Thinking of Clementine as a peer with Adrienne was odd — she had always seemed much younger. Cash's eyebrows knotted together briefly. "This is her second season?" he asked. That had to be worrying Ford, with Grace still unmarried — and it hadn't been Cash's business to worry about Ford's sisters in months, so he wasn't caught up on things.

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Ford rolled his eyes. "If you can count the first one. It wasn't as though she made a proper effort," he remarked. She had not been dramatically unsuccessful, of course, and she had not done worse than Grace had during her first season... but it was different with Clementine, because Ford felt that Clementine could have carried it off better, if she'd had even the slightest inclination to do so.

Talking about his sister was better than talking about Miss Chang, he decided. He hadn't had any reservations about talking about Miss Chang to Cash before, but that had been before he realized the pair of them could conceivably meet while Ford wasn't around — for some reason that was mildly disconcerting. He took the handkerchief back to the sink and wet it again, just for good measure. "But yes, it's her second. And Grace's third."

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It didn't seem good that the Greengrasses had both girls as debutantes at the same time, given what Ford had once told Cash about their finances, but that was complicated to bring up in a powder room. What he managed instead was saying, "That's a lot of debutantes to manage." Any number of debutantes seemed like a lot to manage, but it really seemed like a lot for Ford, who was Ford.

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Ford caught the subtle undertone of what Cash was saying and frowned. "It's two," he said, a touch defensively. "Same as the first season after we were out of mourning." The implication he was pushing was that he had managed it before — Verity was married, however rocky the path had been to get there — so why shouldn't he be able to manage it now? Of course the reality was that he was not managing it — he was resorting to crime to keep them afloat, and that was not a sustainable long-term solution, so even with the burglaries he couldn't manage it very much longer — but he didn't want to tell Cash that. Ford had fixed Cash's fledgling dementor — he wanted Cash to see him as a person who could handle things.

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He'd gone too far. "Right," Cash said. He injected what he thought was an appropriate amount of 'I believe you' into his tone, because he'd just, sort of, made up with Ford. It wouldn't do well to push his luck now. "Hopefully this season is better for them both."

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Ford wasn't sure what to make of Cash's tone. Maybe reading his friend was a skill that had atrophied in the intervening months. He blotted the stain with the damp handkerchief again. "Yeah," he said, with a shrug. He could have added it couldn't really go worse for either of them, but that was maybe a little too vulnerable for the moment they were in (and it wasn't true besides — Verity had been kidnapped, once, and so far at the very least Grace and Clementine could say they'd steered clear of that).

"Right, so —" he fished out his wand and cast the spell to remove the stain. The red blot curled in on itself like parchment tossed on a fire, and eventually disappeared entirely. "That'll do it, I s'pose."

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   Cassius Lestrange

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Cash looked down, and smiled sort of shyly to see that the stain was gone. He stepped away from the counter. "Thank you," he said, "And — I'll see you soon, right?"

Maybe things were starting to look up.

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"Yeah, you too," Ford replied automatically, because see you soon was a fairly routine way to end a conversation and he at first assumed that was what it was in this context. After a second he wondered if perhaps in this case it had been a real question, and bit his lower lip as though to signal he was about to try the answer again. "Think so, yeah. I, uhm — I don't have any fieldwork on Tuesday, if you wanted to do lunch?" This was one level more substantial than just saying see you around the office, but still significantly less invested than making actual plans at actual events. Easing into it.

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Cash tried to keep himself from brightening too visibly; maybe they actually would be friends again. He smiled. "That works for me, too. I'll see you then," he said.

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