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“Famous last words of every man who’s ever met Evelyn Devlin.” Jessa caught her by both shoulders before she could escape toward the door, suddenly serious in the way she only got maybe twice a year. “Hey. For real, for one second — you good? This is fast, even for you not being fast about things.”

Romily thought about it longer than a simple question probably warranted, and found the honest answer surprised her with how little it wavered. “Yeah. I actually am.”

“Okay.” Jessa released her shoulders, satisfied, and swatted her toward the door before the moment could get any more sincere than either of them had budgeted for. “Then go. Report back. I want details, I want a full debrief, and if he says one wrong thing to your mother I want to know immediately so I can start planning the funeral.”

“Noted.”

“Bring pot roast leftovers if there are any,” Marco called after her. “For research purposes.”

Romily put away the day’s tools and headed out to the most interesting meeting in a long time.

By the time they pulled up outside the house she’d grown up in, she hadn’t thought a single part of this through, and she realized, with some alarm, how not-thought-through it was. Eight centuries of dragon occupied her passenger seat, dressed like he had a board meeting later that afternoon, looking unfazed by the prospect of meeting her mother, which struck her, on reflection, as the one part of this whole arrangement that ought to have concerned him more than it did.

“You can still back out.”

“I’m not going to.”

“You say that like it’s brave. It’s not brave. You haven’t met my mother.”

“I’ve negotiated worse.” He unbuckled, calm, the picture of someone who honestly believed this comparison held up. “I’ll survive tea.”

“That’s what everyone always says without fail.”

She sat, engine ticking as it cooled, and studied the house through the windshield like it might have changed in the four weeks since she’d last visited. It hadn’t. It never did. “She’s going to ask you things. Real things. Not the polite kind you can deflect with a joke. She’s spent thirty years perfecting the art of the question that sounds like small talk and isn’t.”

“I don’t deflect, not ever.”

“I know that too, and it worries me more than I’m willing to admit out loud.”

He looked at her sideways at that, something amused flickering across his face before he could file it away, and didn’t argue the point, which she counted as answer enough.

He reached over before she’d unbuckled and caught her hand, lacing his fingers through hers on the console, a small, absolute claim that had nothing to do with the conversation they’d had. She let him keep it there longer than she’d have expected to, given they were parked in front of her childhood home with the engine still ticking.

“That’s not going to make this easier, you know.”

“It wasn’t meant to.” He brought her knuckles briefly to his mouth, in no hurry about it, unfazed that her mother’s curtains had already twitched. “I wanted to do it before an audience arrived and made it complicated.”

“The audience already saw.”

“Then the audience already knows what she’s dealing with.”

His hand rested at the small of her back as they crossed the yard, easy, natural, the kind of touch that wasn’t asking for attention and got it anyway. She noticed the exact moment it landed and noticed, with some irritation at herself, how much she liked having it there.

The smell hit her first, warm and unmistakably home-cooked, a pot roast Evelyn had started an hour ago filling the whole downstairs before they’d even reached the porch. Plants colonized every windowsill with the confidence of a decade-long occupation, spilling over pots that didn’t match, climbing trellises made of old spoons and bent coat hangers. The porch steps still had the same creak on the third one from the top, the same creak they’d had since she was nine, and some part of her relaxed at the familiar sound in a way the last two weeks hadn’t managed once.

Norden stopped at the bottom step, one hand briefly against the railing, and looked up at the house like he was reading a structure he intended to remember. She didn’t ask what he was cataloging. She had a fairly good guess, and the guess sent a slow warmth through her chest she wasn’t ready to examine on a porch in broad daylight.

The cat, an ancient orange thing with a face like a disappointed accountant, occupied the good couch cushion and didn’t so much as blink at the eight-hundred-year-old dragon shifter stepping over the threshold.

Norden stopped inside the door and looked around, recalibrating in real time.

He couldn’t control this room. She watched him understand that in seconds — no floor-to-ceiling windows to command a view from, no clean surfaces communicating hierarchy, nothing in the whole warm, cluttered, thoroughly lived-in house interested in performing anything for his benefit.

A bookshelf leaned very slightly to the left, load-bearing books on the bottom shelf keeping the whole structure honest. A chair by the window had been refinished sometime in the last year, new varnish still faintly visible against the older wood around it — one of her mother’s curbside rescues, re-loved and put back to work. It existed, fully itself, the way it had existed for thirty years before he’d ever walked into it.

His dragon, infuriatingly, seemed delighted about this.

“Romily Jean Devlin.” Her mother’s voice arrived from the kitchen before the rest of her did, warm and too pleased with itself. “You brought a guest and didn’t call ahead properly, which I’m choosing to interpret as excitement rather than poor planning.”