Morgan offered her hand for him to shake, and he pulled her into an embrace. He was stronger than she’d expected, his seventy-year-old sinewy muscles activated around her. “It’s a cold one out there today,” he said. “Did Alvin offer you anything, coffee, tea?”

Alvin. Morgan fought the urge to turn out her bottom lip in a teasing puppy dog frown. With an unfortunate moniker like that, no wonder the kid was a pretentious dick. “No, he didn’t,” she said, “but it’s okay. I’m good.”

Christopher side-eyed his lowly intern. “Okay. So long as you’re … good. Shall I give you a tour? After all, you’ll likely be coming to photograph the place in a few weeks.”

A few weeks? That was news to Morgan. When Christopher had mentioned corporate photography and headshots at the Christmas party, she’d assumed he meant sometime in the summer when the grounds were green again, the courtyard in bloom. But winter was perfectly fine with her. She could put Bennett’s gift card toward some fancy lights and be ready for action in a week or less.

Outside, light snowflakes swirled against a gunmetal sky. She kept a stair behind him as she followed him up the curved staircase, but when they arrived on the catwalk that extended over a laboratory, she fell into step beside Christopher. Morgan had a bird’s-eye view of people in yellow hazmat suits. About fifty feet and a glass ceiling separated her from them. “What are they making?” she asked.

“Have you ever heard of Prozac?”

Heard of it? Back when she’d been able to afford it, she could have been its brand ambassador.

He pointed to the vats that made Morgan think of Mr. Burns’s nuclear power plant. “They’re full of hydrofluoric acid.”

Morgan looked at him, incredulous. She’d binge-watched Breaking Bad back when it had been a new Netflix sensation. “Is it really strong enough to––”

“––dissolve bodies?” He laughed. “Eh. You’d need a lot of it. And it’d be rather messy. Lye is much more effective in that regard. It essentially strips it down into either water or water-soluble molecules that can be flushed down the drain.”

“You sure know your body dissolvents.”

“Keeps life interesting.” He winked.

The tour continued through various labs and sterile rooms. “We put in an ISO 4 clean room last year,” Christopher narrated as they passed over an all-white room with what looked like a glass garage door. Morgan didn’t know what he meant, but he added, “NASA standards. That means there are less than ten thousand particles per cubic foot of air. Which, compared to half a million to a million particles per cubic foot in a regular room … is pretty significant.”

Morgan nodded along in agreement. She got the gist of what he was telling her. This place was hella expensive. Reynolds Capital had invested a lot of money to keep this portfolio company up and running, and more sterile than a bottle of Absolut.