* Lawrence *
The city greeted me with its usual noise, horns, hurried footsteps, the steel-gray press of skyscrapers. But after a night at Magnolia, everything felt sharper, harsher, like I'd traded air for smoke. The resort still lingered on my skin, the salt of the sea, the echo of her laughter when she thought I wasn't listening, the weight of her silence when she was remembering her mother.
I walked through the glass doors of Dankworth & Co., the familiar scent of polished wood and paper contracts replacing the ocean breeze. My staff straightened at once, greetings whispered like ripples. I barely nodded. My mind wasn't on them.
"Lawrence."
Her voice cut through the marble atrium like a blade. My mother, this early.
Jullianne Dankworth stood by the reception desk, her figure as im
