The twenty-second floor of Halvard Tower smelled like a candle trying to be a person.

Nia stepped out of the lift into amber light, and a breeze of eucalyptus. The floor had been designed by someone who had read about warmth in a book. There was a reclaimed-wood reception desk with no receptionist, a wall of living moss, a neon sign above the staff kitchen that read *LIVE LAUGH LOVE* and, beneath it, in smaller pink tubing, *(with a payment plan)*. Someone laughed from deep inside the floor, a high, helpless, performed laugh, and then stopped abruptly.

HEARTHLY, said the moss, in tasteful metal. *Come home to yourself.*

She had a file in her bag. The file said that Hearthly Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Halvard Group, had drawn two point one million dollars in intercompany loans across three years against a promise to become profitable, and had been fourteen months in arrears for the last of them. The file did not say who had co-signed those loans. It didn't need to. Everyone in the building knew the name on the app.

She followed the laughing.

It led her past a fake kitchen with real spatulas, past a booth where a young woman was painting a ceramic mug under a ring light for an audience of no one, and into a corner studio the size of a bedroom. A man sat cross-legged on a velvet sofa with a phone on a tripod in front of him. He wore a cardigan the colour of porridge and four silver rings, and he was in the middle of telling someone that he wasn't mad, he was just *processing*.

"No, but listen," he was saying, "I love that for you, I do, but I need to flag that the energy of just *emailing* me at three in the morning with a screenshot is, like, not it, you know? We're all just humans, trying our best, in a *really* high-pressure ecosystem, and honestly the number one thing I've learned this year is boundaries, and also that I should not post when I'm hungry —"

Nia stopped at the edge of the doorway. A woman in a headset, standing by the tripod, saw her and began making urgent slicing gestures across her own throat. Nia did not understand them. She took a step forward anyway.

"— so I'm going to take a quick break and, oh my god." Theo Halvard turned his head and saw her. The grin on his face froze and thawed in a second. "Sorry, hold on, chat, we have a *guest.* Hi! Hello! Are you here for the oat milk tasting? Because I just have to say, I'm so sorry, it got cancelled, there was a thing with the oat."

"Ms. Boateng," Nia said. "Kestrel Recovery."

"Right. Great. Love it." He looked at the phone. He looked at her. She could see the thought arrive on his face, slowly, like a bad email: *Kestrel. Recovery. Receivables.* "Oh no."

"Theo," hissed the woman with the headset.

"Hi, Bex. It's fine. It's totally fine, it's an audit. Audits are healthy." He rose too quickly, nearly knocked the tripod, caught it, and in catching it swung the phone halfway round the room. On its little screen, Nia saw herself for one second: a woman in a charcoal coat in a doorway, with a green notebook, looking like the weather. Below her, the comments streamed past in white text on a dark panel.

*who is that*

*omg is that the lawyer*

*she looks like she's here to repossess his cardigan*

*THE COAT*

"Is that live?" said Nia.

"It's —" Theo made a noise. "No. Yes. It's live, but it's like, it's a very small live."

"Three thousand two hundred," said Bex, flatly.

"Which is small. In the grand scheme."

"Mr. Halvard," Nia said, "would you like to end the stream?"

"Oh, God, yes, please, absolutely, gosh. Sorry, everyone. We're going to. Love you. Hydrate. Bye." He stabbed at the screen. The comments vanished mid-word. In the silence, the neon in the corner hummed, and somewhere a mug broke.

---

His office was down the hall, past a wall of framed magazine covers on which Theo had been photographed laughing in a field. It had a desk, a couch, a mini fridge, and a ficus that was so obviously fake that it looked like a joke about the other ficus on thirty-four. He closed the door and leaned on it. Then he slid slowly down it until he was sitting on the carpet.

"That was bad," he said.

"It could have been worse."

"How?"

"You could have been in the middle of an ad."

"I was going to do an ad *after*." He put his face in his hands. When he looked up, he looked about nineteen. He had a long gentle face, with his grandmother's high forehead and his uncle's wide mouth, and eyes the colour of weak tea. Hers had that colour, she realised, and looked away quickly. "I'm so sorry. You were nice enough to come to me and I'm sitting on the floor. It's a thing I do. I sit on floors. My therapist says it's a form of grounding. Do you want a kombucha?"

"No, thank you."

"I have the non-weird one."

"I'm sure you do." She took out the file. "Mr. Halvard —"

"Theo. Please. God. Mr. Halvard is my uncle. I look behind me when people say it."

"Theo. Hearthly owes Halvard Group two point one million dollars. The last payment was due fourteen months ago. I'm not here to hurt you. I'm here to ask what the plan is."

"We have a plan."

"What is it?"

"We have a plan to have a plan," said Theo. "We're in a really exciting restructuring phase." He saw her face. "That's what I say to the board. It's not the truth. The truth is I borrowed it to build the creator tools and the creators didn't come and then the creators came and left and now the app is mostly my face." He made a small sound. "It's mostly my face, Ms. Boateng."

It was, she thought, the most honest thing she had heard anyone say in the tower. And he'd said it on the floor.

She sat on the couch, because the alternative was standing over him. "Nia."

"Nia." He tried the name. "That's lovely. Is it short for something?"

"No."

"It suits you. You look like someone." He squinted. "Not, like, in a weird way. You look like — hang on. No, it's gone. It's like a word on the tip of your tongue. Do you ever get that? Where somebody's face is a word?"

She kept her hands where they were. "I get that."

"Sorry. I do it to everyone. I'm tragically parasocial." He laughed, and the laugh went slightly wrong. He rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand. "It's probably my cousin. I mean, you don't look like her. She'd be, what, twenty-nine now. But you're about the right age and you've got the, I don't know, the *no-nonsense* thing. She had the no-nonsense thing. She'd have been furious about the oat milk."

The room tipped, a few degrees.

"Your cousin," said Nia.

"Linnea." Theo smiled. It was the first unperformed expression she'd seen on him. "She died when we were kids. I was fourteen. She was eleven. Everyone called her Lin. She was ridiculous. She drew a horse for me once, and it had five legs, and when I said so she said that horses are *fast*, Theo, they need a spare." He nodded across the room.

A small frame hung on the wall next to the fridge, half behind a plant. In it, a sheet of cheap paper, a brown crayon horse with an extra leg bent at a knee, and in the corner, in blocky letters, T. LOVE LIN.

She had not remembered the drawing. She remembered the crayon, the particular waxy brown, and the way she'd pressed too hard on the fifth leg and it had made a shine.

"I'm sorry," she said, and it was true, in a way she did not have a word for. "What happened to her?"

"Hospital, they said. I was away at school." He pulled his knees up. "When I came home, Dad was — you know, my dad was Uncle Alex's little brother, they were basically the same person — and nobody would say how. Grandmother said it was private. Grandmother says everything is private. There wasn't a funeral." He looked up, and his eyes were wet, with the shining stubborn shame of a man who has told no one. "I asked. I was fourteen and I asked her for a funeral, and she looked at me and said, 'Quite,' and that meant no. The whole family. We didn't have a funeral for her."

"No funeral," said Nia, carefully.

"I know it sounds mad." He gave a half-laugh. "I went looking, once. After Dad died. I thought, I'll find where she is and I'll leave her something. A, I don't know, a horse. I called every cemetery in the GTA. Then Ontario. I paid a guy to check." He shook his head. "Nothing. There's no grave for her, Nia. Not in the province. Not a stone. It's like nobody — I don't know. It's like she was never buried."

The fake ficus stood very still in its pot.

She thought of all the cakes. She thought of her mother's thimbled hand tapping the table, and the pink carbons in the drawer. She thought: *there was a death certificate, and there was no body, and I was the body.*

Theo wiped his face with the cuff of his cardigan, and it left a faint darker line. "Sorry," he said. "That was a lot. I just — you asked me about the loan and I gave you my entire childhood. You must get that."

"Sometimes."

"Honestly? Never, I'd think. People must be, like, terrified of you." He gave a wobbly grin. "But you're weirdly easy to tell things to. Is that a technique?"

"It's a coat."

He laughed properly then, startled and bright, and for one dangerous second she felt a pull toward him so strong it was like vertigo: the young, wrecked, ridiculous boy who had kept her horse for eighteen years in a frame behind a plant, who had gone to every graveyard in Ontario to give her a gift.

She had put him nowhere on the Schedule. She thought she probably should not start now.

"Theo," she said. "About the two point one million."

"Yes. God. Yes." He sat up. "I'll cooperate with whatever. I'll give you whatever you need. Honest. Is there a form? I love a form."

"There's a form."

"Then I want it. And Nia?" He had gone suddenly serious, and the cardigan and the rings and the bravado slipped away until he was only a man in an office with a crayon drawing on the wall. "Don't tell Uncle Konrad I told you about the cemeteries. He gets weird."

"Weird how?"

"Like I asked him for a kidney." Theo shrugged. "And Grandmother's worse. She gets quiet. When she goes quiet, somebody's job disappears."

"Noted," said Nia.

She stood and headed for the door. As her hand found the handle, her phone, in her pocket, began to hum repeatedly against her hip, as it did when something was happening on a network she could not see. She took it out and looked.

PINKY: nia PINKY: NIA PINKY: there is a clip of you going around. 3200 people saw your face and one of them is a very bored person with an account called @towertea PINKY: it has forty thousand views PINKY: and a caption that says "who is the woman in the coat and why does she look like THEM"