"You're brooding," Gus said without looking up. "I can hear it. It has a tempo."
"I'm deciding about a tree."
"Buy a normal one. For once in your ornamental life, buy a normal one."
Dez made coffee in the mutinous Italian pot and watched snow freckle the alley. "Define normal."
"Fits under the ceiling. Does not require a permit. Does not become a memoir."
"Where's the fun in that?"
Gus finally looked up, auburn curls wild, and something softer moved behind the joke. "Just... don't disappear into the past so hard you forget we're still here, okay? Wren's been weird this week. Quiet weird. The kind where she redraws the same layout seventeen times."
Dez filed that away with the other things he noticed about Wren and pretended not to catalog: the way she bit the inside of her cheek when editors undervalued her, the way she saved the last of the good tea for him without announcing it, the way she had started lingering in doorways as if thresholds themselves required negotiation.