JJ
By noon, I had redrawn the same curve three times.
There was nothing wrong with it. My hand was steady, and the design fit the section of Nixx’s arm we were finishing. My brain simply refused to trust anything after yesterday.
Every time I looked down, I saw Millie’s face.
The purple clips in her hair. The way her arms had locked around my neck as though she could keep us together through force alone.
Forty-two minutes.
I had been given forty-two minutes with my daughter, and somehow that made the shop feel emptier than before.
The bell above the front door rang.
I did not need to look up to know who had entered. Nixx brought a particular kind of silence with him, heavy enough that everyone noticed.
“Your noon is here,” Stitch called.
“I gathered.”
Nixx appeared in the doorw
