Page 25 of Open Road

She holds my gaze a half-second longer than necessary, then looks back at her screen. “They come up short again?”

“No. Order’s right.”

“Good.” She replaces the earbud.

She’s not dismissing me. She’s done with a conversation she assumed was finished. If there was more to say, she left room forit. There isn’t any more to say, so she went back to her screen, because Nova doesn’t pretend interest she doesn’t feel.

My hand is on the doorframe.

The order is correct. The errand is done. There is no reason to be standing in the dressing room doorway, holding a confirmed invoice and not speaking.

Her laptop has a study guide open on half the screen and a video paused on the other, a lecture, from the look of the still image. A clinical setting. A woman in scrubs at a whiteboard.

“Thursday,” I say.

She doesn’t look away from the screen. “The schedule.”

“Where’d you learn to work a favor economy like that?”

Nova pauses and sets the earbud on the table. She slowly turns around in her chair in no particular hurry, and looks at me with the expression of a woman deciding something, not about whether to answer but how much of the answer to give.

“Youngest of five,” she says. “Everybody owed everybody something. You learn to keep track.”

The dressing room is warm. Someone has left a curling iron on, and the smell of hot metal wafts through the air. Her eyes are steady on mine—dark brown, attentive, and the kind that takes information in and returns very little of it.

“The Delgado client,” I say. “You called them yourself.”

“The booking might’ve walked if they heard the timing was changing secondhand. Better to explain it directly.” A beat. “Was it a problem?”

“No.”

“Okay.” She picks the earbud back up.

“Why didn’t you wait?”

Her hand stops.

Nova looks at me. The question sits between us in the warm dressing room air, and she is reading something in it that I haven’t decided yet whether to give her or not. Her headtilts, a fraction, the movement of a person who has registered something they didn’t expect.

“Dani asked me to,” she says. “It needed doing. You weren’t here.”

“I would have been here.”

“By noon.”

“Yes.”

“Mia called at eight forty-five this morning. Renee’s accident happened last night.” Her voice is level. No edge in it, no defense. She’s laying it out the way you lay something out when you want the other person to see the full shape of it. “Delgado’s assistant calls at nine to confirm logistics, and I’m the one who picks up because I’m already here. The night had a problem. The problem had a solution. The solution didn’t need you in the room.”

She holds my eyes. “Next time,” she says, “I’ll wait.”

She says it the way she says everything—flat, certain, nothing decorative on it. She means it. If I tell her to wait, she’ll wait, because she takes instruction the way she gives it, without drama, without erosion. The offer is clean.

I should tell her to wait.

“Don’t,” I say.

Her expression barely shifts—the particular calibration of a face absorbing new information. She looks at me for one more second, then turns back to her screen. The earbud goes back in.