The Wrong Reading

Rebecca Powell has never been wrong about what she observes.

She arrives at the Briar Arts Center as incoming executive director and applies that precision to everything — the organization, the board, the thirty staff members who already know whether she'll last. And most especially to Amani Bentley: fifty years old, eleven-year veteran, the woman who expected this position and who Rebecca's growing professional file identifies as the most significant obstacle in the building.

The file is now twenty pages long. Every observation accurate. Every assessment precise.

And completely about the wrong thing.

Amani knows this organization the way only someone who built it can. She holds rooms without trying. She gives back Rebecca's confrontations exactly as launched, professionally, without malice. She asks one question in a January review that Rebecca will think about longer than she has ever thought about anything.

Rebecca catalogs all of it. Labels it. Files it. Calls it threat.

For nine months, she is spectacularly, systematically wrong — and everything she documents is evidence of exactly that.

Nine months of evidence. Twenty pages of professional documentation. Every observation correct. Every label wrong.

And Amani Bentley, who has known what she was looking at for some time now, waiting.

A slow-burn sapphic romance about a woman who has always been right about what she observes — and the nine months of meticulous, accurate, completely mislabeled evidence she builds against the person she loves.