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Jessa gave her a few seconds. She stood there vibrating slightly, the way she always did when a crisis hadn’t been assigned an official plan yet. Jessa didn’t do stillness under pressure. She did barely contained motion, like a smoke alarm deciding whether today was the day.

Behind her, through the office’s glass wall, the invoice stack leaned at an angle Romily preferred not to think about, and the mug on Jessa’s desk that hadn’t moved in four months sat there, still technically in use, according to Jessa, who defended that mug the way other people defended their thesis. Romily wiped her hands on a rag that had given up months ago and took inventory: good tools, bad piece, worse invoices. Monday.

“I need a minute.” She held up a hand before Jessa could argue. “And possibly a new personality.”

“Take the minute. Not sure we stock spare personalities, but I’ll check the supply closet.”

“Check the supply closet.”

“Might just be glass dust and the good scissors nobody can ever find.”

“Tracks.”

Jessa opened her mouth around what looked like the start of an actual plan — a call to the client, maybe, or a longer look at the account, or possibly a very dramatic sigh, with Jessa it was hard to say in advance — when the studio door swung open. No knock.

That told Romily everything she needed to know about who was on the other side of it.

Gerri Wilder walked in like she owned the deed, the mortgage, and possibly the block. Furnace heat, tool clutter, a film of glass dust over every surface in the place — none of it touched her. Silver-white bob, sharp blue eyes, the kind of polish Romily associated with magazines she refused to read on principle.

Her gaze landed on the ruined lump cooling on the marver. “Rough day?”

“You have no idea.”

“Oh, I have some idea.” Gerri didn’t elaborate. She never seemed to.

“If you’re here about the noise,” Romily said, “the door’s right there.”

“I’m here to change your life.” Gerri said it like she was reading off the weather.

“That’s what my landlord said before he raised my rent.”

Jessa, frozen mid-step in the office doorway, lit up like she’d wandered into the cold open of her favorite true-crime episode. This woman hadn’t knocked. She wasn’t sorry about the noise. She’d announced her intentions like she was dropping off dry cleaning.

Gerri glanced her way. “You can pick your jaw up off the floor, dear. It’s not that kind of meeting. Yet.”

Jessa picked her jaw up. Mostly.

“And you.” Gerri didn’t even look at her. “Stop building a case file. I can see you doing it.”

“I’m not doing anything.”

“You’ve got your suspect-board face on.”

“That’s just my face.”

“Mm.” Gerri didn’t sound convinced. She also didn’t stop smiling.

Gerri didn’t wait for an invitation. She perched on the corner of the worktable, ignored the dust ruining her skirt, and got straight to it. A commission. The Sharpe Global flagship — the glass tower two blocks over that made half the skyline photos anyone downtown ever bothered to take. “Full creative freedom,” a phrase Romily had heard before and translated on contact: freedom right up until someone in a corner office changed his mind. A fast timeline. Real money — enough to make her spine straighten before her brain finished reading the number. A platform bigger than anything her studio had ever landed.

“Sold,” Jessa said, from the doorway, not remotely part of this conversation. “We’re sold. Sign it. Sign it right now, in this room, with this pen, while she’s still here to notarize it with her hands.”

“Nobody asked you.”

“Nobody had to. I could hear the number from here.”

Gerri didn’t even try to hide how pleased she looked. “I like her.” She nodded at Jessa like she was assessing livestock at a county fair. “Keep her.”

“She’s not for sale.”