“Sydney?” asked Brayden cautiously. “Is this some kind of hysterical-grief reaction?”

It took me almost another minute to calm myself enough to answer him. “Oh, Brayden. You’ve made my day. You’ve given me something I never thought I’d get. Thank you.” I reached for the coffee and stood up. He looked completely lost.

“Um, you’re welcome?”

I left the coffee shop, still laughing like a fool. For the last month or so, everyone in my life had gone on and on about how responsible I was, how diligent, how exemplary. I’d been called a lot of things. But never, ever, had I been called irresponsible.

And I kind of liked it.

CHAPTER 24

BECAUSE THIS DAY couldn’t get any weirder, I decided to stop by Adrian’s. There was something I was dying to know but hadn’t had a chance to ask.

He opened the door when I knocked, a paintbrush in hand. “Oh,” he said. “Unexpected.”

“Am I interrupting anything?”

“Just homework.” He stepped aside to let me in. “Don’t worry. It’s not the crisis for me that it would be for you.”

I entered the living room and was happy to see it filled with canvases and easels once again. “You’ve got your art studio back.”

“Yup.” He set the brush down and wiped his hands on a rag. “Now that this place is no longer research central, I can return it to its normal artistic state.”

He leaned against the back of the plaid sofa and watched me as I strolled from canvas to canvas. One of them gave me pause. “What’s this? It looks like a lily.”

“It is,” he said. “No offense, but this lily is kind of more badass than yours. If the Alchemists want to buy the rights to this and start using it, I’m willing to negotiate.”

“Noted,” I said. I was still smiling from Brayden’s breakup, and this only added to my good mood. Although, admittedly, the painting kind of lost me a little—as the abstract nature of his art often did. The lily, despite being more stylized and “badass” than the prim one on my cheek, was still clearly identifiable. It was even done in gold paint. Splashes of free-form scarlet paint surrounded it, and around the red was an almost crystalline pattern in ice blue. It was striking, but if there was some deeper meaning, it was beyond me.

“You’re in an awfully good mood,” he observed. “Was there a sale at Khakis-R-Us?”

I gave up on my artistic interpretation and turned to him. “Nope. Brayden broke up with me.”

Adrian’s smirk faded. “Oh. Shit. I’m sorry. Are you… I mean, do you need a drink? Do you need to, uh, cry or anything?”

I laughed. “No. Weirdly, I’m fine. It really doesn’t bother me at all. But it should, right? Maybe there’s something wrong with me.”

Adrian’s green eyes weighed me. “I don’t think so. Not every breakup is a tragedy. Still… you might be due for some kind of comfort.”