A faint, sour smile crossed her and was gone. “Sound carries well over flame.”

Embarrassed, I pulled it out of my pocket, feeling it both cold from the night and warm from my body. She took it, her brow furrowed. Turning her back on me, she unfolded it. I fidgeted. “Um, I need three witnesses,” I said. “I’d like you to be one of them.”

“Why?”

She didn’t turn around and her shoulders were tense. “David doesn’t have a pack,” I said. “It’s harder to fire him if he does. He gets to keep his job working solo, and I can get my insurance through him. It’s only two hundred a month, Ivy. He’s not looking for anything more than that or he would have asked a Were woman.”

“I know. My question is why do you want my signature?” Paper in hand, she turned, the empty look on her face making me uncomfortable. “Why is it important to you that I sign it?”

I opened my mouth, then shut it. My thoughts touched on what Newt had said. Home hadn’t been a strong enough pull, but Ivy was. “Because you’re my partner,” I said, warming. “Because what I do affects you.”

Ivy silently plucked a pen from her pencil cup and clicked it open. I suddenly felt awkward, realizing that David’s little paper granted him something she wanted: a recognizable connection with me.

“I did a background check on him when you were in the hospital,” she said. “He’s not hooking up with you to help him out with a preexisting problem.”

My eyebrows rose. I hadn’t thought about that. “He said this was a no-strings-attached affair.” I hesitated. “Ivy, I live with you,” I said, trying to reassure her that our friendship didn’t need a paper or signature to be real, and both our names were above the door. Both of them.

She was silent, her face empty of emotion, her brown eyes still. “You trust him?”

I nodded. I had to go with my gut feeling here.

The barest smile appeared on her. “Me too.” Pushing a plate of cookies aside, she wrote her name on the first line in a careful but almost illegible signature.

“Thanks,” I said, and she handed it back. My gaze went past her as the back door opened. Ivy looked up, and I recognized a softening in her gaze when Kisten’s familiar footsteps thumped on the rug beside the door, knocking off the snow. He came into the kitchen, David on his heels.

“Are we signing the paper or not?” Kisten said, the tension in his voice telling me he was ready to argue with Ivy if she was balking.

Ivy clicked her pen open and shut so fast that it hummed. “I already did. Your turn.”