“Come to stare? Take a picture? Tweet it to your mates? Oh, you found the elusive Vance Reigns! Congrats!”

Her eyes widen. “What? N-n-no—”

“Gonna go sell some photos to TMZ, are you? Try to get rich off my agony?”

“I w-was looking fo-for—”

“Sod off—”

“—a dog,” she finishes.

From the other side of the pool, there is a woof. Sansa sits at the edge and wags her tail happily. I purse my lips, trying not to look too grateful that she returned. I’ll give her a good belly scritch later.

And I will never let her off her lead again.

The girl begins to say something more when the back door opens to Elias, sweating profusely through his button-down shirt. He went out to try to find Sansa when she escaped, while I waited behind to see if she’d come back. He begins to say something when his gaze drifts to our intruder. “Why is…there a young woman in our pool?”

The girl waves, her teeth chattering and her lips beginning to turn blue. “H-h-hey.”

* * *

—

  “DON’T FRET, I’m sure the book wasn’t that important,” Elias says as he brings the girl a hot cup of tea. She’s sitting on the edge of the couch with a towel thrown over her shoulders, dripping all over the expensive beige rug. Elias made her call her father, who is sitting quite stiffly beside her, a silver-haired man who can’t be any older than Elias himself. He came straight from his job, apparently, though I’m not certain what kind of job lets a bloke wear a rainbow bow tie and red suspenders.

Every now and again, when the girl thinks I’m not looking, she’ll cut her eyes back at me sitting on the piano bench in the corner of the room. My arms are folded over my chest, finger tapping on my biceps.

I don’t believe for a second she came into this house searching after a random stranger’s dog. What kind of person does that?

None that I know.

Well, except Darien. Probably. If the dog wore a Starfield costume or something.

The girl accepts the cup of tea gratefully as her father says, “Really, I’m sure we can pay for the book—”

Elias begins to wave him off when his phone rings. He excuses himself for a moment as he fishes it out of his back pocket, and answers. “Ah! Thank you for calling on such late notice. We’ve had—an incident,” he says as he quickly moves into the library and closes the door behind him.

She wilts a little beside her father. He drums his fingers on his knees nervously, and then he stands and says, “May I use your bathroom?”

“Second door to the left,” I say, pointing down the hall toward the foyer, and he leaves.

When we’re alone, the girl takes a tentative sip of tea and wrinkles her nose. Elias makes terrible tea, which she seems to realize because she sets it down gently on the coffee table and pulls the towel tighter around her shoulders. There’s a birthmark on the side of her neck, but I can barely see it between the strands of her mousy brown hair. If she had a wire on her to record our conversations, it would’ve been ruined in the pool, but a video camera could easily take a swim. She could be hiding it anywhere on her person—in her jeans pocket, her shoe, her…

I glance at her chest, and quickly look away.

She doesn’t strike me as the type.

“I’m sorry if this sounds weird,” she says then, startling me from my thoughts, “but have we met before?”

Oh, that’s charming.

“You’ve probably seen me before,” I reply tightly.

“No, I mean—”

“Why’d you come in here?” I interrupt. “You saw the door was open, boxes in the foyer, surely you could guess the situation.”

“I…just did,” she replies, which isn’t a good reply at all. “I was looking for your dog. She came barreling into the road, so I stopped to try to get her. I thought she was lost or something.”

“And when she went into this house?”

She opens her mouth. Closes it. Opens it again. She hesitantly glances down the hallway toward the bathroom, and finally settles on “…I don’t know.”

I run my fingers through my hair aggravatedly. “I don’t see what you people bloody want from me.”

“Nothing,” she says, surprised. “In fact, I really like—”

The door to the library opens and Elias steps out again, thumping his cell phone against his chest. He has a drawn look across his face that is never a good tell. About the same time, her father comes back from the bathroom saying, “That is a beautiful painting. Where did you get…” He trails off, though, when he sees the grim look on Elias’s face.

Elias presses his lips together and says, as if he’s delivering fatal news, “So, that book. It turns out it was, well…”

“A first-edition Starfield original,” the girl fills in glumly. “I know.”

Her father balks. “You must be joking. The only book in the Starfield-verse that has that kind of collector’s tag is…” But then he trails off and, peculiarly, he and his daughter exchange the same look.

They know something. About the book. Something secret between them.

Coming in here to look for my dog, my ass.

Elias hesitates and glances to me, as if I can somehow possibly get him out of whatever he’s about to say. I don’t know books. I have no idea what any of that means. I wrap my arms tighter over my chest and stand from the piano bench. Whatever, I’m going back to my room.

As I start toward the stairs, he says, “The worst part is, the owner of the house—which is neither of us—might want to press charges for the damages.”

I freeze at the bottom of the steps and glance over to them on the couch. The girl curls her fingers into the edges of the towel tighter, knuckles turning white.

Her father clears his throat. “How much are we talking here exactly?”

“Fifteen hundred,” Elias replies.

“Oh, dear,” he mumbles.

His daughter has gone pale, which is already quite a feat seeing as how she looks one shade off from a ghost already. “We…don’t have that.”

Her father, on the other hand, is already reaching into his tweed jacket. He pulls out a checkbook. “Fifteen hundred?” he asks to clarify. “Does anyone have a pen?”

“Dad!” the girl hisses.

He mumbles something to her, and she growls something back, and they stare at each other in a standoff until, finally, he closes his checkbook and she turns back to Elias. Her mouth works as she searches for something to say. And then, unexpectedly, she finds the words. “This is my mistake, not his.”

“Well, then that leaves us in a conundrum,” Elias replies patiently.

She agrees. “I’ll work off the debt, then? I’ll do whatever you want—cook, clean, garden. Until I pay you back.”

“Rosebud, you barely clean your own room,” her own father says, ratting her out.

She wilts. “I can try?”

I resist the urge to snort—not because she couldn’t do those things, because obviously I’m not any better—but because she would even offer to do things she quite possibly sucks at. “We don’t need any of those things,” I say instead.

She wilts so much she almost fades into the couch. “Well, I…”

“Do you like books?” Elias asks. When I shoot him a look, he refuses to meet my gaze. Don’t encourage her, I want to scream, until I notice that she is no longer wilting.

In fact, she is positively radiating.

“More than Carmindor loves the view from the observation deck,” she replies. “More than Picard loves his model starships. More than Darth Vader loves the Dark Side. More than Sond—”

“We get it,” I interrupt.

“Well…” Elias tilts his head thoughtfully, glancing from her father back to her again. “We do have that entire library, and it would be nice to fix it up for Na—the owner of the house. I was going to have it be your job, Vance, but because of this recent occurrence it might be nice for you to have some help. In exchange, perhaps we could cover the cost of the book.”

I stare at Elias, for he has betrayed me far more than I could have predicted. “You’re joking.”

Because first, I wasn’t going to organize a library. What did he take me for, a maid?

And second, I certainly wasn’t going to do it with her.

But she, on the other hand, seems absolutely ecstatic about this turn of events.

“Really?” She sits up, her eyes wide.

Her father shakes his head. “You have work after school, Rosie.”

She winces at that and turns to him. “Well, um, actually…”

“Never mind.” He sighs and massages the bridge of his nose. “All right. All right—but I do have a few questions and some concerns,” he adds, and his eyes flicker back to me.

My back stiffens at the insinuation. Honestly, I’m too busy ruining my own life to ruin someone else’s. Elias agrees and asks the girl’s father to walk with him while they discuss the details, probably with the owner of the house. He disappears into the library again with Elias, leaving the girl and me in the living room alone.