Page 45

Everything else could wait until she’d finished the one thing in her life currently behaving the way it was supposed to.

She worked through the rest of the panel’s alignment with the absorbed focus that had gotten her through every crisis of her adult life — the studio’s near-collapse in year two, Renata’s betrayal, the slow grinding work of building a life out of nothing with no safety net underneath her.

Two years of surveillance didn’t change that she was still the person who fixed things with her own hands when the rest of the world stopped making sense. Her glass could turn out to be capable of anything, and none of it would change the fact that right now, today, it needed a corrected mounting bracket and she was the only person qualified to do it.

The next panel over needed the same treatment, and the one after that, and by the time she’d worked her way down the row her arms had settled into the ache of a morning honestly spent — the first real accomplishment of a day that badly needed one.

By the time she climbed down, Elena was waiting at the base of the scaffolding with her tablet and her patience visibly running thin.

Elena tapped her tablet once, done waiting. “Timeline.”

“Right. Timeline.” Romily pulled off her gloves, one finger at a time, buying herself as many seconds as the gesture strictly required. “Before we start — quick question, hypothetical, purely for my own peace of mind. If I told you my glass turned out to have secret magic properties nobody bothered mentioning to me until this morning, would that go on the timeline as a delay, or a selling point?”

Elena blinked once, tablet lowering half an inch. “I’m going to assume that’s a joke.”

“Everything’s a joke until it isn’t, Elena. Welcome to my week.” Romily slung the harness over one shoulder and headed for the office, already composing the email she was going to have to write eventually and dreading every word of it. “Now. Timeline. Hit me.”

THIRTEEN

ROMILY

It came out sideways, the way most true things did when she wasn’t paying attention to guarding the door.

They were three days past the penthouse, back to the ordinary rhythm of installation work and evening calls that ran too long, and she’d mentioned — offhand, half her attention on a mounting bracket — that her mother had texted twice asking when she’d bring “the dragon” around for dinner, and Evelyn had known what he was before Romily had gotten around to telling her, which was its own conversation for another day.

Static hummed on the line while Norden said nothing, already rearranging his afternoon around the sentence she’d just handed him.

“When.”

“That wasn’t an invitation.”

“It sounded like one.”

“It was a complaint about my mother’s psychic timeline, not an actual⁠—”

“Tomorrow. Afternoon. I’ll clear it.”

“You can’t just clear a day because I mentioned my mother exists, Norden, that’s not how calendars work.”

“I can. I did. It’s cleared.” His voice shifted, brief and far too pleased with itself. “I’d like to meet her.”

She started to argue, and found, days later, that she still hadn’t come up with anything that would have changed the outcome.

Jessa was waiting at the studio door with her arms crossed and an expression that made clear she’d already heard, through whatever channel Jessa heard everything, and had strong opinions prepared in advance.

“You’re taking him to meet your mother. Tomorrow. And I found out from your MOTHER, who texted me directly, because apparently, I’m more reliable than you at announcing your own life.”

“It happened fast.”

“Nothing happens fast with you. You’ve been informing people of major life decisions eleven business days in advance since I’ve known you.” Jessa followed her toward the workbench, unwilling to let the subject drop for even the length of a walk across the room. “This is a whole new woman standing in front of me. I don’t know her. I have questions.”

Marco looked up from the shipping labels he was supposed to be sorting, abandoning them instantly. “Does he know about the pot roast. Nobody survives Evelyn’s pot roast unwarned. There should be a briefing packet.”

“He’ll survive the pot roast.”

“Everyone thinks that.” Marco shook his head, grave as a man delivering a diagnosis. “I want it known that I offered to prepare him. Emotionally. Possibly with a laminated card of approved dinner-table topics.”

“He negotiates hostile business acquisitions on four continents, Marco. He’ll manage my mother’s pot roast.”