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So I do the thing I do. I reach for the bright, and I aim it at his exposed edges like a blanket I’m throwing over both of us, and I tilt my head at the screen, and I make my voice light, and I give us both the exit.

“This,” I say, “is way better than our original concept.”

And I watch him hear it — hear the out I’m handing him, the we’re going to pretend this is a craft note and not a confession, the mercy of it — and something in his shoulders comes down a quarter inch.

“It tested better,” he says. Rough. Playing along, because I asked him to. “Coward-or-caretaker was too clean. You said so yourself.”

“I did say that.” My heart is breaking a small, specific, quiet crack, and I keep my voice easy. “For the record, the defender’s going to have a field day with this version. It’s a lot more honest.”

“Yeah.” He looks at me, and for one second the wall isn’t all the way up, and the thing behind it is looking right at me, and neither of us says the true thing. “It is.”

Downstairs, Cash yells that the eggs are ready if anyone in this house loves him.

“We should go down,” I say.

“Yeah.”

Neither of us moves for a second. Then I pick up my bag, and he closes the monitors — not fast now, not hiding, just done — and we go be normal.

The kitchen smells like a diner and looks like a crime scene, which is to say it looks like Cash cooked.

“Ashby!” Cash spots me first, spatula aloft, delighted and completely unsuspicious. “Didn’t know you were here. You want a breakfast burger? It’s four in the afternoon, which is the correct time for one.”

“I’m okay, thank you. Theo and I were working on our ethics thing.” I hold up my bag as evidence, which is a move, because nobody waves a tote bag as an alibi unless they’re innocent, and I am a professional. “Adler assigned us the world’s most impossible project and my grade is chained to his, so.”

“Brutal,” Wyatt says sympathetically, around a mouthful. “Sorry you got stuck with the grump.”

“He’s tolerable in small doses.” I don’t look at Theo. Theo is getting a glass of water with the specific casualness of a man who was recently biting my shoulder. “Very small doses.”

“That’s the review I’d give too,” Cash says. “Two stars. Would not board again.”

And it’s working. It’s completely working. Cash has already moved on to whether Wyatt wants cheese, and Wyatt’s holding out for pepper jack, and the cover story is airtight, boring, and true-adjacent, and my pulse is coming back down to something survivable, and I’m reaching for my scarf off the back of a chair, almost out, almost clean —

And I catch Beau looking at us.

He’s leaning against the counter with his coffee and his bad arm, not saying anything, and he’s got this expression — not a smirk, not a question, just a look. Slow and steady, moving from me to Theo and back. The look of a man who’s known Theo three years and has never once, not one time, seen a girl leave his room waving a tote bag. He doesn’t say a word. He doesn’t have to. Beau reads a room the way Sloane does — it’s why they work — and I can see him doing the addition, quiet, behind his eyes.

I give him my brightest, most guileless smile, the one that has gotten me out of every scrape since I was old enough to have a face.

Beau’s mouth twitches. He takes a sip of his coffee. And then, mercifully, he lets it go — for now — because Beau also knows the difference between a thing you call out and a thing you let a person come to on their own, and he tips his mug at me instead.

“Good luck with Adler,” he says. Mild. And there’s something under it, something that isn’t fooled even a little. “That project sounds like it’s turning into a whole thing.”

“You have no idea,” I say.

And I mean it more than he’ll ever know.

I drive home in the four o’clock dark with the heater going and the radio off, and I do the thing I always do, which is narrate my own disaster to myself in the third person like that’ll make it hurt less. Margo Ashby, soon-to-be twenty-one, pre-law, nearly caught, currently unraveling. Details at eleven.

It doesn’t help. It never helps. But I do it anyway, because knowing a con is a con has never once stopped me from running it.

Here’s what I can’t stop seeing, all the way home: not the almost-getting-caught, which should be the headline. Not even the sex, which was — a lot. What I can’t stop seeing is a cursor blinking in a half-finished paragraph about a girl who fixes things with her hands, written by a boy who can’t lie, in a story he doesn’t know is a confession.

We built an arrangement with six terms. Five we agreed to. The sixth he wouldn’t sign, because he wouldn’t say it meant nothing when he didn’t know that it didn’t.

And now I know what he’s been doing with the thing he wouldn’t say. He’s been building it. In the dark. On three monitors. Where he thought nobody would ever look.

The arrangement’s been over for a while, I think. I’m just the only one still pretending it’s on the schedule.