“We talked about it. Not that I made realistic images or anything, but that I was exploring that stuff.”

I nodded. “Are you okay now?”

“I’m happy about the Lookout thing, and the team is mostly together. I miss Ashley and Rain.”

“Are you putting white dabs of paint on chips these days?”

“No, and even if I felt like it, there’s no time,” she said. “There’s other, exciting things to do. It’s really okay.”

“What if…” I said. “—what if I told you to tell me the kinds of things you’re working on, when you’re doing projects like this? You could tell me if you made anything with white dabs on the label.”

“Maybe,” she said. “What about pink paint?”

I saw that light of mischief in her eyes.

I scrunched up my nose. “Hand holding?”

“Kissing,” she whispered.

“Yeah. I’ll give you advice when you get there,” I said.

“Sometime between a few years from now and never,” she said. She ran a hand along the top of her projector box. “Okay. I can tell you stuff.”

“Perfect,” I said. I put the chip back in the box, then poked through it. “It’s a lot. How long do these take to put together?”

“Fifteen minutes, maybe,” she said. “Half an hour if I’m doing something like watching television while I work on it.”

“Fifteen minutes per chip, or fifteen minutes per—”

“Per scene,” she said. “It’s meditative. I have other stuff, like some chat bots that put out friendly messages in response to the right trigger phrases, and I’ve been trying to befriend some birds and things in the neighborhood, but that’s been less satisfying lately.”

“Seems like it’s all variations on the same theme,” I said.

“It’s—”

She stopped talking at the sound of a knock on the door.

It was Julien.

“Can you set the table?” he asked.

“Yeah, for sure,” she said. She turned back to me, “I want to show you preliminary stuff after dinner.”

“I’ll look forward to it,” I said. I followed her out of the garage and into the hallway. “Hi, Mr. Martin.”

“It’s good you could come,” he said. “How’s the arm?”

“Sore, but I’d put up with the pain just to have it out of a sling and be able to use my arm. The only reason I don’t is that I’m pretty sure it would cause long term damage and slow the healing.”

“Follow those doctor’s orders,” Irene said.

“That’s the plan,” I said.

In Julien’s face, I could very much see what I sometimes described as a solemn expression on Kenzie, but it was his default expression, and it read more like the dignified and not-cheerful part of being solemn, while I tended to interpret Kenzie’s expression as a deep sincerity.