I don’t particularly like the woman, but I don’t understand why she can barely bring herself to be civil to me.
Juliet is talking about something — the way charcoal works differently from graphite, the smudging, how she used to draw as a kid — and she is, demonstrably, a good person. The kind who asks real questions and listens to the answers and doesn't make you feel like you're being interviewed. I can see exactly why Isa smiled at her. I can see exactly why Adrian called herprincesathis morning like he's known her for years, why the building already seems to have made room for her.
She moves on eventually, warm and unhurried, picking up her work notebook as she stands — back to the ledger, back to Logan's accounting problem, the forensic trail she's been running.
My coffee has gone cold without my noticing. The pencil stub is still in my left hand, not moving. The half-finished Marisol looks up at me from the page with an expression I haven't managed to get right yet — something in the eyes that I keep losing.
I like her. Genuinely, annoyingly, against my intentions, I like Juliet Price. I had been ready to resent her. It would have been so much cleaner — the girl who walked in and was immediately loved, so easy to push away from behind a wall of resentment. Instead I'm sitting here with cold coffee and a smudged notebook page, and the irritation I feel is entirely directed at myself for being unable to manufacture a feeling I needed.
It’s almost funny.
Almost.
I go to Logan’s office.
He's at the desk, one monitor lit with accounting files, his pen moving in that neat controlled hand. He looks up when I come in. I settle on the edge of the daybed.
The question has been sitting in my chest since this morning, small and sharp.
I try to keep the hurt out of my voice. I am not entirely successful.
"Isa brought Juliet coffee this morning." I look at the window instead of him. "She's been here two days." A pause. I make myself look at him. "She's never brought me coffee."
He sets his pen down. He turns toward me and gives me his full attention.
"You know who Juliet is." Not a question — he was there when Nico introduced her, he knows I was awake for it. "The Rosetti connection."
