Reid hasn’t said anything beyond his initial greeting, but still he steps farther in, listening to Lachelle with a serious expression on his face, offering her the occasional brief nod of understanding as she recounts a long list of grievances about the tax code. This is, in fact, the primary way Reid and Lachelle had bonded, back when she’d first met him. She calls him Robin Hood most of the time, a tribute to his heroic whistleblower status, even though most of the time he also sees fit to clarify for her that he didn’t steal from anyone.

“I only tried to point out the stealing someone else was doing,” he says, usually with that slight flush on his cheeks.

I’m finishing my tidying of the display when I hear Reid offering his suggestions to Lachelle—the same steady, assured tone I’m sure makes him excellent at his new job. Within seconds she’s thanking him, letting us know she’s going to go “handle this” right now, before she forgets every single thing Reid said to her.

“Looking sparse,” Reid says, nodding at the table.

I smile at him. “Quite,” I say pointedly, and he swoonshes.

The startup at Harbinger had been something of a fight between me and Reid. I didn’t have the funds on my own to get it going—the contract with the supplier, the more sophisticated software and scanning equipment I’d needed. But Reid—practical, numbers-minded Reid—definitely did, and all he’d wanted was to give me some of it.

“Think of what you’ve done for me,” he’d said, practically begging me. But I hadn’t really seen any of what he’d been referring to as something I’d done for him. It’d been for us. A way for us to start our lives even as we were weathering the storm. After a couple of months, it hadn’t made sense for Reid to stay in his apartment. It’d made better sense to move into mine—farther away from the chaos of the Coster fallout, farther away from the job he’d used to have. Closer to the job he’d hoped to have.

Anyway, it wasn’t as though he didn’t pay rent.