Friday came faster than the house wanted it to.
Veronica did not forbid the walk. She did something more Veronica than that. She stood in the front hall with her keys and looked at Ethan like she was sending him into a room she could not control.
"You will be on time. You will keep it about the building. You will not make me get a call from Sophia that starts with your name and ends with a pause."
"It’s a listing. That is what she called it."
"I heard what she called it." Veronica reached out as if she might straighten his collar, then stopped herself and let the hand fall. "If she offers you more work, you may take it. If she offers you anything that is not work, you will remember who got you that number."
Alexandra hovered in the kitchen doorway, trying to make it lighter and not quite managing. "He looks fine. You are treating this like a deposition."
"I am treating this like Sophia Bennett," Veronica said, and that was the end of breakfast.
File Street was a different kind of tired than Holt. Wider porch. Brick that had been cared for and then abandoned halfway. The code Sophia’s office sent worked on the second try.
She was already inside.
Coat off. Sleeves pushed. Hair the same clean pull-back as the lobby. She looked like she had come from a different city and was already annoyed that this one needed explaining.
"You’re on time," she said. "That is the first useful thing you have done for me today. The lock sticks if you lift it. Don’t lift it."
"I wasn’t going to."
Sophia gave him a look that said she had heard that line too many times. "Walk it with me. I read your Holt notes on the plane. If you start performing honesty because I liked it once, I will see it."
They started on the first floor.
The living room had good bones and a fireplace somebody had painted shut. Wanted Scent worked whether he asked it to or not. In the closed air of an empty house it sat warmer than it had in Marta’s office. Sophia noticed the room. She also noticed him in it. She did not comment on either.
"Kitchen’s been redone by someone who watched videos," she said, opening a cabinet that did not sit square. "How bad?"
"Cosmetic bad. The floor under the dishwasher is the actual bad. Soft. Whoever flipped this cared about the listing photos."
"Show me."
He crouched. She crouched with him, closer than the lobby, close enough that Low Heat wanted out and he still did not let it. This was her site. Sloppy heat would make her walk.
His shoulder brushed her arm when he pointed at the swelling along the board. Wicked Fingers II took the contact and traveled. Not a handshake this time. A line from her arm inward, low, the kind of path the upgrade had been bought for.
Sophia went still.
She did not gasp. She stood up first, like posture could kill a feeling.
"I asked you not to do extra things in my rooms."
"I pointed at the floor."
"And your arm was on mine." She looked at the place he had touched as if the sleeve had failed her. Echo Touch arrived late and she breathed once through her nose, angry at the timing. "If I thought you were clumsy, I would send you home. I do not think you are clumsy."
"The floor is still bad."
"I know the floor is bad." Sophia walked into the hall before the rest of it could become a conversation she had not scheduled. "Upstairs. If the bedrooms are lying too, I want that in the same paragraph as the dishwasher."
The second floor was better. Light. A bathroom that had actually been finished. The back bedroom faced a line of trees instead of the brick wall on Holt.
Sophia stood at the window with her arms folded.
"This is the one I would keep if I take it," she said. "Which means I need you to tell me why I shouldn’t."
"Street gets loud after ten. I heard it from the porch before I came in. Insulation in this wall is lazy. You’ll hear whoever lives next door like they’re in the bed."
She glanced at him sideways. "You say bed very comfortably for someone walking a property."
"You asked why you shouldn’t keep the room."
Sophia turned from the window. In the better light she looked less like Veronica’s friend and more like the problem he had wanted since the terrace.
"Thursday night I sat on a plane and tried to decide whether you were useful or inconvenient," she said. "I have not finished deciding. That should bother you more than it does."
"It doesn’t."
"I can see that." She came closer to inspect a crack in the ceiling and stopped closer than the crack required. Wanted Scent was in the space between them now, sleep and skin. Sophia’s voice dropped without her permission. "You smell like you already spent the night here. I do not like being managed by a nineteen-year-old’s cologne."
"I’m not wearing cologne."
Sophia went quiet. That was worse for her than if he had argued.
She reached past him for the closet door, which put her chest almost against his arm, which was either careless or a test. The door stuck. He put his hand over hers on the knob to turn it properly.
Wicked Fingers II ran from her fingers straight up her arm and did not stop where a handshake would have. He felt the skill find the inside of her shoulder, the start of her chest.
Sophia’s breath broke. Small. Real.
She took her hand out from under his and stepped back until her calves hit the window ledge.
"That is the second time you have done that to me in a week," she said. "If there is a third, I am going to ask you a question you will not want Veronica hearing."
"Then ask it when she isn’t in the room."
Sophia stared at him. For a second the adult in her, the one who hired and fired and flew out on Thursdays, looked like she might close the distance and finish the mistake.
She did not.
"Write the File Street notes the same way you wrote Holt," she said, already going for the stairs. "Include the dishwasher. Include the wall. Include that the back bedroom is the only reason I am still standing here. Do not include anything else."
"I wasn’t going to put the rest in an email."
"See that you don’t."
They locked up. On the porch she put her coat on like armor.
"I am taking the building," she said. "Not because you touched me in it. Because the bones are better than Holt and the price will move. I will have work for you next week if your notes stay clean. If you show up to that work thinking Friday was an invitation, you will find out how fast I can end a trial."
"I understood the sentence."
Sophia looked at his mouth, then at the street, then back at his mouth like she hated the loop.
"Good. My car is on the corner. Do not walk me to it. This neighborhood does not need a story about Veronica Cole’s boy and me on a porch."
She left him with the code still in his phone and her breath still in the back bedroom.
[File Street Walk Complete]
[+400 CP]
[Sophia Bennett: Return Pending → Tempted]
[Tempted is not taken.]
[New Optional: Wait]
[If you chase tonight, she slams it.]
[If you send clean notes and nothing else, she comes back.]
[Current CP: 3,900]
Ethan stood on the porch until her car door shut.
He did not follow her.
He wanted to. That was the point of waiting.
At home, Veronica was in the living room with a glass she had not finished.
"Well?" she asked.
"She’s taking File Street. She wants notes tonight and more work next week if I don’t get cute in the email."
Veronica searched his face for the rest. He let her find the part he had already decided to give her and nothing that had happened against the closet door.
"Then write the notes in your room," she said. "And Ethan. If you come downstairs later looking like Friday meant something else, I am going to ask you the question I am choosing not to ask you right now."
He went upstairs and wrote about dishwashers and insulation.
He did not write about her breath on the second floor.
The System left him alone for once, which felt like a reward of its own.