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“It’s a hobby, a genuine one.” Darius clinked his glass against hers, thoroughly pleased with himself. “You should see what I’ve got planned for the wedding toast. I’ve been drafting it since roughly the scaffolding.”
“There is no wedding.”
“Yet.”
He glanced across the room toward Norden, who was in the middle of a conversation with a donor and visibly not listening to a word of it, attention locked on Romily instead. “Look at him. He’s not even pretending to care about whatever that man is saying about hospitality trends. Eight hundred years, and this is what finally breaks his concentration. I find it deeply satisfying.”
Jessa arrived with Marco on one side and Lila on the other, all three of them moving with the collective energy of people who’d been counting down to opening night since the commission was signed. Jessa stopped dead three feet inside the entrance, took in the atrium, the reception, the installation throwing color across a room that used to be beautifully, expensively dead, and then took in Norden — who had materialized at Romily’s side the way he always did, sudden and certain, like weather nobody had seen coming until it arrived.
He kissed her temple in full view of the donor he’d just abandoned mid-sentence, unfazed by the small crowd of hospitality executives now watching their CEO do it, and settled his hand at the small of her back like doing otherwise in public had simply never occurred to him.
Jessa’s eyes went from Romily to Norden to the complete absence of space between them, and her expression eased into a satisfied grin.
“Are we rich now?”
“You are exactly as rich as you were before.”
“Technically.” Jessa gestured at the entire room — the glass, the champagne, the CEO standing close enough to count as a permanent fixture. “Technically?”
Norden said nothing, but the corner of his mouth moved, fractionally — the closest thing to a standing ovation he had in him.
Marco had already drifted toward the installation’s base, head tipped back, narrating quietly to himself the way a man composes memoirs in real time. He circled the nearest panel twice, pressed a hand flat against the glass like he was checking its pulse, and turned back to the group with the expression of a man who’d witnessed a genuine religious event.
“I need everyone to understand that I have never once in my entire professional life been moved to tears by architecture, and I am currently one structural support beam away from a genuine incident.”
Lila surveyed the room once, took a slow sip of champagne, and delivered her verdict the way she delivered everything — brief, exact, no more words spent on it than the conclusion required.
“Finally.”
Gerri Wilder appeared at the edge of the reception when she intended to, in a dress that cost more than the champagne, looking unsurprised by a room that had every right to surprise her. She found Romily near the base of the installation, pressed a fresh glass into her hand without asking, and spoke without preamble.
“Told you he needed something only you could give him.” Gerri patted her arm, delighted. Her gaze drifted toward Norden, then back, too pleased with herself. “You’re welcome, by the way. For the match, and for not warning you. Some things a girl has to find out for herself. Preferably at close range.”
“You could have given me a hint. One hint. Anything.”
“I’m a matchmaker, darling, not a monster.” She sipped her champagne, satisfied with the observation.
“You could have at least warned me about the eight hundred years, Gerri. That felt like fairly load-bearing information to withhold from a first consultation.”
“Sweetheart, would knowing his exact age have changed a single decision you made? Be honest.”
Romily considered the question with more seriousness than she’d intended to give it.
“No. Probably not.”
“There you go, then. Some information only matters as a story you tell later. It’s never once mattered as a warning, in my long experience of matching people who had absolutely no business working out as well as they did.”
She was gone again before Romily could get a single follow-up question out, a small stack of warm cookies mysteriously already left behind on the nearest table, the way they’d arrived that first afternoon in the studio.
Mrs. Petrov found her by the champagne table not long after, squeezing her hand with the glow of a woman who’d spent months quietly right about the whole affair and had finally, publicly, been proven correct in front of witnesses.
“I told you.”
This wasn’t, strictly, accurate. It read close enough to true that Romily didn’t argue the point.
“You did.”
“About time.” Mrs. Petrov reached into the enormous knitting bag she apparently carried everywhere, including, evidently, black-tie receptions, and produced a small, soft, pale bundle she’d clearly spent weeks working on and had refused, every time asked, to explain. She held it out. A tiny, hand-knit sweater, sized for a person who didn’t exist yet.
