POV: Jasmine
Aurora was alert in a way she hadn't been a month ago.
The way her eyes tracked across a room, the way she responded to sound before you could visibly see her respond, the way she looked at me with an expression almost too considered for a child her age — Liam had noticed it too.
We had stopped being surprised by it and started being interested, which felt like the correct progression.
The conference was three days at a hotel venue forty minutes from the apartment. I was not on the program. I was there as myself and my title — Creative Consultant, Cadence Records — attending because the work required it now, not because I was attached to someone who required it.
The morning sessions were industry panels. I took notes on a legal pad rather than my phone because it slowed my thinking in useful ways, and watched the room.
Liam introduced me to four board-level contacts over two hours. The same pattern each time: my name, my title, a sentence about the consultation work, then a deliberate half-step back. He gave me the space and stayed out of it.
I handled every introduction without reaching for him. Answered questions directed at me, moved conversations forward, ended them cleanly when they were done.
More people than I expected had already heard of me.
Two of them — a distribution executive and a creative director from separate companies — referenced the Delray project and the Meridian album in the same breath. They had connected dots I hadn't known they were watching. I filed that.
The afternoon shifted to smaller conversations — breakout groups, corridors, the kind of exchange that doesn't happen in seated panels.
Three people sought me out specifically to talk about creative direction. A producer with questions about attribution structures. Two A&R executives from separate companies asking about my read on a specific emerging market. I gave honest assessments. They wrote things down.
By four o'clock I felt the specific tiredness of a day spent being taken seriously — a different kind of tiredness than most.
I was heading back toward the main hall through a side corridor when Marcus Webb came from the opposite direction.
I knew the name. Mid-tier label, solid commercial output, a reputation for operating outside the standard industry lane when it suited him. Pleasant-faced, mid-fifties, dressed in a way that communicated authority without appearing to try.
He introduced himself, said he had been following my work. He mentioned the Meridian project specifically — which told me he had prepared for this moment before it happened.
I had been in enough rooms to know when a conversation is heading somewhere before it arrives.
He took out his phone, turned it toward me, and showed me the screen.
A screenshot. My Virtue Exchange listing — the profile photo, the username, the auction details. Everything.
He didn't pause for a reaction. His voice stayed pleasant, his pacing unhurried. He had an artist he wanted routed through his label. He framed it as a mutual benefit arrangement — my creative credibility, his distribution infrastructure, a straightforward business proposition. He named specific figures. He was thorough.
I registered all of it.
What I did not stop registering, from the moment he showed me the phone until the moment I walked away, was his hands.
Completely still. Resting loose at his sides, not adjusting, not making any of the small unconscious movements hands make when a person is managing the gap between what they are saying and what they mean.
A man whose hands do not move when he is applying pressure to another person has applied pressure to other people before. Many times. He has learned that stillness is part of the tool.
I told him I would think about it.
I turned and walked directly to the nearest bathroom. Locked the stall door, sat on the closed lid, and called Nora.
She picked up on the second ring.
"I need you to write something down. Exactly as I tell it. Don't interrupt until I'm done."
"Tell me."
I recited the conversation from the beginning. Every word Webb had said, in the order he said it, while it was still exact in my memory.
The setting, the approach, the phone screen, the specific figures he had named, the precise framing of the proposition. Nora didn't interrupt. She asked me twice to slow down and said she was writing it out longhand.
When I finished she was quiet for a moment.
"Are you all right?"
"Yes. I need you to keep that. Exactly as I've given it."
"It's written down. Word for word."
"Thank you."
I washed my hands, checked my face in the mirror, and walked back out into the conference.
That evening Liam asked how the afternoon sessions had gone.
I told him about the three creative conversations, the attribution structure questions, the A&R executives, the producer who had asked about attribution structures.
I gave him the full account — everything that had happened in rooms where I had been sought out, where my work had been the reason someone crossed the floor to find me.
I did not tell him about Marcus Webb.
Not yet. The conversation was in Nora's handwriting, exactly as it had happened. What I needed first was to understand what I was holding before I decided what to do with it and who needed to be in the room when I did.
I drove home.
Aurora was asleep by the time I got back, one arm thrown up beside her head the way she slept now — that total, boneless surrender of someone who has not yet learned that sleep requires defending.
I stood over the bassinet for a long moment.
The hands that didn't move.
I would have to be very careful with this.
But I had been careful before. I had been careful in rooms where the cost of a mistake was everything. This was not new territory — it was just new stakes on top of territory I already knew.