Four Of A Kind

Chapter 95: [2.70] Seven Out of Ten Is Basically a Miracle for the Problem Child

We made it back to the manor with six minutes to spare before Vivienne’s brand call.

I considered this a personal victory.

The art supply package was enormous. Not “oh this is a bit heavy” enormous. It was “I need to reassess my life choices” enormous. Harlow had the audacity to skip ahead of me through the front doors while I navigated the entrance sideways like a crab with a mortgage.

“You’re doing great!” she called back.

“I know,” I said, to the wall.

Mrs. Tanaka appeared from nowhere, saw my situation, and disappeared just as quickly. No help forthcoming. I respected the efficiency.

I deposited the box in Harlow’s room, declined her offer to show me what was inside with the excuse of Vivienne’s call, and made it to the study with forty seconds to spare. Vivienne looked up from her desk, clocked my arrival time without a word, and went back to her notes.

I sat in the chair across from her. The call went for fifty minutes. I handed her documents when she gestured for them, confirmed two dates via text with the Lumière team’s scheduling assistant, and stayed quiet while Vivienne dissected a marketing proposal so thoroughly the person on the other end sounded genuinely smaller by the end.

When the call ended, Vivienne set her phone down and pressed two fingers to her temple.

“Adequate,” she said, which I was learning meant the call had gone well.

“The October fifteenth date works for Harlow’s V-Girl crossover segment,” I said. “I confirmed it while you were talking.”

She looked at me. “I didn’t ask you to do that.”

“You were going to.”

She looked at me for another second. Then she turned back to her notes. “Add it to the calendar.”

I already had. I didn’t mention this.

“Cassidy’s at four,” she said.

“I know.”

“She texted me this morning. She wants to try the quiz again.”

I looked up from my phone. “She said that?”

Vivienne’s expression did something small and complicated. “She said, and I quote, ’tell the scholarship kid I’m going to destroy him today,’ which from Cassidy translates to she wants another attempt.”

“That’s actually promising.”

“Don’t get sentimental about it.”

“I’m not sentimental. I’m reading data.”

She almost smiled. I caught the corner of it before it disappeared back into her face. “Go eat something before four. Mrs. Tanaka said you skipped lunch.”

“I had a waffle.”

“That’s not lunch.”

“It had fruit on it.”

She pointed at the door.

I went.

The kitchen had leftover rice and some kind of braised short rib situation that Chef Laurent had apparently left for the household. I ate standing at the counter, which Mrs. Tanaka silently disapproved of by setting a plate in front of me and then a fork, and then a napkin, at three separate intervals until I was functionally sitting at the island.

“You don’t have to do that,” I told her.

“I know,” she said, and went back to whatever she was doing.

I ate. The short rib was unreasonable. The kind of food that made you briefly understand why people became chefs instead of doing literally anything else.

My phone buzzed. Iris, sending a photo of her algebra homework with a circle drawn around a problem and the words “this is a personal attack” written beside it. I looked at it for about four seconds, identified her error, and sent back: you dropped a negative when you moved the term. Try again.

Her response was a string of crying emojis followed by: how did you know that without seeing my work.

I’ve been doing this longer than you’ve been alive, I sent back.

She replied: you’re only four years older than me you’re not a sage.

I put my phone away and finished eating.

At five minutes to four, I collected the velvet bag of poker chips from the guest suite and walked to the library. The late afternoon sun came through the tall windows in long columns, landing across the carpet in stripes. The library smelled the same as it always did, paper and lemon polish and something that felt like a room that had been important for a long time.

Cassidy was already there.

This was new.

She sat at the reading table with her color-coded pens arranged in a row. Her glasses were on. Her textbook was open. She had, against all natural odds, arrived before me to a study session.

I stopped in the doorway.

She didn’t look up. “Don’t make it weird.”

“I’m not making anything weird.”

“You have a face right now.”

“I have a face always. It’s attached to my head.”

She looked up then, just to give me a look that communicated volumes about what she thought of that answer. Her glasses caught the light and her wine-red hair was in a high ponytail, a few black-streaked pieces falling loose around her face. She’d changed out of the hoodie from breakfast into an oversized black t-shirt that had been cut at the collar, hanging off one shoulder.

I sat down across from her.

She pushed a piece of paper toward me. It was a practice sheet, the same problems from two days ago, filled in. Her handwriting was aggressive, the letters big and slightly slanted, with color everywhere, her red circles around variables, blue underlines beneath what she was solving for.

I looked at it.

Seven out of ten. Correct.

She’d done it herself. Before the session even started.

“Okay,” I said.

“Okay,” she repeated, mimicking my flat tone. “That’s it? That’s your reaction? I did that in like forty minutes and you just say ’okay’?”

“What do you want me to say?”

“Something more than okay.”

“It’s good work.”

“It’s great work.”

“It’s great work,” I agreed.

She threw a pen at me. I caught it.

“You’re infuriating,” she said.

“Seven out of ten, Cassidy. Before the session. On problems that made you throw a pillow at me three days ago.” I set the pen down. “That’s not okay. That’s actually significant.”

She went quiet. Looked at her paper instead of at me. Something moved across her face that she covered quickly by picking up her own pen and tapping it against the table. “It still took me forty minutes.”

“It’ll take thirty next week.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because it took you twenty minutes to do three of them last time, and now you’re doing seven in forty. The pattern’s already there.”

She stared at her paper for another second. Then she reached into her bag and pulled out a second sheet, sliding it across the table. “I tried the next section. Quadratics.”

I looked at it.

Four problems. Two correct. Two wrong in ways that showed she understood the structure but lost the thread in the middle. Not random errors. Pattern errors, the exact kind you’d expect from someone whose working memory scrambled numbers under pressure.

“Walk me through problem three,” I said.

“It’s wrong.”

“I know. Walk me through it anyway.”