Corbin arrived at eight with a bottle of wine and the Paris-NYC territorial proposal in a folder under his arm, and she let him in because both of those things were real reasons and she was not going to pretend they weren't.
Bram had been asleep since seven-thirty — the deep, total sleep of a child who had used his whole day and had no interest in the night. She had checked twice. He was under.
She cleared the end of the table that was not covered in Ember Pack administrative work, which was a smaller portion of the table than she would have liked, and Corbin set the folder down and opened the wine and poured two glasses and looked at the room while she moved the worst of the paper stacks to the side counter.
He looked at the room the way he looked at most things — fully, without perfor
