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“I contain multitudes.” He hopped down off the stool, satisfied with himself, and returned to the laptop like nothing had happened. “Also I’m going to need a producer credit when this becomes a documentary.”

“There is no documentary, Marco.”

“Not yet.”

Jessa grabbed the mouse and started scrolling herself, reading headlines out loud in a newscaster voice that got progressively more unhinged with each one. “‘Sharpe Global Announces Fourth Consecutive Year of Record Growth.’ Sexy. ‘Norden Sharpe: The Hospitality Industry’s Most Private CEO.’ Aggressively sexy. This one’s just a photo of a building, but I’m including it for tone.”

Marco leaned over her shoulder, squinting at a grainy long-lens photo taken from what looked like a rooftop two blocks away. “That jawline is doing a lot of narrative work with very little information. I respect it.”

“You can’t review a jawline from forty feet.”

“I absolutely can. It’s a skill.”

Jessa found the last of Gerri’s cookies in the paper bag on the worktable, held it up like evidence, and ate it without asking. “These are insane, by the way. Who baked these. I need this recipe more than I need most of my current relationships.”

“You don’t know who Gerri is?”

“I don’t need to know her. I need to know her baker.”

Between the two of them, Romily got approximately zero new information and roughly forty minutes of secondhand chaos. It beat researching alone, against all logic.

Marco sobered for exactly one second, hand landing on her shoulder. “You know you don’t actually have to do this alone.”

“I know.”

“Good.” The seriousness lasted about as long as a single blink, then vanished behind the usual grin. “Now. Is he tall? I need this information for the story I’m building.”

“I don’t know. I haven’t met him.”

“Unacceptable. Find out immediately.”

“I’ll schedule it around my ruined finances.”

“Multitask.”

Jessa claimed to be ordering food, disappeared into the office to do it, and came back twenty minutes later having ordered nothing, mid-sentence about a true-crime episode she’d listened to twice and needed to relitigate out loud regardless. “—and the whole time, the neighbor’s been watching the house. For weeks. Nobody notices the van because it’s beige. Nobody ever suspects beige.”

“Is this relevant to my situation?”

“Everything’s relevant to your situation. That’s the lesson of the podcast.” Jessa flopped into the chair by the worktable. “Also, hypothetically, if a rich, secretive, possibly-not-entirely-human CEO wanted to keep tabs on someone before officially hiring her, how would he do it?”

“I don’t love where this is going.”

“I’m saying. Beige van energy.”

Marco, who had migrated to the office stool at some point and appeared to be losing a slow war with consciousness, chin dropping and snapping back up every few minutes, cracked one eye open. “If he’s watching her, he’s not being subtle about admiring the artistry.”

“That’s not comforting, Marco.”

“I didn’t say it was comforting. I said it was accurate.”

“Nobody is watching anybody.” Romily pulled a fresh sketchpad toward her and roughed out a replacement design for the ruined piece while the two of them ran out of steam around her — cleaner lines this time, a shape that couldn’t fold in on itself even if it wanted to. Working with her hands quieted her mind in a way arguing with Jessa never quite managed.

Marco caught sight of the sketch over her shoulder a while later and went quiet, which from Marco counted as a real compliment. All the performance dropped out of his voice long enough for him to say, “That’s good. That’s the good kind of ugly. The kind that means it’s still working.”

“It’s not ugly.”

“It’s supposed to be a little ugly right now. That’s how you know it hasn’t finished lying to you yet.” He straightened, and the performance clicked back into place like a switch. “Anyway. Is he tall? Still need to know.”