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“Actually,” Ofelia said, “I was also just passing by. I have a stray cat to tend to. A bit of a nuisance, but they do grow on one. Rather like mildew.”

“Oh.” Poppy hesitated, then reached out to give the wall a brisk little pat, feeling oddly apologetic toward the ward she’d been blocking.

“What color is it? Tabby or…or orange, or black, or…” Oh, god, she was babbling again.

Was this a fae thing Rai hadn’t told her about, the need to babble in their presence?

Or was it just her? “Did you know, um, orange cats aren’t actually stupider than other cats?

I was wondering last week, so I Googled, and it turns out it’s a myth.

There’s no scientific evidence that orange cats are…

” She finally managed to slow the flood of inanity under Ofelia’s wry gaze.

Those really were very expressive eyebrows.

“Trust me,” Ofelia said when Poppy finally managed to shut her mouth. “This cat is as foolish as they come.”

“Is it orange?”

Ofelia pursed her lips as if she were holding back a laugh. “No,” she said with a tone of finality, then gave Poppy a regal bow of her head, murmured a low farewell, and swooshed away down the street.

Poppy watched her go for a moment, wondering just how it was that fabric seemed to move more elegantly around fae. Did they learn that when they learned how to make magical hidey-holes and Houdini their wings away? Or did they just have better quality fabric? She wished Rai were there to ask.

She just…wished Rai were there.

But it was a good thing he wasn’t, she reminded herself as she started to walk home.

It was for the best. Best for him, best for her, best for her mom, best for everybody.

And he was moving on, just like she’d wanted him to.

She’d wanted this. Exactly this. And if she said it in her head enough times, maybe she would believe it.

She was about to step onto her mother’s porch when her phone vibrated against her thigh, startling her. She fished it out of her pocket, frowned at the familiar number, answered. “Heather?”

“Hey, did I see you walk past earlier?”

“Yeah, I was, um, in kind of a hurry. Did you need something?”

“You sold a piece.”

Poppy’s heart went cold. “Did I?” she asked flatly, the echoes of anger rising in her again, overwhelming the grief she’d just been feeling.

How had he done it? Had he recruited Ofelia, or found some other agent?

Or maybe he’d just left Heather with a stack of bills and a forwarding address.

She wouldn’t put it past him. She knew he’d already left town, so he must have made some sort of plans.

And just like the trenchcoat full of issues she was, she was mad at him all over.

How dare he go behind her back yet again?

Because it had to be him. Who else would it be ?

And she could practically hear his sulky voice. You said not to contact you, but you didn’t say I couldn’t buy your drawings. And I desired them. Selfish, generous jerk and his semantics. And she totally didn’t want to cry when she imagined his pout, not at all.

Heather had been talking while she fumed, Poppy suddenly realized. And she must have asked a question, because she was now silent. “I’m sorry,” Poppy said quickly. “What was that?”

Heather laughed. “Just wanted to know if you had another piece to drop off.”

“Not today,” she said, though part of her wanted to say not ever . If she stopped hanging art at the coffee shop, then Rai wouldn’t have anything to buy, no matter how much he pouted. “I’ll check tonight, see what I can frame up.”

“Okay. See you tomorrow, then?”

She stuffed her reluctance down. She needed this money.

A hundred dollars was worth almost ten hours of transcripts nowadays, and unlike the massive black hole of her terrible portrait, at least this art had been delivered.

She could spend Rai’s pity-money without guilt.

Then, after she picked the payment up, she could go hang around the entrance to faerie until Ofelia showed up again, give her a message to Rai to just stop, leave her alone, go be happy already without her.

That’s what she would do. No matter what Ofelia’s expressive eyebrows insinuated. “Yeah. I’ll come by in the morning.”

“Great. See you then.”

The call disconnected, and Poppy stood there in the shadow of her mother’s house, still angry.

She should either go figure out which of her half-finished drawings was most finishable or see if some transcripts had appeared on the market while she was out, but she couldn’t, not like this.

She was starting to break again, could feel the cracks, and that was Rai’s fault, too, because if she hadn’t been compelled to ask Ofelia about him, she wouldn’t have been fragile enough to get mad in the first place.

Except it wasn’t his fault, she knew it wasn’t, because she had chosen this. All of it.

That’s who she was really angry at. Her own damn self.

As if to punctuate her thoughts, her phone vibrated again, and she glanced at it.

Instagram notification, something about a book.

She’d been getting those again since she’d last checked on Brendan’s page, trending bookstagrammers and publishing news.

The stupid Instagram algorithm went hard.

She was going to have to set aside some time to retrain it, watch a lot of puppy videos or something to get the books back off her feed.

She started to swipe her thumb to dismiss the notification, then paused, looking at the post preview on her screen.

Reading the words two or three times, just to make sure .

“Oh, you fucking fucker,” she breathed as she tapped to open the reel. “You did not fucking do that. You absolutely fucking did not.”

She didn’t recognize the face on the screen, or the voice that was speaking.

She knew the type, though—ironic goatee, wire-framed glasses, wall lined with pretentious book covers behind him.

Maybe a poster for an Orson Welles movie, or Tarantino.

The sort of reviewer who had always gushed over Brendan’s books, praising all the things Poppy had suggested Brendan do.

She’d sometimes reassured herself that the same people would have hated those exact things if her name had been on the cover instead of Brendan’s.

Believed that was why they were such a good match.

He was the face and the ideas, and she massaged those ideas into poetic words.

A perfect symbiosis, until she’d realized he was just a parasite, and she was the only one who’d thought they were a team, ever.

And then it had been over.

But while the talking head on the screen was yammering on about a triumphant return to literary fiction and passionate, lyrical imagery and a unique structure of seemingly unrelated vignettes , she was reading the quoted excerpt from Brendan Fucking Beaumont’s latest masterpiece, the quote the reviewer had chosen to highlight in his pre-release review.

She lifts her arms to the azure sky, ever hopeful, ever reaching. Yet she cannot remove the poison from her heart. It spreads like pollution, its foul miasma eating away at her flesh, evidence of the crimes against her.

But she reaches.

She strives.

She lives.

She is stronger than her wounds.

Poppy stared at the quote on the screen as the man’s voice droned on, and everything, the whole day, every ounce of it boiled up inside her.

The hours of soul-sucking transcripts. Her mother’s innocently stabby words.

The painful conversation with Ofelia. The rage at Rai, at herself, at the world.

And today’s miseries were joined by more—the grief of sending Rai away, the pain of making right and safe but agonizing choices, the months and months of struggling to keep her head above water, or at least protect her mom.

And now this. Her words of freedom, stolen by the very man she’d freed herself from.

All of it bubbled around in her head, round and round, and in the very center of it all, the eye of the storm, she had a moment of clarity.

The Poppy of two months ago would have just rolled over, she realized.

Blocked the ironic goatee, blocked Brendan himself once and for all, and gone back to her miserable, circumscribed existence.

That Poppy might have even thought she deserved it, that it was just an extension of her penance for neglecting her mother, choosing the wrong man.

Believed it wasn’t worth going up against a juggernaut like Beaumont Book Group.

But holy fuck , had Brendan picked the wrong fucking Poppy to fuck with. Because Today Poppy had had enough.

She focused all the boiling in her head, focused it like a goddamn tornado, and took a deep, cleansing breath. In for four, hold for seven, out for eight. She raised her eyes to the impossibly blue sky, the one she’d seen a lot more intimately just a few weeks before.

It wasn’t safe to open her mouth. Brendan had the reputation, the connections, the industry behind him.

She had none of those things, and might end up with even less, once the Beaumont Book Group lawyers got through with her.

She had no doubt they could find all sorts of things to sue her for, if they tried, and they had the money to wear her down, no matter how right she was.

She was risking everything she’d worked for since moving to Tucson, maybe her entire life.

A life without risk is merely existing, not living.

She heard Rai's voice as if he were right there, and her resentment at his buying more of her art melted away. Because he was right. He'd always been right.

Ofelia’s voice echoed in her head. You have met him, haven’t you? He will never be safe.

He’d said it himself, that time that he’d been painfully, devastatingly right about her, about him, about everything.

I am not safe.

“And neither am I,” she whispered aloud, wishing Rai could hear her say it. He’d be so fucking proud.

She took one more deep breath—in for four, hold for seven, out for eight—and started to type.