“Well, that’s what I told Gary. I said, that girl is going to work herself into the ground, and nobody’s checking on her.” She adjusts her hat and peers at the house again. “I thought I saw something move in there. Through your studio window. When I was coming up the drive.”
My fingers tighten on the casserole dish.
The foil crinkles.
“Drying rack,” I say. “I set one up by the window. The bars shift when they’re curing, and the rack wobbles. I’ve been meaning to shim the legs.”
“Hm.” Mrs. Pritchett processes this with the expression of someone filing information for future cross-reference. “Looked tall.”
“It’s a big rack. Four-tier.”
“Well, you’d know.”
She smiles with her whole face, warm and searching and approximately as subtle as a searchlight. “You look different. Something about yourcolor.”
“Probably the mica powder. I’ve been working with a new shimmer line.”
“Hm,” she says again, and the syllable contains multitudes.
I walk Mrs. Pritchett back to the golf cart with the casserole braced against my hip, answering three more questions about the Verdance order and deflecting two about whether I’ve “thought about getting some help around the place.”
When the golf cart finally whines back down the drive and Mrs. Pritchett’s hat disappears below the rise, I stand in the yard holding a nine-by-thirteen dish of green chile chicken and breathe for what feels like the first time in four minutes.
Inside, I close the front door and lock it, set the casserole on the kitchen counter, and look around.
“Oz?”
Silence.
The living room is empty.
The couch holds nothing but my grandmother’s quilt and a stack of invoices.
The hallway is clear.
I look up.
He’s pressed flat against the ceiling, spread thin and wide like a second layer of plaster, his color shifted to match the off-white paint so precisely that I can only find him by the faint pulse of light traveling through his edges.
He covers most of the living room ceiling.
“That’s new,” I say.
He peels away from the ceiling in sections, like paint in reverse, flowing down the wall and reassembling into his humanoid shape by the time he reaches the floor.
“She has remarkable peripheral vision,” Oz says.
His surface is still cycling through residual camouflage tones, patches of off-white and ceiling-beige fading back to his usual teal.
“I could feel her attention pattern through the wall. She scans in a grid.”
“Yeah, she missed her calling at the NSA.”
A ripple of gold moves through his chest, amusement or relief or both.
I’m still amazed. “You matched my ceiling perfectly.”
“I can match most surfaces if I have a few seconds to sample the light. The texture is harder. Your ceiling has a stipple pattern from a roller, and I had to—”
