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Inside, the house smelled like something yummy. Cinnamon and sugar. We settled in the living room with mugs of tea, a plate of huge and soft snickerdoodle cookies. I was in heaven.

Angelica launched in. She was involved in the Make-A-Wish effort this year, had been for the past three, and she wanted to know if Millie was still connected to the same organizer she'd worked with the previous spring.

"I am." Millie reached for her phone. "Actually, I’ve been making a lot of phone calls. Donations started slow, but they’re ticking upwards.”

I took another cookie. "These are fantastic. How can I help?”

“Donations,” they both said in unison.

“We’re having a silent auction, and some of your pieces would be perfect,” Angelica said. Then she turned to Millie. "Can I ask you something personal?"

Millie looked up. "Sure."

"How have you been holding up with all of the travelling? Renzo mentioned you’ve taken three plane trips out of state without him this year. I think that's remarkable. How are you managing to cope?”

Millie set her mug down. She was quiet for a moment, but it was the kind of quiet that was thinking rather than avoiding.

"The thing that helps the most was naming each moment as it was happening. Just: I am walking through this door. I am sitting in this seat. I couldn't think about what came next or I would spiral. I had to stay in the three feet around me."

I thought about that. The three feet around me.

"Having Renzo with me the first trip, helped immensely," she added. "He is annoyingly good at keeping me in the present moment." She said it with so much warmth that it didn’t come out as a complaint.

"You're doing so well," Angelica said softly.

Millie shook her head. "I'm doing better. There's a difference." She looked at me. "How are things with you and Adam? Have you spent much time with James? He’s such a love."

“Adam has approved my first sleepover tonight. It was slow going in the beginning. James was rooting for Miss Angel over here to begin with.” I pointed toward my best friend.

Millie laughed. “For real?”

“For real,” Angelica said. “He said I was pretty, but I truly think it was my Mario Kart abilities.”

“Renzo’s really impressed by Adam,” Millie said.

“He is?” I was fishing.

"He said that Adam is competent and fair and has excellent taste in building materials." She paused. "And that when he talks about you, he makes it sound like you hung the moon."

I opened my mouth and then closed it.

"Renzo said that," Angelica confirmed, apparently done pretending she had nothing to do with any of this.

I processed that for a second.

"Speaking of which." I set down my mug. "Have you noticed that Renzo has been unusually quiet about the project lately?"

The shift in Millie's expression was small but immediate.

"Yes." She said it carefully. "He usually tells me everything about all of his projects. Every setback, every win, who showed up late, whose coffee order was wrong. Lately, I get a brief summary and a subject change." She looked at me. "I told myself it was because things were moving fast."

"Adam's pretty close-mouthed about this project," I said. "But I don't have a baseline for how talkative he usually is about work, so I didn't want to assume."

"I should have seen it as the red flag it was," Millie said quietly.

Angelica had gone still beside me. She was thinking. I recognized the look; it was the expression she wore when something was assembling itself in her head.

"Code's been on his laptop a lot," she said. "Kit mentioned it. She said he'd pulled up what looked like camera feeds of the property."