She laughed. Matthew couldn’t sound mean if he tried. “You’re not far off. It’s not a direct copy, that’s why I’m more swish than the other people doing it. I’m supposed to do the painting Alexander would’ve done if he’d been around, not just a photocopy. His palette, brushstrokes, composition. My brain. Her daughter. New painting.”

“Sounds hard.”

“It’s not. Well, not anymore. It’s just my job.” Swallowing the rest of the fancy coffee, she pushed off the pure-white counter to gaze at the living room walls. No photographs. She wondered if the sweetmetal was even in the house. She couldn’t feel anything; it wasn’t like El Jaleo, where part of her could always tell it was around the corner even before she saw it. Barbara or Fisher had said something about sweetmetals wearing off. Maybe it had worn out.

“It’s a cool job.” He was glancing at her when he thought she wasn’t looking. Probably he thought he was being discreet, but he wasn’t. His face was curious. “Cooler than Declan’s other friends.”

“He has friends?” Jordan asked, mouth amused. She doubted this highly. Friends required honesty, which wasn’t a thing Declan had a lot of. “What do they do?”

“Number jobs? Politics. They wear ties. They have these things.” He made a gesture to his face that managed to convey facial hair. “Declan stuff.” Jordan was surprised to see that Matthew seemed to believe in the neutral, boring person Declan presented to the rest of the world. That meant Declan had played that role even at home.

“Do you go to school, Matthew?”

His golden, carefree expression went troubled, and then it went blank. This was a very different expression than the one he’d had before. Something had happened at school, she thought, or something—

Oh no. Something was wrong.

Her mind was slipping out one of the high church windows, up into the sky. She could see clouds, wings, birds, branches—

Jordan dragged herself back to the present. It had been a little bit since she’d had one of her dreamy episodes. Never mind, she thought. It was minor. She could push through it. She had done it before; she could do it again. It was only when they got really bad that other people began to notice she was struggling.

Oof. There it came in a wave again.

Flashes of images moved before her eyes. Images from another time, another place. Real? Unreal? Past? Future? She didn’t know. It was hard to make sense of them and harder still to remind herself to make sense of them.

It only took a glance to see that Matthew was experiencing it, too. He’d put down his coffee and was walking very, very slowly toward the door, shaking his head a little.