Page 123 of Legacy Elite

"Not here."

"That's not—"

"I have somewhere to be."

"You've had somewhere to be every single time you've seen me since yesterday."

He goes past me down the stairs.

I stand on the landing with my hand on the rail and I do not go after him, and it is, I would like the record to show, extremely difficult.

The Leadership and Governance rotation has visiting practitioners this week.

That's the polite version. The actual version is that all three Great Houses have people on this campus at the moment, because somebody sent them a notification eight days ago, and the academy has cleverly decided to fold the resulting circus into a teaching opportunity.

So on Thursday afternoon I'm in the long room on the first floor of the administration building with about thirty second-years, a Draeven policy adviser, a woman from the legal office, and a Council staffer who has been talking about consultation frameworks for nineteen minutes.

And an Ardent delegation.

Which is how Linnea Vane comes to be standing at the back of my leadership rotation in a coat that fits, holding a folder.

"Oh, God," Sophia says beside me, with enormous satisfaction.

"Don't."

"I'm just observing the room."

"Sophia."

"It's a rotation, Jessica, I'm rotating."

Here's what I get to do for the next fifty minutes: pretend to take notes about consultation frameworks while watching Ander Ardent and Linnea Vane run a room together.

Because that's what it is. They're not doing anything. They're standing at the back of somebody else's session being polite. And they are running it anyway, in a way that has nothing to do with the front of the room.

Linnea knows who Ander needs to speak to. She moves him — not obviously, just a hand at his elbow and a half-step, and he goes, because he's been going for years. She knows which of the visitors matters and which one only thinks he does. When somebody corners Ander for too long she appears beside them with a question for the other man and Ander is free inside eight seconds and neither of them acknowledges that it happened.

He does it for her too. Somebody asks Linnea something and Ander answers half of it before she has to, and she picks up the second half without a beat, and it's so seamless that it takes me twenty minutes to notice they're doing it at all.

Leo. Of course he is. You could put that man in a room with four hundred strangers and within a minute the room would rearrange itself around him without anybody deciding to.

When the coffee comes round he takes two and hands her one without asking what she wants.

That's the one that gets me.

Not the hand on the elbow. The coffee.

Because he knows. He's known since they were children. And there's a whole architecture there — a hundred rooms like this one, a thousand of these afternoons, two families and a shared future that everyone has been quietly building since before either of them could object.

And I stand there with a notebook I've written nothing in, and jealousy goes straight through me.

Fuck. I'm jealous.

Not in a mature, self-aware way that I'd like credit for. I would like to put my coffee down and walk over there and stand between them, and I have absolutely no right to, and I want to anyway.

It would be so much more convenient if Linnea Vane were terrible.

She isn't. She's never once been terrible. She's funny, which is the part I still resent most.