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“I’ll have it looked at.”

“Don’t. I’m making conversation, not submitting a work order.” She caught herself, laughed once, short and surprised by her own laugh. “Force of habit. I’ve done this too long to sit in a room and not see what’s broken in it. It’s a great skill at work and a truly terrible one at dinner parties. Ask anyone who’s ever invited me to one twice.”

“I don’t mind. Most people in this room have never told me the truth about anything.”

“That sounds exhausting. Do they all just nod? Is there a lot of nodding?”

“Considerable nodding.”

“I bet you love that.”

“I did. Until recently. It’s efficient. Lonely and efficient aren’t mutually exclusive, whatever the greeting cards say.”

“Nothing’s mutually exclusive if you set the bar low enough.”

Most people agreed with him instantly, reflexively, before he’d finished a sentence. He’d stopped noticing how dull that was until she sat across from him refusing to do it even once.

“Tell me about the installation.” He wanted to watch her face do what it did when she talked about the one thing that mattered most to her.

She stopped performing altogether.

Fast, exact, no padding — hands cutting shapes in the air to demonstrate angles words weren’t fast enough to explain, the way light moved through the panels hour by hour, the mounting problem she’d solved at two in the morning three nights running. She knocked her water glass reaching for an imaginary panel angle and caught it without looking, still talking, like her hands had learned to manage disasters on their own so the rest of her could keep working. She talked like a woman used to watching people’s attention wander before she finished a sentence, and had stopped waiting for it not to.

He asked a real question. Load distribution — the kind that required her to think before she answered instead of reaching for the answer she’d already rehearsed.

She looked at him like the question had surprised her by surviving contact with a real answer.

“Most people ask because they want to seem interested. You actually want the number.”

“I want the number.”

“Nobody wants the number.” She said it like a discovery. “Fine. Here’s the number.”

She gave it to him. Then the next one, and the reasoning behind both, and somewhere around the third number she caught herself and stopped.

“Sorry. I do this. I forget normal people don’t want load calculations recited at them over appetizers.”

“I asked.”

“You did. Most people regret that within thirty seconds. You’re at two minutes and holding. It’s honestly impressive.”

He listened with the same focus he gave board meetings that decided whether a property survived its first fiscal year, except this mattered more.

She’d spent a great deal of time managing other people’s disinterest. He intended to be the exception to that pattern for as long as she’d let him be.

It came out two glasses past professional distance, mid-sentence, the way true things came out of people who’d stopped guarding the door.

“I had a mentor. Renata.” She set the name down like a blade, the humor draining out of her voice for the first time all night. “Took me on at twenty-two. Taught me everything that mattered — technique, mostly, but also how to survive in a studio that isn’t yours yet. Six years I worked under her. Six years I trusted her with things I didn’t trust anyone else with.”

Her hand found the wine glass again, turning it, giving her fingers a task while the rest of her worked through the telling.

“My first solo show came around. She steered the one buyer who mattered — the only one with real money — away from my work and toward a bigger commission of her own. Quietly. Never once raised her voice about it. I found out three weeks later, secondhand, from a gallery assistant who thought I already knew.”

A cold, immediate anger moved behind his ribs at the picture of a woman twice Romily’s age deciding a twenty-two-year-old’s future wasn’t worth protecting. He kept it off his face. Barely. His hand had closed around the stem of his own glass hard enough that he made himself set it down before the pressure became visible.

“Does she still work. Renata, I mean.”

“Why.”