Toll, Toll the Wedding Bells!!!!!!!!!

VP and BP Rankings
Claire - 176 VP - 8600 BP - 3 Achievs
Chloe - 146 VP - 9250 BP - 3 Achievs
Erin - 144 VP - 12100 BP - 3 Achievs
Sam - 139 VP - 9400 BP - 3 Achievs
Emi - 132 VP - 11750 BP - 3 Achievs
Riley - 131 VP - 12800 BP - 3 Achievs
Marissa - 127 VP - 5000 BP - 3 Achievs
Myra - 126 VP - 10000 BP - 3 Achievs
Emily - 122 VP - 11600 BP - 3 Achievs
Liesa - 107 VP - 6900 BP - 3 Achievs
Norah - 106 VP - 2000 BP - 3 Achievs
Dawn - 102 VP - 13500 BP - 3 Achievs
Laura - 0 BP - 2 Achievs

Morning came into the Master's Suite sideways, a long bar of gold laid across the carpet and up over the foot of the bed, and nobody in the bed paid it the slightest attention.

Andy lay on his back in the middle of the mattress, one arm flung out wide, asleep so deeply his mouth had fallen a little open. Two of Laura were wound around him. One was tucked into his side with an arm looped over his chest; the other had her face pressed into the hollow of his shoulder and a knee hooked across his thigh, as if she'd climbed onto him in the night and simply never climbed back off.

Laura had fallen asleep first, somewhere in the dark hours before dawn, and the instant she did, her body had come apart into three again. The third of her had ended up at the far edge of the bed, curled small under the blanket with her back to the room. Nothing showed of her but a long slope in the covers and a few strands of hair on the pillow.

The room was quiet. Somewhere outside a gull was complaining about something.

Next door, in the Consort's Bedroom, Emi woke up alone.

She didn't move right away. She never did. The dream was already thinning out, the way hers always did in the first minute — the usual kind now, warm and slow, Andy's hands in it and a great deal of her own skin — and she lay there and let it drain off without chasing it. When it was gone she opened her eyes and found the orchid on the nightstand had put out two new blooms since last night. She considered them for a second. They were very white, and she was fairly sure they hadn't been there before.

She had no memory of coming to bed here. The last thing she could find was the other room: the three of them together, time going soft and stretched around her the way it always did, and then nothing. Somebody had carried her in and tucked the blanket up to her chin. She had a decent idea who, and why.

Emi stretched, all six arms at once, and felt her joints pop in a satisfying little chain from shoulder to wrist. Then she lay back and looked at the ceiling and smiled at it.

It was, she decided, exactly the kind of morning that called for an ambush.

She slid out from under the blanket and padded to the connecting door on bare feet. The marble floor was cool. She eased the handle down with one hand while two others braced the door so it wouldn't creak, and the remaining three hovered at her sides for balance, not doing much of anything. Sneaking was a skill she'd practiced. It was not a skill she would ever admit to having practiced.

The door opened without a sound. Emi slipped through, turned, and let it settle shut behind her by degrees.

The Master's Suite bedroom was bright and warm and smelled like sleep. She took a second to find everyone. Andy, flat on his back in the middle. Laura, both of her, wrapped around him from two directions, one head on his chest and the other on his shoulder. Three shapes in the bed. That was right; that was what Laura looked like when she was left to her own devices, and Emi had long since stopped counting her twice. At the far edge of the mattress the blankets had been kicked into a heap, the way blankets always ended up when Andy slept with anyone, and she gave the heap no more thought than it deserved.

She crept closer. Andy snored once, softly, and one of Laura's hands flexed on his chest and went still again.

Emi stopped at the edge of the bed and planned the approach. Four arms for Andy, since he was the biggest target. One for each of Laura's bodies. She'd have to go over the top rather than around, and she'd have to commit, because a half-hearted ambush was worse than no ambush at all.

She put one knee on the mattress.

The bed was soft, and the mattress dipped under her weight a good half-breath before she was ready to move. She felt it happen and knew instantly it had given her away. Andy's snoring hitched. Both of Laura's bodies stirred against him, heads lifting a fraction off his chest and shoulder, as if something had tugged them up from a long way down.

There was nothing to do but go.

“Rise and shine!” Emi crowed, and launched herself at all three shapes with every arm she had. “It is officially morning! Everybody up! Up, up, up!”

What she got back was not the shriek she'd been hoping for. Andy jerked and made a noise like a man who'd been expecting a noise, half grunt and half laugh. Both of Laura's bodies flinched in the same instant, a quick, muffled jolt that was already turning into laughter before it finished. They'd felt the bed tip. They'd been braced, not much, but enough. Emi, sprawled across the three of them with hands in hair and on ribs and around one of Andy's ankles, felt a small, genuine stab of professional disappointment.

At the same time, the heap of blankets at the far end of the bed exploded.

The covers went flying. A third Laura bolted upright out of them, eyes wide and hair everywhere, and let out a raw, wordless shout — the same startled sound the other two had just made, the same pitch.

Emi screamed.

It came out of her far louder than anything anyone else in the room had managed, a real, full-throated scream, and she was off the bed before she'd decided to move. She staggered backward, caught her heel on the rug, and ended up on her feet by pure luck, one hand pressed flat over her heart, two more flung up in front of her, the rest grabbing at air. Her breath came in fast, shallow pulls. She stared at the third Laura. The third Laura stared back.

One, two, three, Emi counted, without meaning to. She counted again. The number stayed the same.

For a second the room was completely silent.

Then Andy started laughing. He laughed so hard he had to roll half onto his side to do it, which dislodged one of Laura and made her start laughing too, which set off the other two, and it was the kind of laughter that feeds itself, each round making the next one worse.

“In fairness,” Andy managed, wiping at his eyes, “none of us saw that coming either.”

“You—” Emi pointed at him with three hands at once. Her heart was still going like a hummingbird. “You could have warned me! You could have left a note, or put a sign on the door that said beware of—” She tried to finish and couldn't, because she was laughing now too, bent nearly double, all six arms wrapped around her own middle. “Beware of the extra—”

It went nowhere after that.

“Which one of us,” Laura said, from all three mouths at once, “did the screaming, exactly?”

“That is not a fair question and you know it,” Emi wheezed.

“I heard it from over here,” all three of her said. The far body pointed at her own ear, while the two by Andy settled back against him. “Pretty sure the whole Hotel heard it.”

“I have been emotionally ambushed in my own ambush.” Emi straightened up, still breathing hard, and pushed her hair out of her face with two hands while a third stayed on her chest. “I think I need to sit down.”

“You planned this,” Andy said. “You actually planned this. I could feel you planning it through the wall.”

“You could not,” Emi said. “You were snoring through the wall.”

“She's right, you were,” Laura said, all three of her at once, and the far body flopped back down onto the pillows with an arm over her eyes. “My heart is still going. You made my heart go in three places, Emi. Do you know how that feels?”

“Good,” Emi said. “Now you know how it felt to be me, about ten seconds ago.”

Nobody stopped laughing right away. It came and went in waves, somebody getting nearly under control and then catching somebody else's eye and losing it again, until the waves got smaller and further apart and finally stopped. Andy let out a long breath and scrubbed a hand over his face. The sunlight had crept another few inches up the blanket.

Emi sat down on the edge of the mattress, carefully this time. She looked at the third Laura, then at the other two, then back. The laughter was still sitting in her chest, but something underneath it had gone quiet and curious.

“Okay, seriously,” she said. “Since when are there three of you in here?”

“Last night,” Laura said, all three of her together, plainly. “After you fell asleep.”

“And is it...” Emi made a small circling gesture with one hand that took in the whole bed. “Is it permanent? Or does it wear off, like a costume?”

“It doesn't wear off,” all three of her said. “It's an upgrade. No returns.”

Emi took that in. She looked at the third body a moment longer, at the ordinary way it pushed its hair back, exactly the same movement she'd seen Laura make a thousand times, now happening in one more place than it used to. It was not strange, exactly. It was not ordinary yet, either, but it was already on its way there.

“Last night,” Emi repeated. “While I was asleep. You got a whole extra Laura while I was asleep in the next room.”

“You were very asleep,” all three of her said. “Andy carried you. You didn't even twitch.”

“It was Laura's wedding present,” Andy said defensively.

“Okay,” Emi said again, more softly. Nobody made a move to get up after that.

Emi didn't decide to climb back in so much as find herself doing it. She crawled up the mattress into the middle of everything, and Andy lifted his arm to make room without being asked, and the two of Laura beside him shifted over to let her in, and the third came across the bed on her knees and settled in against Emi's back. “Come here,” Andy said, low, the laugh all gone out of his voice.

“I'm coming. Give me a second.” Emi's arms were still sorting themselves out. “There's more of everybody than there was yesterday.”

“Take your time,” Laura said, from behind her and beside her at once.

There was a short, clumsy minute of it, knees and elbows and too many hands, the kind of arranging that people do when there are more of them than a bed was ever really built for. Emi had six arms to put somewhere, and for once she wasn't entirely sure where they all went.

She worked it out slowly. One hand went flat on Andy's chest, where she could feel his heartbeat, still a little quick from laughing. One went into Laura's hair. One found a waist, one found a wrist, and the last two tucked themselves in against her own ribs, because there wasn't anywhere else they needed to be. Behind her, the third Laura's forehead came to rest between her shoulder blades, warm and heavy.

Nobody said anything. It wasn't the kind of quiet that needed filling.

The air in the room changed a little, the way it always did around Emi at moments like this. It went a degree warmer and took on a faint sweetness, something like jasmine, or like a garden after rain, with no source anyone could have pointed to. Nobody remarked on it. Andy breathed out slowly, and Emi felt his whole body loosen under her hand, and felt Laura's bodies loosen with him, all of her at once, the way they always seemed to settle whenever the two of them were touching.

Emi lay there and listened to the three of them breathe. Andy's breathing was slow and deep. Laura's came from three places, not quite in unison, a small ripple of the same breath arriving at slightly different moments, and Emi found she liked listening to it more than she'd expected to. She thought she might get used to it. She thought, a little further off, that she wasn't sure yet what her hands were supposed to do about an extra Laura in the long run, and whether she'd need to learn the whole thing over again, and then she let the thought go without answering it.

Andy's hand came up and closed over hers where it lay on his chest. One of Laura's hands found the back of Emi's neck and stayed there. Nobody was holding on tightly. Nobody was letting go, either.

Outside, the gull had given up complaining. The bar of light had reached the pillows now and lay across all of them together, and none of them got out from under it.

Whatever the day wanted from them, it could ask later.

---

Sam had been awake for twenty minutes and hadn't moved once, which for her was something close to a personal record.

The guestroom was full of the kind of grey-gold light that couldn't decide yet whether it was morning. The sheet over the two of them had gone soft and warm with sleep, and Liesa lay half on top of her under it, one leg thrown across Sam's and her cheek on Sam's collarbone. Married. Less than a full day of it so far. Sam kept turning the word over and finding it still fit, the way a new ring keeps surprising you when you catch it on your own hand.

Liesa was awake too. Sam could tell by her breathing, and by her fingers.

They were moving along the top of Sam's shoulder in a slow line, out toward the arm and back again. Even that small a motion came out of her unhurried and liquid, a roll of the wrist that looked as if it had been rehearsed for an audience, though there was no audience and Liesa had never once been able to make her body move any other way, since that tranformation. The shoulder under her fingers was harder than it used to be. Since Bearing the World Upon Her Shoulders had taken hold, Sam could lift things she hadn’t imagined even budging, and Liesa had spent a good part of the last week touching that shoulder like it might explain itself.

“You are awake,” Liesa said. “I can hear you thinking from here.”

“Nope.”

“Sam.”

“Mostly nope. Give me five more minutes of pretending I'm not.”

Liesa's fingers kept moving. Out to the arm. Back again. When she spoke again her voice had gone quieter, the accent sitting a little heavier in it, the way it did when she'd been rehearsing something.

“Is today.”

Sam didn't say anything. She felt the words land against her collarbone and stay there.

“I am not asking you not to go,” Liesa said. “We decided this. Both of us, long before today, and I meant it, and I still mean it. I am not going to fight you on it now.” Her hand stopped on Sam's shoulder and rested there, flat. “I only need to say it once. Out loud. Now that it is here. You are going to fight.”

There it was.

Sam opened her mouth and felt the joke already coming up to meet it, easy as breathing. “Well, I mean, it's flattering. Not every girl gets fought over by—”

She stopped. It wasn't a decision, exactly. The sentence just ran out of floor, and she let it drop rather than climb back up after it.

“Yeah,” she said instead. “It's true. I'm going to fight.” She turned her head on the pillow so she could see Liesa's face, or the top of it at least, a mess of hair and one eye, open and watching her. “Not going to lie or dress it up You'd know. You'd hate it.”

“I would hate it very much,” Liesa agreed.

She pushed herself up on one elbow. The sheet slid down her back. Her face, now that Sam could see all of it, was very calm, and her eyes weren't calm at all.

“Do not be the hero, schat,” Liesa said. “No martyr thing.” Something moved at the corner of her mouth that wasn't a smile. “Our baby needs both moms.”

It hit somewhere Sam hadn't braced for.

She'd said that line—do not be the hero—to half the people she loved. Andy had heard it. Laura had heard it. She'd built a whole argument on it once and meant every word, and it had never occurred to her until this exact second what it sounded like from the other side. It didn’t land as a joke, but as the thing it had always really been underneath.

“That's mine,” Sam said, and her voice had gone quieter than she meant it to. She reached up and pulled Liesa the rest of the way down, into her, and the words ended up somewhere in Liesa's hair. “You stole that from me.”

“I married you. Now is ours.”

Sam held on. She breathed in the smell of Liesa’s hair and felt her own heartbeat going steady and heavy under Liesa’s hand, and for a while she couldn’t say anything at all, because the words were too big to get out in order.

Married. Our baby. Both moms.

She kept turning them over. Three months ago, she hadn’t even had a steady girlfriend. Now there was a ring on her finger that meant something to another person, and there was — God, there was actually a baby, a real one, growing somewhere in the mess of all this, and it was theirs. She pressed her face into Liesa’s hair and laughed a little, one breath, mostly air.

Liesa felt it. She shifted against Sam’s chest, tipped her head up. “What is funny?”

“Nothing.” Sam swallowed it back. “Everything. You said our baby. Like it’s a thing we have. Like we’re people who have that.”

“We are people who have that.”

“I know. I know we are.” Sam kissed the top of her head because she couldn’t not. “I just keep having to remind myself you’re real.”

Liesa made a small sound against her collarbone—not quite a laugh either—and then went quiet again, and Sam knew what that quiet meant now.

“And I’m not planning on dying today, Liesa.” She kept her voice level, because it mattered that it be level. “That’s it. That’s the only promise I’m making. I’m not going to tell you nothing’s going to happen. I don’t know that. But that one I can make, and mean, so that’s the one you get.”

Liesa's answer came back muffled against her shoulder. “Is not enough.”

“I know it's not.”

“Is not enough, and I take it anyway.”

Sam didn't answer that. She lay there with her arms around her wife and listened to the quiet, and after a while she noticed the thing she'd been too busy talking to notice before.

Liesa was holding on hard. Not the loose, lazy way she'd been lying there twenty minutes ago, but with both arms locked around Sam's ribs, fingers dug in, as if the bed were moving and Sam were the only fixed thing on it. Her breath was going in and out a little too carefully. All that calm on her face, Sam thought. All that calm, and this underneath it.

“Hey,” Sam said softly. “You're not fine.”

Liesa went very still, as if Sam had caught her at something.

“I'm not fooled, is what I'm saying. You don't have to be fine. Not with me.”

Liesa lifted her head. Her mouth opened on something, and Sam didn't wait to find out what it was going to be. She kissed her.

It was slow. Sam made it slow on purpose, one hand coming up along Liesa's jaw, and for a second Liesa was still under it. Then Liesa kissed her back, hard, one hand sliding up into Sam's hair and closing there, and she didn't let the kiss end. Sam tried to ease back once and Liesa followed her, and that was that.

When Sam finally did pull back, it was only far enough to get her fingers under the hem of Liesa's sleep shirt.

“Is this okay?”

“Ja.”

Liesa lifted her arms. Sam drew the shirt up and over her head and dropped it off the side of the bed, and felt the change go through Liesa almost before the fabric hit the floor. Her breath caught. Colour came up along her throat and her chest, and her back arched in that slow, helpless way it always did, some tide in her turning all at once. Sam knew the rule as well as Liesa did: less clothing, more want, no bargaining with it. She'd seen it a hundred times. She had never once gotten tired of seeing it.

Sam pulled her own shirt off one-handed. Liesa's hands were on her before it was clear of her head, spreading over the width of her shoulders and down her arms, reading the heft of muscle there with her palms.

There wasn't much left between them after that. Sam hooked her thumbs in the waistband of Liesa's underwear and drew them down, and Liesa kicked them the rest of the way off, and the last of it was gone.

From one breath to the next, Liesa's entire body seized, every muscle going taut, and she made a sound between a gasp and a sob—low and wild and nothing at all like the unflappable, coiled-calm Liesa who could face down a challenge in the Banquet Hall without blinking.

She shuddered from her shoulders to her heels. Her eyes went dark and wide, and the sound that came out of her was low and raw and not quite human. Her back arched with it, and in that instant the only thing in the world was getting Sam closer, getting everything closer, her hands digging into Sam’s shoulders with a need so overwhelming it was almost frightening.

Sam could feel it before she could think it: the way Liesa’s want crashed in, huge and unstoppable, a force of nature too big for her to soften or outmaneuver. The next moment, Liesa caught Sam by the back and pulled her down, hard, a decisive snap of her arm that left no room for Sam to hesitate. Their bodies met, skin to skin, and the shock of it hit both of them like a wave. It was so much that for a second neither of them could breathe.

Liesa’s thighs came up around Sam’s hips, locking her in place, and the two of them fit together as if nothing else had ever made sense. Liesa kissed her with a kind of ferocity that melted straight into Sam’s bones, and Sam met it, not holding back, because there was no way to hold back from this.

The world outside narrowed down to this bed, the two bodies on it, and the wild chemistry of what they had become. Sam had lost herself before, but never like this. Perhaps it was the knowledge of what was coming. There wasn’t time for jokes, no space for banter, nothing clever left in her. She was hungry for Liesa and for the feeling of being needed like this, and it short-circuited every other thought she’d had since opening her eyes that morning.

How many times had she imagined what it would be like, wanting someone this much? Not only wanting, but being wanted back, with the kind of certainty that could demolish every wall you’d built up just to survive. She knew she was strong—the transformation had made sure of it—but at the same time, none of her strength mattered here, or it mattered all at once and all for the same reason: Liesa wanted her, and Sam wanted Liesa, and there was no negotiation about what that meant.

She lost track of the sequence after that. Liesa’s hands were everywhere, exploring the definition along Sam’s arms and shoulders, confirming that none of it was a trick of the light. She shivered at the reverence in Liesa’s touch, at the open hunger of her gaze. Sam’s own hands roamed down Liesa’s back, along the arch of her waist, finding the places that made her tremble.

Sam kissed her way down Liesa's throat, and Liesa's fingers twisted in her hair and pushed, not gently. Sam went where she was pushed. She took one nipple into her mouth and then the other, and Liesa writhed under her, the slow, sinuous roll of her body gone wild and uneven now, feral with it. Every small motion from Liesa seemed to echo through her, magnified by the new laws the transformation had set, until Sam could almost feel the feedback loop—every gasp, every shift, a message sent and returned doubled.

When Sam slid a hand down and found Liesa’s thigh, her skin felt fever-hot, her pussy soaked, hot and slick against Sam’s fingers. Liesa whimpered, and the sound triggered something almost animal in Sam. She wanted to be careful, to move slow, but Liesa was already pushing her, wordlessly telling her that slow was the last thing on her mind. Sam gave in to it.

Liesa’s fingers twisted in Sam’s hair, guiding her, insistent, until their mouths found each other again. There was no finesse left in it; it was all hunger. Liesa’s hips jerked up against her palm, and the sound she made was raw and desperate, her face flushing a bright, impossible pink. Even knowing what was supposed to happen—the way the transformation let want override everything—Sam was still caught off guard by the force of it.

She pressed her fingers against Liesa, drawing a slow circle, and Liesa all but shattered in her grip. Sam wanted to take her time, to taste every piece of this, but there was a momentum to what was building, and Liesa wasn’t going to let her draw it out. Liesa’s want was a current.

She eased two fingers inside her, and Liesa bucked so hard they nearly overturned the bed itself, her nails raking down Sam’s back without apology. Sam caught her by the hip, pinning her in place with a grip that would have been bruising if either of them cared. Liesa moaned at being held, at being taken, and it was that sound that finally unmoored Sam from any sense of restraint.

She worked her hand in and out, crooked her fingers, and found the place that made Liesa’s whole body lock up, freezing on a single desperate note. Sam pressed her thumb against Liesa’s clit, drawing tight, slow circles, and Liesa let go all at once, the climax tearing through her with enough force to leave her gasping for air.

For a moment, Liesa’s grip on Sam’s shoulders was the only thing keeping her anchored to the bed; for a moment after that, she seemed not to remember how to breathe. Sam watched her come down, the flush fading, the tension draining out of her like a wave ebbing from shore. It was merely a temporary lessening of her Paint Me Like One of Your French Girls transformation, but there was something beautiful about the aftermath: the way Liesa went slack and heavy at once, the way every harsh line in her body softened.

For the first time in as long as Sam could recall, she felt herself relax along with someone else, letting the urgency go, letting herself be nothing but present. But Liesa wasn’t finished. She rolled Sam onto her back with a force that startled Sam, who half-expected to be the one doing the pinning, not the other way around. Liesa slipped down her body with deliberate slowness, her mouth leaving a trail of heat along Sam’s ribs, her stomach, the jut of her hip. She kissed the muscle there, almost reverent, then slid lower, nestling herself between Sam’s thighs.

She looked up once, her eyes clear and so full of intent it made Sam’s heart stutter. Then she put her mouth on Sam, and Sam had forgotten, as always, that it could feel this good. Liesa’s Cunning Linguist-enhanced tongue was confident, the rhythm slow at first, then building as she read every shiver, every twitch, every sound Sam made. It moved over her slow and certain, and the pleasure came in thick and fast and far too big, every nerve turned up past where it was supposed to go.

Want hit Sam all at once, the pleasure too much, hard and fast and unrelenting. She braced one hand against the headboard, feeling the wood creak and splinter under her grip, and the other knotted in Liesa’s hair, holding on not because she had to but because she needed some kind of anchor.

Liesa’s skill had only improved, but Sam’s body needed the release, and what once took minutes was now seconds, every nerve ending tuned to a higher frequency. Liesa drew out the tension, drawing it tighter and tighter, and Sam tried to control it, to make it last, but it was no use. She came so hard she saw stars, the sound she made echoing through the room, Liesa’s name at the heart of it.

When it was over, Sam let her hand fall away from the headboard. She noticed, with a kind of distant amusement, that she’d left a new crack in the wood above her.

She stroked Liesa’s hair, wordless, because speech was impossible right now. Liesa crawled back up along her, settling exactly where she’d started, face pillowed on Sam’s chest, one leg hooked over hers. The sheet was tangled at their waists; after Liesa put on her underwear and shirt to lower her arousal, Sam pulled it up over both of them. There was no rush to move. The pressure of the world outside the room—the challenge, the wedding, the threat of what was coming—felt suspended, as if the day itself had agreed to wait.

Sam lay there, one hand in Liesa’s hair, the other resting on her back, and tried to slow her breathing, tried to remember why she had ever been afraid of saying the words that had come so easily in the dark. She thought, not for the first time, about the promise she’d made. I’m not planning to die today. She’d said it for Liesa, but it was true for herself, too; she didn’t want to go. Not now, not with this here, a life she wanted more than anything she’d ever had before. The realization was both terrifying and exhilarating. Sam didn’t know if she could keep the promise, but she knew she would try. Their baby would need both moms, after all.

They lay together, not speaking, for a long stretch of time measured only by the change in the light as the sun climbed higher.

Sam kept her arms around Liesa, feeling the heartbeat in both their chests, sometimes in sync, sometimes not. She didn’t want the morning to end. She didn’t want to move on to whatever was supposed to happen next. Maybe they didn’t have to, at least for a little while longer.

“What do you think of the name Sharron?” Sam asked, once she could speak again, kicking off a conversation about baby names that lasted another half-hour, interrupted by kisses and the tender touch ofher wife on her skin.

Neither of them reached for the clock.

Married the Lovey Contestant! +10 VP

It was Norah who was dressed first.

Dawn had woken the way she always did, the moment the sun cleared the water — rested all the way down to the bone, no matter how late the night had run, hair already lying the way she liked it and her face feeling scrubbed and new. She'd stopped marveling at it a long time ago. It was just what mornings were now. She'd rolled over expecting to find the other bed still a lump of blankets, and instead Norah had been sitting on the edge of it in a blouse and slacks, one foot up on the frame, working a strap.

The room was still mostly shadow on Norah's side, the early sun lying in a pale stripe across the floor between the two beds and stopping just short of her shoes. Dawn's ears kept swiveling toward that side of the room without asking her first.

Norah finished the first heel and set that foot down on the rug, then pulled the second shoe onto her lap. Her hair was already perfect. It always was. It was one of those things about Norah that had stopped being strange a long time ago and had never quite stopped being a little unfair.

“You're up early,” Dawn said.

“Couldn't sleep.” Norah threaded the strap through the buckle. “Tried. Gave up around five.”

“You want coffee? I can go down and—”

“I'm fine.” Norah pulled the strap snug and didn't look up. “Sit down a second. I want to tell you something before the day starts eating everything.”

Dawn sat on the end of her own bed, a pillow still in her hands.

Norah finished the buckle. She set her second foot on the floor, and something in her posture settled once both heels were under her, the way a table stops rocking when you find the short leg. Then she looked up, and her face was very plain.

“So. Today's the day,” Norah said. “I'm fighting. With Sam, and probably Sumiku. Same as we worked out. That's not news, I know it's not news, I just—” She waved a hand. “I wanted to say it in this room. Out loud. Before it's real out there.” She hesitated, which Norah almost never did. “And I've been thinking about the Commissary. There's something I could buy. Something that'd make me harder to lose out there, if it comes to that.”

“Okay,” Dawn said, too fast. “Yeah. Okay. Good.”

It was out before she'd thought about it at all.

The mattress under her had started to prickle, the slow, familiar gravel-feeling that crept into any seat that wasn't the right lap. Dawn stood up again without thinking about that either and set the pillow down.

Her next line was already on its way. She could feel it coming up, warm and easy and worn smooth from use, the kind of thing she'd said a hundred times to a hundred people without it ever costing her a thing.

“You're going to be great out there,” Dawn said. “You always are, you'll—”

She stopped.

Her mouth stayed open a second on nothing. Her ears, which had been standing up straight, went slowly down.

Norah frowned at her. “What?”

Dawn looked at the pillow on the bed. She looked at her own hands. It would have been so easy to finish the sentence. It would have been the kindest thing in the world, in a way, and it would have been a lie by omission, and she'd spent a long time now learning to stop doing that, especially to the people who mattered.

“I'm scared,” Dawn said.

Norah didn't say anything.

“And it's not—it’s not just about you.” The words were coming faster now that they'd started, as if they'd been stacked up behind her teeth for days and had only been waiting for the first one to get out of the way. “I'm scared of losing Laura. I'm scared of losing Riley, or Myra, or you, or any of the others.”

Her hands had found each other and were twisting, and she let them.

“And I'm scared of what any of that would do to Andy, if the worst thing actually—” She swallowed. “If the worst thing happens. That's what I've been thinking, nonstop. Since yesterday. Longer.”

Something changed in Norah's face while Dawn was still talking. It wasn't the fear that reached her first; Dawn could see that much. It was the list itself, the names lined up one after another with Norah's own dropped somewhere in the middle of them. Her chin came up a fraction, and her voice when it came was sharper than anything she'd said all morning.

“So I'm on the list.”

“What?”

“The list. Of people who might get lost.” Norah's mouth twisted. “Good to know where I sit. Right in there with everybody you have to worry about.”

It was not anger, exactly, but something older than anger, and Dawn recognized it the way you recognize a song from the first two notes. The leftover. The one nobody counted on. Dawn didn't need the whole story to know the shape of it, or to see that while Norah had grown enormously, that old wound still had to fully scab.

“No,” Dawn said. “That's not what this is.”

“It kind of sounds like what this is.”

“It isn't.” Dawn crossed the space between the beds and stood in front of her, close enough that Norah had to tip her head back to keep glaring. “I'm not doubting what you can do. Not for a second. I've seen what you can do.”

Norah's jaw worked. She didn't look away, but she didn't argue, either.

“You're on that list because I love you,” Dawn said, “not because I think you're the one who can't handle it. I'm scared for every single person I love today, including Sam and even Sumiku, although I’ve only known her for a day, and you're one of them, and that's all it means.” She took a breath. “Being scared for somebody was never a measure of what they're worth.”

Norah looked at her for a long moment. Some of the stiffness went out of her shoulders, slowly, the way a fist loosens when the person making it finally notices it's been clenched.

“Okay,” Norah said at last, and it came out quiet, not with the usual shrug in it. “Sorry. That's an old one. It still gets out before I can stop it, sometimes.”

“I know.”

“You didn't deserve that.”

“You didn't either. The old one, I mean.” Dawn sat down next to her on Norah's bed, carefully, knowing she wouldn't be able to stay there long. “Whoever put it there.”

Norah almost smiled. She looked down at her shoes, the long clean line of the heels, and for a while neither of them said anything. Dawn could feel the bed starting to nag at her already, but she stayed put.

“I've decided,” Norah said.

Dawn waited.

“The Commissary thing. There’s a purchase that lets you copy a transformation from someone else. I'm buying Sam's package. The whole Bearing the World Upon Her Shoulders TF, everything that comes with it. Strength, whatever else is bundled in there.” Norah's voice had gone steady again, the voice she used for numbers, for spreadsheets and quarterly reports, as if saying it in that register made it a line item rather than a decision about her own body. “It's the best edge I can get before today happens, and I'd rather walk in there with it than without it. And—” She glanced sideways at Dawn and then away. “And it means you get something better from me than I'll be careful. That's all I had before. Now you've got this.”

Dawn's throat went tight. She didn't try to say anything yet. She wasn't sure what would come out if she did, and she had a feeling Norah wasn't finished.

Norah let out a breath that was almost a laugh.

“Okay, this part is dumb,” she said. “Don't make fun of me. Some small part of me is hoping it comes with the rest of it, too. The look. Sam's arms.” She held up one of her own, soft and round, and considered it. “Actual muscle. The kind you can see from across a room.”

Dawn looked at her properly, the way she didn't often let herself, since Norah hated being looked at when she hadn't arranged for it first. Out of her heels Norah stood five feet even, full-figured, soft everywhere, not heavy but not hard anywhere either, and none of that had ever been entirely her own to decide.

“Eye of the Beholder,” Dawn said slowly.

“Eye of the Beholder.” Norah gave a short, rueful snort. “My body does whatever his head likes best, whether he knows he likes it or not. So maybe I get the arms. Maybe I get all that strength and I still look exactly like this. I've got no way of knowing until I'm standing at the terminal down in the lobby, with the purchase already gone through.” She shook her head. “So I'll find out down there. In front of whoever's walking by.”

Dawn didn't know if she should laugh. Norah was almost laughing, but not quite, and there was something under the almost that Dawn didn't want to leave alone. She wondered what Norah was really hoping to see in that lobby, and whether Norah knew the answer herself.

“Then I'm coming with you,” Dawn said. It came out quick and certain, no hesitation in it at all. “To the lobby. When you do it. Whatever it looks like after, I want to be the first one who sees it.”

Norah blinked at her.

The bed had finally gotten the better of her; Dawn got up. She didn't sit back down. She leaned in instead and pulled Norah up off the mattress and into a real hug — heels and all, Norah wobbling for half a second before she found her feet and then holding on hard, arms wrapped tight around Dawn's back, her chin hooked over Dawn's shoulder.

Dawn's ears came slowly back up.

They stood there for a while in the middle of the room. The fight was still ahead of them, every bit of it, and nothing either of them had said had made it one inch smaller. But something between them had settled that hadn't been settled when the sun came up, and Dawn held on to Norah and let it stay that way.

---

JJ was working on his fist.

He had it jammed about halfway into his mouth and was gumming at it with enormous concentration, the whole of his small body bent to the job, a fuzz of dark hair standing up on one side where he'd slept on it. Riley sat on the edge of the bed with him propped against her shoulder and let him get on with it. Every so often he paused to consider the ceiling, found nothing there worth the interruption, and went back to work.

Morning light already filled the guestroom. It came in white through the long window and lay across Erin's bed and most of the floor, stopping a foot short of the bed where Riley sat, and Erin had taken the armchair in the far corner, just outside the edge of it too. Erin did that some mornings, when she wanted her head clear; the sun had its own ideas about her, and she'd learned to pick her moments with it. She sat the way she always sat, easy in her own skin and nothing else, one leg tucked up under her, green against the pale upholstery. Riley had stopped noticing, a long time ago, that Erin was naked. She noticed now only because of what today was.

Riley shifted JJ higher on her shoulder. She sent a single lock of her hair down to tuck the edge of his blanket back around his foot, barely thinking about it, the way anyone else might have used a spare hand.

“Can I ask you something?” Riley said.

“You're going to anyway.”

“Probably.” Riley watched her. “How are you actually feeling about it? Walking down the aisle later. In just the veil. With everyone watching.”

Erin snorted. It was short and sharp, and it came before she'd even thought about the question, which was how Riley knew the question had landed somewhere.

“Honestly? Fine,” Erin said. “I picked it. Veil and a bouquet. Everybody in that room has already seen me. Every inch.” She shrugged one shoulder. “The veil's the only thing I'm wearing that I actually chose. I kind of like that.”

Riley studied her a moment longer, half expecting to find the nervousness hiding somewhere, the way it usually hid with Erin, behind a joke or a statistic or the kind of flat, clinical sentence that sounded like a lab report and meant the opposite. She didn't find it. Or if it was there, Erin had put it somewhere Riley couldn't reach this morning, and that was Erin's business.

“Okay,” Riley said.

“Okay.” Erin tilted her head. “My turn. Can you see it? You, doing this. Marrying him, someday. The way the rest of us are today.”

Riley opened her mouth and then shut it again.

The honest answer didn't come quickly. It never did for her, not anymore; it had to be found first, turned over, checked for anything in it that wasn't true, because nothing that wasn't true would come out of her mouth no matter how hard she pushed. JJ gurgled against her collarbone. She waited for the words to get there.

“I don't know,” Riley said at last. “I used to know. I used to be very sure it was a no.” She looked down at the top of JJ's head. “I don't know anymore. That's the real answer. It's not a no. It's just not anything yet.”

Erin didn't push. She only nodded, slowly, as if she'd been handed something breakable and meant to put it down carefully. It was not the answer Riley would have given a month ago, but it was the answer she had now, and Erin seemed to understand that the difference was the whole point.

For a while neither of them said anything. JJ had given up on his fist and was now attempting to eat Riley's collar instead. Outside, somewhere down the hall, a door opened and closed. Riley felt, without trying to, exactly where Myra was — two rooms over, not moving much, probably still in bed — the same way she always knew where the people she loved were, like a hand on the back of her mind.

The quiet drifted. Neither of them steered it. It went, the way quiet in this hotel always seemed to go lately, toward the thing underneath everything else.

“Myra and I worked something out,” Riley said. “For later. If it comes to it.”

Erin went still in her chair.

“Nergal gets here, and Sam needs time. Time to get close enough to do what she has to do. So Myra and I give her time.” Riley kept her voice even, the way she’d keep it for a grocery list. “We step up. We put ourselves in front of him, and we make ourselves the more interesting thing in the room, for as long as it takes. We stall him. That’s the whole plan. That’s our part.”

Erin didn’t speak. She sat perfectly still in her chair, her eyes fixed on Riley’s face as if trying to read something written just beneath the skin. The silence stretched, thick and heavy, while behind her eyes a dozen terrible implications clicked into place one by one.

“Riley,” she said at last, the word coming out low and taut.

“I know.”

“No, listen to me.” Erin sat forward, both feet on the floor now. “Do you actually understand what that could mean? If you two offer yourselves, and Myra backs out, for any reason—she panics, she freezes, something happens to her—then it isn't the two of you anymore. It's just you. Nergal could take you. Just you.”

Riley didn't look away.

She had thought about it. She had thought about it at three in the morning more than once, and in the shower, and while JJ slept on her chest, with his small warm weight in her arms making the thought harder to hold and easier to see at the same time.

“I've thought it through,” Riley said. “All of it. That part too.” She took a breath. “I trust Myra. Completely. She's not going to back out on me. And I’m not going to back out on her. And if something goes wrong anyway, if somehow it's just me—” She shifted JJ on her shoulder, and her voice didn't shake. “Then Andy comes and gets me. I trust him for that. I've watched him do things that aren't supposed to be possible, Erin. With my own eyes. I trust him now. All the way.”

It was true. Every word of it. It had to be; Riley couldn't have said it otherwise, and for once she was glad of the rule, because it meant Erin would know it too without having to wonder.

Erin let out a breath that was mostly relief, and Riley could hear it.

“Yeah,” Erin murmured. “Okay. Yeah. Me too.”

She sat back. Then she sat forward again, as if something had just occurred to her, though from the look on her face it had occurred to her a long time before this.

“For the record,” Erin said, “I'm not sitting this one out, either.”

She got up, crossed the room to the nightstand by her own bed, and pulled open the drawer. When she turned around she was holding a handgun. It was heavy and dark and faintly ridiculous, with two barrels stacked one over the other, and she carried it over and laid it down on the blanket between them, carefully, the muzzle pointed at the wall.

“Erin,” Riley said. It was the only word she had for a second.

“Harper’s Mattie gave it to me. Ages ago. In a fanmail round.” Erin sat down on the bed next to her, the gun lying between them like a third guest. Her fingers found the safety without looking, the movement automatic as breathing. “My father made me learn when I was twelve. Said if I was going to work in conservation, I’d better know how to not get eaten by a bear.”

“So you do know how.”

“I get by.” Erin looked down at the gun, then at her own hand resting on the blanket. She turned her palm up slowly. The pale green of it caught what little light reached that side of the bed, faintly, the way a leaf does when the sun gets behind it. “Knowing how it works and pointing it at something that isn’t a paper target are different things. But it’s not the whole plan. I’m not walking in there with just that.”

She didn't say anything else. She didn't have to.

“Okay,” Riley said quietly, and it came out warmer than she'd meant it to, and she didn't take it back.

JJ chose that moment to squirm. He twisted against Riley's shoulder and let out a thin, rising complaint that promised to get louder, and Erin held out both arms before she'd even thought about it.

“Give him here.”

Riley passed him over. Erin took him in both hands, awkwardly at first, holding him out a little too far as if he were something that might go off, and then pulled him in against her chest and spent a long second working out where his head was supposed to go. JJ settled with a soft sigh against her breasts. He blinked up at her green face with deep suspicion and stuck his fist back in his mouth.

Erin laughed under her breath.

“I need the practice,” she said. “Two of my own, soon enough. I should probably figure out which end is up before then.”

Riley laughed too, and it surprised her how easily it came, after the last ten minutes, as if some knot in her chest had been waiting for an excuse. It was loud in the small, bright room, and JJ startled at it, his whole body jerking, and then went slack again against Erin and resumed chewing. Riley pushed the gun a little further away from all of them with one finger.

“My parents are coming today,” Erin said after a while. She was rocking JJ without seeming to notice she was doing it. “Mom and Dad. My brother, too.”

“How are you feeling about that?”

“Strange.” Erin's mouth twisted. “They don't know. They think they're coming to a normal wedding. Their memories of the invitation got smoothed over before they ever left home, sounds like, so it's just a nice beach wedding, in their heads. Maybe they know there are multiple brides, maybe not. But they have no idea what they're about to walk into.” She looked down at herself, at JJ against her bare green skin. “No idea at all. The Reality Adjustments I bought will make them think there’s nothing odd in me being naked, or green, or having breasts that defy gravity. But how many people here have Adjustments? Does Harper? Sumiku? Katherine? Any of the others who will stand out?”

Riley winced in sympathy. She tried to picture it, two people stepping off a plane into all of this with nothing in their heads but a pretty invitation and a seating chart, and couldn't quite get the picture to hold still.

“Andy's parents, though,” Erin said, and something eased in her voice. “They know. They know everything, they know there’s magic here, they know about the seven of us and the seven of you, and they know what they’re getting into, before they ever saw me two days ago. So when I finally did see them, like this, it was...” She shook her head, half-smiling. “Easier than I'd braced for. A lot easier. Nobody had to pretend anything about The HH, and the Reality Adjustment did the rest for me.”

Riley hummed, low. It came out somewhere between wistful and amused, and she let it stay that way.

She reached over and closed her free hand around Erin's, where it rested against JJ's back. Erin's fingers were warm. JJ lay between them, quiet now, his eyes going heavy.

“Whatever happens today,” Riley said, “none of us is walking into it alone.”

Erin squeezed back and didn't answer. She didn't need to.

The light had crept across the floor while they talked and reached the foot of the bed, where the gun lay pushed well out of JJ's reach. For a little while, nobody moved at all.

---

Claire had been at the desk since a little after five, and she had used four pens.

Blue was for things that happened. Black was for who had said what, as close to the words as she could get them. Green was for things she had seen and not understood, which in her experience was many things about people, and red was for anything she was not sure she had remembered correctly and would need to check against someone else later. The red list was longer than she liked. She had accepted this around six. She had read a letter delivered by Mildred, from Shar, a response to an inquiry sent days ago:

{letter signed "Shar"}

Dearest Claire.

It is a wonderment to see you motivate the others in the pursuit of your quest. I will of course help as I can. First, I can tell you that to the best of my knowledge no one has successfully cultivated such a rose before, until now. They can be found growing at the site of important deaths, and gather memories of the departed. The color of the roses will match the eyes of the departed. These roses require more than just water to thrive and will grow many lesser roses among the one true rose needed. It is also impossible to know when or if the true rose has gathered enough memories. Lastly, the rose itself is not enough for resurrection. They do not provide a body for the departed to return to, and the soul itself must be retrieved and placed in a temporary vessel. The rose will enable this if it is properly watered, needing memories and truths.

One final bit you may find useful, this type of rose is virtually unknown in legend. Only mentioned once in Sumerian text. In the tale the flower grew from the tears of Inanna upon her return to the world and learning her husband, Dumuzid, had taken her place.

That is all I can tell you from my knowledge of the lore of roses. With the importance given on the watering of this one, I could suggest you seek answers about water. My love Nimue has much lore there, being the incarnation of the waters of earth, if you have further questions.

Wishing you success in this endeavor,

{endletter}

There were interesting clues in the letter, and it had made Claire want to go back, and put down on paper what had happened before. Not bullet points or short summaries, or quick jotted notes. The events themselves, in as much detail as she could remember them.

The other half of the bed in the room was still made. Emi had not come back last night, which was expected; Claire had left her with Laura and Andy in the small hours, and had not thought it likely anyone in that room would be letting anyone else go before morning. The quiet suited the work. The window was open a few inches, and the air coming through it smelled of salt, and the pages had spread from the desk onto the chair beside it and, in one small stack, onto the floor.

It had started as a list. Claire had woken up with the thought already fully formed, the way her best thoughts sometimes arrived, as if they had been assembling themselves overnight and were only waiting for her to open her eyes and take delivery: the season was ending, and nobody had written it down. Not the whole of it, anyway. Not properly, in order, with sources. There were ledgers, and there were the show's own records, and there were a great many people's memories, and none of those were the same thing as a story someone had sat down and told on purpose. Besides, remembering what had happened before could still yield clues to what was to come. So she had sat down. She had made a list of everything she would need, and the list had become an outline, and somewhere around six-thirty the outline had become pages.

She was working on the third challenge when something moved in the doorway.

Claire's ears turned before the rest of her did. Sumiku stood just outside the threshold, very still, holding her naginata upright in one of her lower hands with its blade angled carefully away from the doorframe. There was a faint sheen on her skin and her breathing was a little deeper than usual. Her wings were folded tight against her back. The terrace, Claire thought; she had heard, earlier, through the open window, a steady whistle of something cutting air, over and over, in a rhythm that had not varied in forty minutes.

Sumiku bowed from the waist.

“Good morning,” Sumiku said. “This one saw the door was open. She did not mean to disturb your work.”

Claire set her pen down. She reached for the notebook that lived at her left elbow and wrote, turning it so Sumiku could see.

Claire wrote: You aren't disturbing it. Come in. I was going to find you after breakfast.

Sumiku read the line. Her head tilted a few degrees, which Claire noted without being certain what it meant, and she stepped inside and stopped a respectful distance from the desk.

“This one is here now,” Sumiku said. Her eyes went past Claire to the desk, the chair, the small stack on the floor. “You have been writing a great deal.”

Claire wrote: Since five.

“Since five,” Sumiku repeated, with something in her voice that might have been approval—a soldier's respect, maybe, for another early drill.

That was true. Claire considered the pages in front of her, then reached past them to a shorter stack she had set aside on the corner of the desk, squared at the edges and held together with a clip. Eleven pages. She had finished them just before seven. She picked them up and held them out.

Sumiku took them with both of her upper hands at once, the way she took everything anyone gave her, as if it might be heavier than it looked.

“Thank you,” Sumiku said immediately, and bowed again over the pages, before her eyes had gone to them at all. “This one is grateful.”

Claire's ears went back a little — she could not help that. She wrote quickly, to get past it.

Claire wrote: I've started writing down the season. All of it. Everything since the beginning, now that it's ending. I’ve written up to the third challenge, outline and some pages, but I wanted to show you this. It's you. How you came to be part of it.

Sumiku looked down at the top page.

Claire watched her read. She had built those pages mostly from last night, from the long round of introductions downstairs, where nearly everyone had come up to Sumiku one at a time and Claire had sat in the corner and watched all of it. Norah's joke about a timeshare, delivered with her eyebrows. Sam offering, apparently seriously, to spar and test Thrustworthy against Sumiku’s naginata. Myra's joke about a panic attack, and then Myra's hug, which had lasted longer than the joke. Liesa saying she asked a lot of questions. It had all happened quickly, to a woman who had been a cup for three and a half centuries and had only had a body again for a day, and Claire had not been sure, watching Sumiku bow and bow and bow, how much of it was actually landing. So she had written it down. In order. With the words as close as she could get them.

Sumiku turned the first page, then the second. Her wings shifted against her back, drawing in another few degrees. Claire noted that too.

Then Sumiku looked up, and her face had gone careful in a way Claire recognized, because she had seen it on her own face in mirrors.

“What may this one do in return?” Sumiku asked. Her free hand had already started moving, as if it were looking for a teapot to pour or a floor to sweep. “There must be something. Something this one can carry, or clean, or fetch for you. She would like to repay this properly.”

Claire shook her head.

She stood up, took the pages from Sumiku's hands, and put them straight back again, pressing them against Sumiku's chest until two of Sumiku's hands had no choice but to close around them. Then she shook her head a second time, firmly, so there could be no confusion about it.

Sumiku's hands went still around the stack. Something crossed her face. Claire did not have a good name for it. It was not unhappiness, exactly, but something closer to the look of a person who has been handed a coin in a currency she does not recognize and cannot work out what it is supposed to buy. Claire had seen that look before, on other people, and had never once known what to say to it.

She knew what to write, though. That was different. Claire sat back down, pulled the notebook to her, and turned to a fresh page. She wrote slowly this time, in her neatest hand, because she wanted it to be legible and she wanted it to be kept.

Claire wrote: You don't have to earn a place that's already yours. Not in the story. You are part of us now.

She turned the notebook around.

Sumiku read it. She read it twice — Claire watched her eyes go back to the beginning. Then Sumiku stood for a long moment without moving, the pages held against her in two hands, the naginata upright in a third, and the fourth hand hanging empty at her side.

“This one does not know how to do that,” Sumiku said at last, very low. “To simply take a thing. Without giving. She has been told, many times now, by many kind people, and she still does not know how.”

Claire did not write anything.

She got up again instead, and reached out, and took Sumiku's free hand in both of hers. Sumiku's fingers were warm, and her claws had retracted into black fingernails. Claire's tail curled once around her own ankle and stayed there. She held on. She didn't squeeze and she didn't let go, and she didn't look away, even though looking at people's faces for this long was the kind of thing that usually made the inside of her head itch.

It took a while. Claire counted, without meaning to, and got to forty-one before Sumiku's shoulders came down. Not all the way. Some of the way. Her wings loosened against her back by a degree or two, and her breath went out of her slowly, the way a sail goes slack when the wind drops.

“This one will keep them,” Sumiku said, barely above a breath. “The pages. She will read all of them. This one promises.”

Claire nodded, and let go.

Sumiku stepped back. She bowed, and it was not the quick, correct bow she had given at the door, but a slower and much deeper one, held so long that Claire began to wonder whether she should do something about it. Then Sumiku straightened, the pages held carefully against her chest, and turned, and went out into the corridor with the naginata upright beside her. Her tail was the last thing to leave the doorway.

Claire stood looking at the empty doorway for a moment after Sumiku had gone. The corridor outside was bright and quiet, and somewhere far down it a door closed, and then there was nothing else to hear.

She was not sure it had gone well. She was not sure, if she was being honest with herself, what going well would have looked like, or whether Sumiku would read the pages tonight and feel better or worse for having them, or whether there had been some other thing, a better thing, that someone who could read faces would have known to say instead. She put that on the red list, in her head. She would check it later.

Then her mouth curved, small and private, with no one there to see it.

Claire sat back down at the desk, pulled the rest of the notes toward her, and picked up the blue pen.