Sienna thought about Adriana’s face in the moment before she’d turned away. The look that had been, for just a moment, undefended. The tightness in her jaw that wasn’t anger. She’d saidit’s genuinewith a conviction that didn’t match the persona she was wearing. The scent of her perfume that had been close enough to taste.
“I don’t think she knows the difference anymore,” Sienna said.
Dani was quiet for a moment. Her dark eyes moved from Sienna’s face to the spot where Adriana had disappeared into the crowd and back again. Her expression was the one she wore when she was assembling a picture from pieces she hadn’t been given permission to see.
“Sienna.”
“Don’t.”
“I’m just going to say one thing.”
Sienna pinched the bridge of her nose.
“Don’t.”
“She looked at you like you were a problem she wanted to solve by getting closer, not further away.” Dani raised her hands in surrender when Sienna opened her mouth to argue. “That’s all I’m saying. I’m done. Professional observation from your business partner and best friend. Take it or leave it. Now let’s go get the Sterling Reach guy’s email before he leaves, because he was two drinks in and starting to talk about festival exclusivity, and I need to get back to him before his discretion catches up with his drinking.”
Sienna took a breath. Let it out. Straightened her blazer and felt the reassuring weight of her phone in her pocket and the press of her feet on the floor and all the solid, physical details that meant she was here, in this room, doing her job, and not standing in the space where Adriana Lovett had just been, thinking about the scent of vetiver and the faint lines at the corners of those eyes.
“Let’s go,” she said, and followed Dani back into the crowd.
She worked the room for another forty-five minutes. Got the Sterling Reach email. Had a brief, productive exchange with a sound designer who had worked on two of Burty’s earlier productions and remembered irregularities in the payment schedules. Collected three business cards and left one of her own with Grace Nakamura’s assistant, along with a note that said only:Whenever you’re ready. No pressure.
But through all of it, through every handshake, every conversation, every smile, she could still feel the exact temperature of the air in the space where Adriana Lovett had stood close enough to touch and told her to be careful with a sincerity that sounded, impossibly, like it mattered.
6
ADRIANA
The deposition transcript was forty-seven pages long, and Adriana had read the same paragraph three times without absorbing a single word.
She sat in her office with the transcript on the screen, the cursor blinking at page thirty-one, and could not for the life of her concentrate on the expert witness testimony regarding intellectual property valuation that was going to determine whether her client, a streaming platform in a licensing dispute, settled for eight figures or went to trial. It was a legal problem she ordinarily found absorbing, one that required the sharp application of strategy and precedent that made her very good at what she did and made what she did feel worthwhile.
Today, the words kept rearranging themselves into the shape of a woman standing in a cocktail lounge sayingthe truth about your clientwith the calm, unshakeable certainty of someone who had already decided what was real.
Adriana closed the transcript and pressed her palms flat against the cool surface of her desk.
Two encounters. That was all. The gala and the Palomar. Two conversations totaling perhaps ten minutes. And somehow Sienna Ramirez had taken up residence in the part of Adriana’s mind that she reserved for problems she couldn’t solve through strategy alone.
It was the defiance. That was what Adriana told herself. Sienna’s refusal to be intimidated was a professional concern, a variable that resisted the usual pressure, which made it strategically important and therefore worthy of analysis. The fact that the defiance had been delivered with eyes that didn’t waver and a voice that dropped quiet and dangerous when challenged was irrelevant. The fact that Adriana could still map the exact geography of Sienna’s face in the lounge’s amber lighting, the angle of her jaw, the curl that had escaped her loose knot and fallen against her neck, how she breathed when she was about to say exactly what she meant, was irrelevant.
Adriana pressed her thumbs against her temples and exhaled slowly through her nose.
She had not been this distracted by another person in years. Not since Rachel. She straightened in her chair and returned her attention to the deposition transcript.
Page thirty-one: expert witness testimony on intellectual property valuation.
She lasted four more minutes before giving up entirely.
A knock at her open door. Andrew stood in the frame, holding two coffees and wearing the expression of someone who had already diagnosed the problem and was waiting for the patient to describe the symptoms.
“You’ve been staring at the same screen for twenty minutes,” he said.
“I’m reviewing a deposition.”
“You’re reviewing the inside of your own head. The deposition is just the screensaver.” He set one of the coffees on her desk and took the chair across from her with the comfortable ease of someone who had been occupying that chair for the better part of a decade. “What’s going on?”
Adriana picked up the coffee. It was black and bitter, no sugar, as she always took it. Andrew never asked. He just knew.
