Then, when she nodded, he looked up again and let his eyes pass over the one room in her apartment he’d not yet been in. Her grandmother’s most personal things, plus Nora’s tiny workspace. When his eyes landed back on her again, he maintained the furrow. He said, “What happened?” and it felt like he was asking her about so much more than the phone call.

She sighed and swiveled her chair toward him, this time concentrating enough not to run into anything.

“Austin—that’s my boss—he wants me to come back to San Diego next month.”

For the briefest of seconds, something about Will’s body changed, even though his posture remained exactly the same. But Nora saw it—a tightening. A tension.

“What for?” he said, his voice light.

She sighed, overwhelmed. Will knew a bit about her work (and rework) for the influencer, but now, everything went beyond today’s loss of the account. Everything was so much more complicated.

“A week of meetings, I guess. A few new pitches he wants me there in person for, and”—she shook her head, still in shock about this part—“some talk of moving the whole business to Los Angeles.”

This is between us for now, Austin had said, which Nora knew meant something specific: she was not meant to tell Deepa about it.

“Is that a problem for you?”

Nora tilted her head, thinking about it. “It would have been, I guess, a year ago—I wouldn’t have wanted to go to LA. Now that I’m here I guess it won’t matter so much for me in the everyday, except I think what it means is that Austin is changing direction, and it’s . . . I don’t know. These pitches are going to be a lot of work.”

More of the same—a celebrity who was starting an ecotourism foundation. A retired pro surfer getting into documentary film production. A vegan home chef who’d recently gone viral on social media. There was nothing wrong with the work, but it certainly wasn’t what she was used to. And Austin wasn’t giving her much time to pivot. She stared morosely at the mess in front of her, the open notebook where she’d hastily taken notes on what Austin was saying.

“You don’t have much space of your own in here,” Will said, and she looked up at him.