Page 122 of Spiced!

He looked at me when he said it.

I stared at the bar surface.

Mark had been quiet in his corner, running numbers, lips moving steadily. Finally, he turned the laptop to face the room, revealing a color-coded spreadsheet, three attendance scenarios, and more rows than any anniversary event had ever required, assuming anniversary events required spreadsheets in the first place.

The third scenario was labeled What Finn Will Think Is Realistic.

Finn looked at it. He looked at Mark. He looked at it again.

“This seems high,” he said.

“It’s what you told me it is,” Mark said, and turned the laptop back.

Then Dante startled everyone by speaking.

He had been at the wall the whole time, listening with the attention he gave things he considered worth listening to. When the room had run through everything, and the conversation had started circling back on itself the way planning conversations did when they’d produced more ideas than decisions, he set his book down on the nearest table and stood.

“Do something for the neighborhood,” he said, his deep voice vibrating everything within range. “Not just the regulars, but for the people who walk past on Saturday nights and see the lights on and know this place is here.” A pause. “Five years in Ybor is something. Let them know you know that.”

The room was quiet for about two heartbeats, then everyone started talking at once, which was what happened when Dante said something, not because it was complicated, but because it was so precisely right that it needed immediate incorporation and everyone needed to be the one who incorporated it.

Jacks said it was exactly what his bracket was trying to do.

Benji said it was essentially page five of his presentation.

Finn wrote it down verbatim.

Rod, from the kitchen doorway, said, “Yes.”

Mark, in his corner, stopped typing. He looked up at the room, then his eyes moved briefly to the door where Dante had already returned to his book. Then his attention returned to his screen, but his lips weren’t moving. He was looking at the spreadsheet without running numbers, which was its own kind of unusual.

Dante’s eyes came up from the page. Only for a heartbeat. Then dropped again.

Benji was watching the corner booth and the door with the peripheral attention of an NSA spy camera. He reached into his apron pocket, produced yet another napkin, and added something to it.

Finn called the room back to order, and the planning continued. The bar held all of us in the warm, productive noise of people who had been building something together for five years and were now figuring out how to celebrate it. I sat on my stool and thought about words I had been teased about an hour ago but had not yet said to the person they were about.

I thought I probably would. Or should.

Soon.

Chapter 35

Brendan

Iwas a professional and prided myself on disassociating my emotions from the cases I worked. Unfortunately, my brain didn’t get the memo where Marisol was concerned. My brain skipped into another gear as my finger clicked the mouse and opened the message that arrived at 7:12 a.m.

Four weeks post-modification. Episodes: zero. Behavioral withdrawal pattern: gone entirely. She’s been engaging with the left-side enrichment daily. I think we have our answer. Great work, Doc.

I read it twice before grabbing my phone to call Dr. Reyes.

“Mold,” she said, before I’d finished my first question. “Facilities found it during the ventilation cleanout. Apparently, there was a massive colony along the duct seam closest to the left wall. They’ve fully replaced the affected section.”

“That tracks with the timeline,” I said. “The new system must’ve disturbed the colony.”

I kept the caveat to myself—that a mold colony along a duct seam and brand-new ductwork curing in a sealed space could easily be two faces of the same disruption. The lab was still running the air panel, and Dr. Reyes didn’t need my hedging today, and honestly, neither did I. The direction was right. The left wall was the problem. The rest we’d nail down when the full workup came back.

“Marisol’s been a different animal,” Dr. Reyes said. “She’s eating with enthusiasm and initiating contact with the keepers again. I haven’t seen her this engaged since before all this started.”