Petra’s expression communicated that she had, in fact, reviewed Diane Fitzgerald’s complete professional history, client roster, revenue projections, and probably her favorite breakfast order through whatever database the Lang family maintained for industry competitors. Petra Lang did not enter meetings without having memorized every relevant biographical detail about every person who would be present. This was either admirable preparation or concerning surveillance depending on how charitable you felt toward people whose mothers ran Hero agencies with federal database access.
The door opened at one fifty-three.
Diane entered the conference room with the specific energy of a woman who had been waiting for this particular room since the moment she learned it existed. She wore ivory. A structured blazer over a silk blouse that caught the afternoon light and made her skin glow in a way that Luster enhanced but didn’t manufacture. Gold earrings. Gold watch. Her pink hair fell in a calculated wave across one shoulder. Her heels were good. Better than good. The kind of heels that cost enough to communicate financial confidence without crossing into ostentation.
She carried a leather portfolio that matched her blazer and a coffee from the faculty lounge that she’d apparently obtained from somewhere between the parking garage and this room. She smelled like expensive botanicals and the specific perfume I had been breathing forty minutes ago in room 205.
"Petra." Diane’s drawl stretched the name into something warm and proprietary. "Sugar, you look wonderful. That blazer is doing exactly what you need it to do."
Petra’s composure held. Barely. The compliment landed with the surgical precision of someone who had spent twenty years calibrating exactly how much warmth to deploy in professional settings.
"Ms. Fitzgerald."
"Diane. Please. We’re going to be in each other’s lives for a while, and Ms. Fitzgerald sounds like a summons."
Diane sat beside me. Not across from me. Beside me. The chair placement communicated a united front to anyone entering the room, and it put her close enough that I could feel her body heat through two layers of silk and one layer of cotton.
She opened her portfolio. Inside, I caught a glimpse of documents organized with color-coded tabs that made Percy’s filing system look recreational. A photograph of Reina and Marcus sat in a clear sleeve on the portfolio’s interior flap. Diane had brought my parents to the meeting. Whether as emotional armor or genuine tribute was a distinction she would never clarify and I had learned not to ask.
"Odette Reyes confirmed fourteen hundred," Diane said. "She’ll arrive at two sharp because the Lang Agency operates on Germanic precision rather than Southern hospitality. She’ll open with pleasantries, transition to the file within four minutes, and have her actual questions prepared before she sits down."
"You’ve met her."
"I’ve met everyone in this industry who matters and several who don’t. Odette is the one who matters." Diane’s blue eyes found mine. Cold and warm simultaneously in the way that only Diane’s eyes achieved. "She is also very good at what she does and will not be charmed by a boy with a nice jawline who quotes Radiant on camera."
"Then what will she be charmed by?"
"Competence. Clarity. And the impression that whatever she’s investigating is significantly less interesting than what she’ll find if she looks elsewhere." Diane sipped her coffee. "I will handle the registration questions. You will handle the personal questions. Petra will handle the institutional questions. Nobody freelances. Nobody improvises. Nobody mentions the word ’progressive’ unless I say it first."
She looked at Petra. Petra looked at Diane. Two women separated by twenty years of age and united by the specific intensity of people who had been underestimated because of how they looked and had spent their lives making everyone who underestimated them regret the calibration error.
"You understand what your presence here communicates," Diane said to Petra.
"My family’s name endorses his registration’s legitimacy. If this meeting produces an unfavorable outcome, the unfavorable outcome attaches to Lang before it attaches to Belmont." Petra’s voice carried zero warmth and complete comprehension. "I am aware of what I’ve signed."
"Good." Diane’s smile was genuine. Warm. Devastating. "Because Margot called me last night."
The room’s temperature dropped three degrees. Petra’s hand stopped moving over her planner. Her emerald pen hovered one millimeter above the paper in the specific stillness of someone whose nervous system had just received information that reorganized every assumption they’d carried into the room.
"She called you."
"At nine forty-seven. Which means she waited until after dinner and before her evening review, which means the call was personal rather than operational. Your mother wanted to talk to me, Petra. Not to Fitzgerald Media Group."
Petra’s jaw did something complicated. The flush that started at her collarbone and climbed toward her cheekbones was visible above the blazer’s collar and beneath the geometric precision of her hair. Her emerald eyes moved between Diane and me with the rapid calculation of someone running worst-case scenarios and finding all of them worse than anticipated.
"What did she say."
"That depends on how the next forty-three minutes go." Diane set her coffee down with the gentleness of someone placing something fragile on an unstable surface. "What you need to understand is that Margot Lang did not call me to discuss your co-representative’s registration. Margot Lang called me because her daughter has been mentioning a specific student with unusual frequency and she wanted to determine whether the frequency was professional or personal before sending Odette into a room that might contain answers she didn’t anticipate."
The silence that filled the conference room had physical weight. I could feel it pressing against my eardrums, settling into the space between Diane’s coffee cup and Petra’s emerald pen and the photograph of my dead parents tucked into a leather portfolio.
Petra Lang sat perfectly still in her Halloran uniform with her planner open and her hand frozen and her face doing the thing it had done in Room 214 when Steele smiled at her answer about saving lives. The thing that looked like someone remembering they used to be a person before they became a brand.
She looked at me.
I looked at her.
Diane looked at both of us with the expression of someone who had read the room professionally for twenty years and was now deploying that capability in a context that her IHL registration had never been designed to accommodate.
A knock landed on the conference room door. Three sharp raps. Germanic precision.
"That will be Odette," Diane said.