Page 2 of Summer L.A.W.

“I didn’t mean to,” she said, quieter. “I don’t… do that. Not with people. I was trained to put holes in targets the size of coins at impossible distances. Discipline. Control. The whole point is not missing, not making messes, not raining bloody daggers on German engineering.”

Joell descended two steps. “And yet…”

“And yet.” Crystal swallowed, throat raw. “He said I was too intense. That I made everything ‘a production.’ That I—” Her voice went higher, mocking Stan’s poshness. “‘Have these moods, darling, and it’s very fatiguing.’ As if he hasn’t benefited from those moods. As if his flat hasn’t been warded to within an inch of Buckingham Palace, because I ‘had a mood’ in which I didn’t want him eaten by a shadow.”

Rayna moved first, not with a hug. Crystal was not huggable at the moment, but with proximity, a presence at her right flank that said I will tackle a hurricane if it tries to hurt you. “Say the rest,” Rayna said softly.

“He said the bird creeps him out,” Crystal added, and that, somehow, was what cracked her. “He said it watches him like it’s sizing him for a coffin.”

The bird fluffed, deeply gratified.

Victoria’s raccoon bared tiny teeth in solidarity. “Your ex has no taste,” Reginald squeaked.

“It’s fine,” Crystal lied, and her eyes flooded in direct contradiction. “I will be fine. I am fine. I am a professional. I am a⁠—”

Her throat closed. She looked up, blinked hard, refused to be the sort of woman who sobbed in foyers. The tears came anyway, hot and humiliating, slipping past her lowered lashes to strike the marble with tiny, traitorous taps.

The first tear hit and flashed, blue-white, like summer lightning in shallow water.

Everyone went very still.

Crystal stared at the floor. Another tear fell. It touched stone and crystallized mid-spread, a small, perfect shard of sea glass the color of old bottles and morning tide. It hummed a note so clean it almost made her calm… Calmer. Calmish.

“Okay,” Sahara said. “New data. Be patient with me. This is my first day in charge, but I feel the need to document everything weird.”

“I’m not weird,” Crystal said, pouting.

“You are being very weird for you,” Joell noted. “I say this with love… You are the most emotionally stunted of us all.”

Crystal sniffed hard, furious with herself, with Stan, with physics. She crouched, picking up the shard. It buzzed against her skin, a soft, alert vibration, like a hummingbird trapped gently in her palm.

Rayna crouched beside her. “What does it do?”

Crystal shook her head. “I don’t know.” The shard pulsed once, twice, like a heartbeat answering her own. “I really don’t know.”

“Maybe it senses danger,” Sahara guessed, scribbling. “Or emotional catharsis trapped in a crystalline matrix. Or both. It’s you, so think Ocean-depths.”

“Wonderful,” Crystal muttered. “I weep jewelry.”

“Useful jewelry,” Victoria said. “Historically, sea glass wards were carried by women who waited on cliffs for ships. When they glowed, it meant the storm had teeth.”

“I am not waiting on a cliff for Stan,” Crystal said. “If he sails past a kraken, I hope it asks him about his tone.”

Sahara strolled over, then reached out her hand, palm up. Crystal placed the shard in it without thinking. Sahara closed her fingers, the smallest smile tugging at her mouth as the glass flared, then settled. “Thank you,” she said. “Consider it logged.”

Another tear slid. Crystal caught it with the edge of her sleeve before it hit, because she was not starting a cottage industry in the entryway. Her bird, whom she’d named Bird, shuffled closer along the banister, cocking its head like an embodied question mark.

“She’s humiliated,” Rayna said to the room, as if translating. “So, everyone be kind or be elsewhere.”

“Always kind,” Victoria said, and her raccoon, scandalized by guilt, hid its small face in her elbow.

From deep in the mansion, plumbing thunked. A pipe exhaled a long, unhappy moan. Crystal’s jaw tightened. She put her hands flat on her thighs and breathed through the building’s sympathetic noises.

“Not today,” she told the mansion, as if talking to a younger sibling. “I do not need you dramatizing on my behalf.”

The moan softened. A polite drip answered from somewhere near the conservatory, as if the mansion were trying to weep in solidarity and had to settle for a leak.

Joell arched a brow. “You’re affecting the infrastructure, darling.”