She nodded once, satisfied, and returned to her book. Our conversation was apparently concluded. I was being dismissed by a girl in a silk robe who communicated primarily in tea preferences and cryptic observations, and I had started to find this completely normal. That was probably sothing I should think about.
I didn’t think about it.
The foyer was quiet. Mrs. Tanaka appeared from the side hallway as I passed, pressed a paper bag into my hands without comnt. It was warm. It slled like the teriyaki chicken from last night and also possibly croissants.
"Mrs. Tanaka, you didn’t have to."
She gave the look that ant she had already decided and my opinion was noted but irrelevant.
"Thank you," I said.
She nodded and disappeared back around the corner.
I pushed through the front doors into the evening air. The sky had gone that particular shade of blue that happens just before dark, the light thin and gold at the edges. My weekend. One bag, four sisters, one mother who ran a billion-dollar company and had looked at across a dinner table like she was deciding whether I was an asset or a liability.
Jury was still out, probably.
I ca down the steps.
"Wait."
I turned.
One of the Valentine sisters stood at the top of the stairs.
My brain ran the identification sequence it had been running for three weeks and imdiately hit a wall, because she was wearing the outfit. The matching burgundy silk set from movie night, the camisole and the tiny shorts, hair loose and flowing around her face.
The Quadruplet Guessing Ga outfit.
The one they had all worn when they had comprehensively destroyed my ability to tell them apart and stolen four unlimited favors from in the process.
She ca down two steps.
Purple eyes. Wine-red hair in the early evening light. Identical face to three other girls currently sowhere inside that house.
I genuinely could not tell.
The rational part of my brain, the part that had spent the weekend paying careful attention to gaits and posture and hand habits and the exact way each sister tilted her head when she was thinking, was currently reviewing the data and coming back with inconclusive in large red letters.
She ca down another step.
"Yeah?" I said.
She was close now. Four steps away. Three. She stopped on the second step, which put her almost at eye level with , and that should have helped with identification and sohow made it worse, because up close they were all exactly the sa kind of devastating.
Her cheeks were red.
That did not narrow it down. In my experience, all four of them were capable of blushing and all four of them had done it at at so point in the past forty-eight hours for various reasons.
She looked at the paper bag in my hand. Then at my bag. Then at my face. She was doing the thing where a person has decided to do sothing and is currently having an internal argunt about whether to actually do it, and the argunt is very close.
"This weekend was." She stopped.
I waited.
"Good," she said. "It was good. You were." Another stop. She exhaled through her nose. "You were good."
"Thanks."
"I don’t say things like that. To people. Usually." She was looking slightly to the left of my face now, at so neutral point in the air. "I just wanted to say it before you left because I thought about not saying it and that seed worse."
My brain was still running the identification sequence. I had narrowed it down to two possibilities, and the narrowing was based on the specific quality of the embarrassnt, the way she was holding herself, the fact that she had co out here alone and was standing on the second step like the extra height gave her courage.
I was sixty percent sure.
Sixty percent was not a number I should be making decisions based on.
"Okay," I said carefully.
She looked at directly then. It lasted about one second.
Then she leaned forward, and she kissed .
It lasted maybe three seconds.
Three seconds of her mouth against mine, warm and deliberate, her hand catching the lapel of my jacket to keep herself steady on the step. She slled like strawberries and sothing floral underneath, and her lips were soft, and my brain, the thing that had kept functional through four years of five-hour commutes and midnight shifts and raising a teenager and surviving a dinner with Camille Valentine, just. Stopped.
Complete silence. No calculations. No inventory of professional consequences. No identification sequence.
Nothing.
Just her.
Then she pulled back.
She was still holding my lapel. Her cheeks had gone from red to sothing closer to burgundy, which matched the silk, which my brain noted in the completely useless way brains note things when they have just been comprehensively short-circuited. Her purple eyes were very wide. Mine were probably worse.
Neither of us said anything.
The evening air moved between us. Sowhere behind the gate, a car passed on the road. A bird called from the maple tree in the Japanese garden.
She released my lapel.
Smoothed it once with her fingers.
The guard behind was looking at the horizon with the focused dedication of a man who was paid not to see things.
She stepped back up to the third step. Then the fourth. Her face had gone the particular shade of red that happens when a person’s blood pressure has made decisions without consulting their better judgnt.
"See you at school," she said, and her voice only cracked a little on the last word.
She turned and went back through the front doors.
They closed behind her.
I stood at the bottom of the Valentine estate’s front steps in the evening light, holding a paper bag of teriyaki chicken and croissants, staring at a set of doors, and running a full diagnostic on what had just happened and what I was supposed to do about it.
The guard cleared his throat. "Ready, Mr. Angelo?"
No, I thought. Not even slightly.
"Yeah," I said. "It’s ti to go ho."
***
END OF VOLU TWO: The Hand I Have To Play
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