BRITTANY
The Hartley kitchen was beautiful in the way things maintained by staff tend to be—impeccably clean, perfectly appointed, subtly expensive. I’d been in it dozens of times. Knew where Victoria kept the good olive oil. Knew the drawer Chase always left slightly open.
Knew a lot of things about this house.
Including how to read the air in a room.
And the air in this room right now was *very* interesting.
“I love what you’ve done with the pendant lights,” I said to Victoria, because giving Chase a moment to recover was something I’d learned years ago. He processed at his own speed. Pressure never helped.
“Aren’t they perfect? I found them at this little shop in Rittenhouse—”
I listened with exactly the right amount of attention while my peripheral vision catalogued everything I
