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My eyes come up. “You know about that.”

“She was carrying the plan around last week. Showed me the drawer situation.”

“She has made the desk impossible to miss.”

“Kid commits.”

“She does.”

I measure the reach, and it is better, and it is not yet enough better to say out loud. I lower his arm and he rolls the shoulder once without appearing to.

“What’d you want to be at twelve?” he asks.

The question surprises me enough that I answer it before I have sorted the answer. “To get out of school.”

“Excellent ambition.”

“I modeled.”

His eyebrows go up. “Seriously?”

“Yes.”

“Like, catalogs?”

“Catalogs. Some runway. They wanted Swedish girls then, tall and blonde, and at fifteen I was both.” I reposition his elbow. “Milan twice. Hamburg for a season. Hold here.”

He obeys immediately, which is the part nobody who has met him outside this room would believe.

“Why’d you quit?”

“I wanted work that asked more of my brain than my face.”

“That’ll do it.”

He has not told me I could still model, and I did not know how tired I was of that sentence until he leaves it unsaid.

“What would you do more of?” he asks.

I check the angle. “Go where people work. Watch the movement in the place where it matters.”

“Like the rink.”

“Yes.”

“You liked it out there.”

“I did.”

His mouth changes, and I know he is remembering the shirt, and so am I, and I move his arm before either of us has to find out which of us would have said it.

This time he is the one who smiles first.

“Again.”

He gives me the arm. I take the measurement, write it down, and do not tell him what it says.

Chapter thirteen