“I knew you had this in you, but that doesn’t make me less proud of myself for being right,” Harper told Reesa after they finished looking at her paintings. “I don’t know how you managed to keep your skills under wraps for this long.”

The part of Reesa that shied away from praise bristled at these remarks, but since Cora, Leonardo, Lorenzo, Gemma, and Dorothea delivered similar ones, she decided it was safe to accept Harper’s. And to go with theirs, she had her own ...