Fair Value

She can put a defensible number on anything. Then she walks into a gallery on Third Street.

Delphine Broussard is twenty-eight, the best auditor at a Baton Rouge university, and the most carefully arranged woman in the parish. She balances her own checkbook on Friday nights for pleasure. She gave a good man's ring back four years ago and has never once let herself ask why she felt relieved.

Then a dead woman leaves the university forty-one paintings, and Delphine is sent downtown to verify the appraisals.

Freda Vale has had her own name on her own door for six years and has been openly, unapologetically herself for eighteen—in a town that charges her for it daily. She is nine years older than Delphine. She reads people the way Delphine reads ledgers. And she has been left before by careful women who were brave in the dark and strangers in the daylight.

She will not be anyone's experiment. If Delphine wants her, Delphine will have to say so where people can hear it. One file becomes Thursdays. Thursdays become a drawer holding fourteen months of beautiful chaos, two heads bent over the same page, and a want Delphine has no column for. But wanting turns out to be the cheap part. When the storm comes up the bayou and her whole family is seated at her mother's table, Delphine will be asked one kind, ordinary question—and the answer she gives will cost her the only thing she has ever chosen with her own hands.

Some things you can restore. Some things you have to restate.

A slow-burn sapphic love story about first love at twenty-eight, the price of the closet, and what it takes to earn your way back to someone.