Her face flushed, lashes fluttering as she blinked. “Because … because, I mean, how could you not know your profits?” she stammered. “Don’t you have to, like … buy supplies?”

“I’ve got everything I need in the greenhouse.”

“But what if you could make good money? What if you could expand? Start selling them in Longbourne? What if you—”

“I don’t do it for money. I just like growing things.”

“But what if you could monetize?” she started, excited now, bright with ideas and ingenuity.

“I don’t need the money.”

“Everybody needs the money.”

“I make my salary at the greenhouse, and I live here rent-free. What do I need money for?”

She huffed, scoffed, and rolled her eyes, but for all her stalling, she couldn’t seem to come up with an answer.

“I don’t want to monetize something I enjoy, Lila. I don’t want something I love to become a job. A chore. I just want to play up here in my botanical sex dungeon and create.” When she pouted, I asked, “Why do I get the feeling that offends your sensibilities?”

“Because it does,” she said without hesitating. “Why not do something you love for a living?”

“Because once you ask your passion to make you money, I imagine it would lose its luster.”

“But that’s what I did, and I love my job.”

I gave her a look.

Her cheeks flushed brighter, and she frowned. “I do.”

“You do your job strictly for the joy of the thing? Every Felix sister is endured because it’s fun?”

Lila’s mouth opened, then closed. Her frown deepened.

“Tell me, what is it you love so much again? Is it the lying to nuns or being humiliated by the people who pay you?”

My tone was light, but I was defensive of that truth, of that stark difference between us. And she matched me for it, folding her arms across her chest.

“There are moments of joy, or I wouldn’t put up with all the bullshit.”

“Do you love it as much as you did when you first started?” I pressed.

“No. But isn’t that every job? Doesn’t everyone have an illusion of what things could be? And isn’t that illusion always wrong? Nothing is what it seems. Life is never what you think it’s going to be.”

The shift in her meaning didn’t go unnoticed by me. I didn’t think she was referring to our jobs anymore.

“Fair enough,” I admitted. “But that doesn’t mean you have to accept where you end up without fighting for your own happiness.”

Something tightened her face, a pain she didn’t want me to see. The memory of accepting less than she was worthy of, I hoped. Because I never wanted her to accept anything less than absolute happiness. I wanted her to fight for the things she wanted and abandon what she didn’t.