November arrived the way it always did not suddenly, but gradually, the city shifting into something quieter and more considered.
At Gemini Montgomery, Ethan's desk had accumulated the particular organized chaos of someone who had fully inhabited a space.
Two completed commission files stacked neatly at the corner Claire's doing, not his. His sketchbooks claimed the rest, open to different pages, different stages of different ideas existing simultaneously the way his mind did.
Marcus had started coming to him.
Not often. Not for everything. But occasionally, when a structural question arose mid-production, he'd appear at Ethan's station with a piece in progress and set it down without preamble, and Ethan would look at it and think out loud, and Marcus would listen in the way he listened — completely, without interruption — and then nod once and take it back.
It had happened enough times now that neither of them remarked on it.
