Page 5

The invoice stack hadn’t moved. The ruined piece hadn’t gotten any less ruined. Gerri’s card sat on the corner of the table: a phone number, no name, no warning label for the centuries-old complication that might pick up on the other end of the line.

She flipped the card over. Blank. Unhelpful, the way expensive things often were. She set it down next to the little shelf where she kept the stuff she’d never explained to anyone, not even Jessa — a doorknob from some demolition job, a key that didn’t open anything she owned, a chipped tile she’d liked the color of and never got around to throwing out. No system. No stated reason. Only the one habit that wasn’t armor.

She looked at the wreck on the marver, then the invoices, then the card, and ran the same math she’d been running alone since the day she opened this studio with nothing behind her but a lease and a stubborn streak: she needed the money, she didn’t trust the offer, and neither of those facts was going to cancel the other out no matter how long she stared at them.

There was probably a version of tonight where she called somebody and talked it through before she signed anything. She didn’t have that somebody on speed dial, and wasn’t about to invent one over a business card and two excellent cookies.

The ruined lump was still sitting there, unbothered, having wrecked her afternoon and moved on with its life. She was almost impressed by the commitment.

She said yes anyway. Silently. To no one. Standing in a studio that had cost her eleven hundred dollars and possibly her peace of mind — which, historically, was how her best and worst decisions started. Usually before coffee.

Behind her, Jessa’s thumbs were already flying across her phone screen. Romily caught enough of it over her shoulder to make out HOT RICH PARANORMAL MAN?? SHE SAID YES?? CALL ME THE SECOND— before Jessa angled the screen away, protective, like Romily might try to edit her own headline.

The phone buzzed back almost immediately. Jessa glanced at it, then held it up without comment. Even upside down, Romily made out several exclamation points and the word DETAILS in all caps, twice.

“He wants details.”

“He’s not getting details tonight.”

“He’s absolutely getting details tonight. I told him ten minutes. He’s counting.”

The furnace kept roaring, indifferent to all of it, the way it always did. Outside, the afternoon had gone the flat gray of a day that couldn’t commit to rain. Fitting.

“You’re really doing this,” Jessa said, not looking up from her phone.

“Apparently.”

“Should I be worried?”

“Immensely.” She said it lightly, like it wasn’t the truest thing she’d said all day. “Doing it anyway.”

She didn’t know yet what she’d agreed to. She knew she was out of clean rags, her studio smelled like scorched metal, and there was a second cookie in the bag with her name on it.

She ate that one too.

TWO

ROMILY

Eleven p.m., and Romily was three browser tabs deep into hating a website.

The furnace had gone quiet hours ago. Her tea had gone cold an hour before that. She drank it anyway, out of spite, the same policy she applied to most disappointing things in her life.

The Sharpe Global homepage loaded slow, on purpose probably, the kind of slow that made you feel the luxury before you’d even seen it. White marble. Gold accents that never quite tipped into gaudy. A hero video of the flagship lobby that panned so smoothly it looked like no human hand had ever come near it.

“Oh, I hate it already,” she told the screen.

She kept scrolling anyway. Every photo whispered the same message: we have standards, and your personality is a liability. Corridors so symmetrical they looked edited even when they weren’t. A spa page with the tagline “Radical Stillness.” A restaurant page that used the word “curated” four times in one paragraph — she counted, out loud, jabbing a finger at the screen each time like she was keeping score. The testimonials were worse. Guests describing their stay as “transformative,” like a king bed and good lighting were a religious experience.

The leadership page gave her headshots and titles for everyone except the one person she needed. A grid of smiling executives — Chief of This, VP of That — and then, where the CEO photo belonged, a placeholder silhouette. Norden Sharpe, Founder & CEO, in a font that looked expensive and said nothing else.

She kicked her chair back and got up to steal the last of the good tea bags from Jessa’s stash, muttering the whole way there. A magician’s empty top hat. That’s what the website was. All the flourish, none of the rabbit.

Back at the desk, she tried a review site instead — the unpolished kind, the one nobody edited. Mostly five stars. A few complaints about pricing. One review, buried on page four: staff incredible, but the owner walked through the lobby once and the whole room went quiet, like a teacher showed up to a party. She read that one twice.

The careers page had a photo of six employees laughing at a laptop screen that clearly displayed a spreadsheet. Nobody laughed at a spreadsheet. She closed the tab before it could do any more damage to her opinion of laughter as a concept.

She’d worked for enough polished, controlling clients to know this flavor of website by heart. This wasn’t a job. This was a hostage situation with much better lighting.