Turn 10 of 10

I take in the scene, and act on what matters most.

The room is smaller than you expected and warmer than the hallway, swatched in fabric samples that hang from a tension rod like a sunset in strips — peach, coral, butter yellow, a green so soft it looks like the house invented it. A full-length mirror stands in the corner, gilt-edged, tilted slightly forward as if leaning in to get a better look at you. Three sisters are already inside, arranging swatches on a folding table with the focused choreography of a surgical team, and when you enter they look up in sequence — left to right, like a wave — and smile in a way that lands on you like a blanket fresh from the dryer.

Brynn's hand leaves the small of your back. The absence registers as temperature, not loss — a cool patch where the warmth was, already fading. She moves to the head of the table and picks up a clipboard you didn't know was there.

"Okay, so spring palette is us being so sure about you. Like, we wouldn't put you here if we weren't." She clicks a pen. The sound is small and final.

"We're going to hold some colors up and see what speaks to you, and I promise — I *promise* — you're going to be amazed at how right it feels."

A sister — blonde, name tag reading SLOANE — lifts a coral swatch and holds it beside your cheek. You catch your reflection in the gilt mirror. The color does something to your skin: warms it, brightens it, makes you look like a girl who has never stood apart from anything in her life. It's a good color. That's the problem. It's a genuinely good color, and the part of you behind glass watches yourself lean into it and notes the lean with clinical precision but cannot make the body stop.

Tamsin stands near the door, hands folded, tote pinned and pristine. Her eyes find yours in the mirror. For one second — less, a fraction, a sliver — the house smile slips, and underneath it she looks like a girl who once planned to study lichen on a rocky coast, who once knew exactly what she wanted and said it out loud. Then the smile resets. She mouths something. Two words. You can read them on her lips without sound: *your card.* Not *read your card* — she already said that. Just *your card*, like a reminder, like a rope thrown to someone who is still close enough to shore to catch it.

Sloane switches to a butter yellow. It lights you up even more. Brynn nods, and the other two sisters nod with her, and the nodding is beautiful and synchronized and you feel a pulse of something that might be joy and might be grief and is probably both, braided together so tightly you can't separate them without unraveling.

You are standing in a room full of warmth, holding nothing, wearing a smile that fits, and somewhere behind glass the girl who came here to use this place is watching you choose — or fail to choose — with the same still, sad clarity she used to use for everything.