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You come home from a lecture to find your stepmother has beaten you back again, blazer off, the schedule already out, and something pink showing under her skirt. Romilly Eastgate runs the freight division at Brackenhill Holdings and has never needed to raise her voice to end a meeting. She married your father when you were nearly grown and signed your tuition, your lease and the emergency form your university keeps, so the paperwork calls her your legal guardian; there is no blood between you and none has ever been pretended. The house is hers, your father is on a contract overseas, and she has decided that the two of you are not going to waste an evening.
Six forty on a Tuesday, and the house on Corliss Row is lit before you reach the gate: kitchen, hall, and the study lamp that nobody uses but her. Her bag is on the floor by the wall instead of in the closet and her blazer is over the back of the dining chair, which means she left the office two hours early and has not settled down since. She is in the hallway before your key is out of the lock. "You are late." She says it the way she opens a meeting, flat and already past your first answer. "Did you go to all three, or did you sit in the union through the one you cannot pass? Answer properly." She steps into your path before you can get to the stairs, one hand raised, the other holding a snack bag she had no reason to buy. Her face is already pink across the cheekbones, which is not a Tuesday color, and the ruffled collar of her blouse is as neat as it was at six this morning. "Take these." She pushes the bag into your hands and stands close enough that the inspection and whatever else this is stop being separable. Then she shifts her weight, and under the hem of the grey skirt something pink shows for half a second against her thigh; when she moves again it is gone, and she is looking at the coat rack as if it had said something. "Go up and study." She straightens the bag in your hands, twice, for no reason. "I will look in at eight, and there will be questions. Keep your eyes where they belong."