Ricky had always been good at walking into rooms without showing what he was carrying.
It was a skill he'd developed early, in the specific, survival-adjacent way that people who grew up watching adults closely developed skills — the particular, practiced composure of someone who had learned that showing your hand too early was a good way to lose it. He walked into Aurora's office with a careful pace and an expression he had assembled in the hallway, and took the chair across from her desk the way he always did, and gave her the stiff smile that was the closest he could manage to his usual one.
"Aurora."
"Ricky." She looked up from whatever she'd been working on, and he watched her do what she always did — the quick, almost imperceptible reading of him, the specific attention she paid to faces when she was trying to understand what a room was going to require from her. "Any problem?"
"Nothing," he said. "Actually."
He folded one leg over the other and looked at her, and waited.
