The man standing at the front desk of the Blackwell Hotel turns around, and I stop walking. I know that face. I know the exact angle of that jaw, the way his dark hair sits too deliberately unstyled, the particular stillness of a man who has learned to take up space without apology. I know the scar that bisects his left eyebrow — thin, old, the kind that comes from something fast and sharp. I know the width of his shoulders under a charcoal suit that costs more than my last four paychecks combined. Rowan Ashby. My chest does something wrong. Not a gasp — I'm too trained for that — but a kind of internal lurch, like a stair I thought was there that wasn't. He sees me. His jaw tightens. One small, controlled clench. Then it releases, and his face rearranges itself into the neutral expression of a man meeting a new employee for the first time. Polite. Impersonal. Like I'm the name on a résumé he barely glanced at. I think about my mother's medical bills. The stack of them on her kitchen counter, the ones she tries to turn face-down when I visit. The Blackwell's salary offer was not a salary — it was a lifeline. Four months of Mags's treatment, covered, before I'd even asked. I keep walking. "Ms. Voss." His voice is exactly as I remember it — low, unhurried, the kind of voice that never has to raise itself to be heard. He extends his hand. "Rowan Ashby. Welcome to the Blackwell." I shake it. His grip is firm and brief and completely professional, and his eyes stay on mine just long enough to be courteous, no longer. The hand that held my face in a darkened hallway three years ago now releases mine like I'm a stranger. Maybe to him, I am. I find my own voice somewhere below my sternum. "Thank you. I'm glad to be here." The words taste like cardboard. His assistant — a compact woman with steel-gray hair and the bearing of someone who has outlasted twelve Rowan Ashbys — steps forward to collect me, and Rowan turns back to his desk without another glance. Not coldness, exactly. Just dismissal. I follow the assistant down the marble corridor, my heels clicking too loud against the floor, my face arranged into the expression of a woman who is absolutely fine. Behind me, I hear nothing. No hesitation. No second look. He shakes my hand like we have never touched before, and I let him.