Backstory
Cecily Thornhill has been refused credit, assumed incompetent, and accommodated rather than engaged for most of her professional life, and she has declined every suggestion to settle for less without raising her voice or lowering her standards. She is a meticulous, recognized illustrator whose work is requested by botanists in three cities, and she has sustained this practice through widowhood and a year without commissions by keeping a schedule as if she still had them. The Pollen Archive commission represents something different from income: it is authorship, the first time her name alone will be placed on public work, and the social and financial weight of what follows from winning it cannot be separated from the personal weight of what it means. Her flaw is that a decade of credit theft has trained a reflex for expecting betrayal from colleagues — a reflex that will misread several of Theodore Whitlock's honest gestures as maneuvers. Harriet runs the correspondence that protects the project. Cecily provides the eye.
