Chapter 5 #2
I ordered sparkling water first, then wine only after asking if she wanted any.
She did, but cautiously, and chose a glass of red after reading the menu with the grave concentration of someone trying to calculate the total in her head.
I did not tell her she could order whatever she wanted.
That would have made her feel managed. I simply ordered what I wanted and let the waiter leave us alone.
For a moment, silence sat between us, but it wasn’t uncomfortable.
She looked at the folded napkin beside her plate. “I think I remember my dad mentioning this place to me when they were still both alive.”
“He did?”
She nodded. “Yeah. My dad brought my mom here for their anniversary once. She wore green. I remember because she came into my room before they left and asked if her earrings were too much, and they were absolutely too much, but I said no because I was seventeen and had just learned diplomacy.”
I remembered the earrings. They were elegant emerald dangles, a little theatrical, but exactly the kind of thing Elena Hale could wear without apology.
Robert had complained about the price for three days and then spent the entire dinner looking at his wife like the earrings had been entirely his idea.
“She looked beautiful,” I said.
Avery’s gaze lifted to mine.
I had to be careful with memories. They were bridges and traps.
A way to reach her, yes, but also a way to pull her backward into a version of herself she was trying very hard not to be.
I did not want to make her the orphan at dinner.
I did not want to summon ghosts to sit between us because I was more comfortable loving the dead than wanting the living.
“She always did,” Avery responded softly.
“She did.”
“And Dad probably told everyone the earrings were fake because he thought it was funny.”
“He told me they were made of paste.”
Her laugh came out surprised and bright. “Of course he did.”
“Then he spent the next ten minutes making sure I understood he knew they weren’t.”
“That also sounds like him.”
The waiter returned with water, and the moment settled instead of breaking.
“So,” I said when we were alone again. “Tell me about the terrible bosses.”
Her brows rose. “That’s a dangerous invitation.”
“I survived commercial development in the nineties. I can handle a bad events planner.”
“Lydia once made me reorganize orchids by emotional tone.”
“So your resume said.”
“No, but you don’t understand. There were categories.” She leaned forward, hands beginning to move as she spoke, the nerves turning into animation. “Welcoming, romantic, architectural, tragic, defensive, and—my personal favorite—quietly sensual.”
I nearly choked on my water.
Avery’s eyes flashed with satisfaction. “Exactly.”
“Orchids?”
“Orchids.”
“Quietly sensual orchids?”
“She said peonies were too emotionally available.”
I laughed properly then, not the contained office version, but the kind that loosened something under my ribs. Avery looked pleased with herself and a little relieved, as if laughter had been a door she had hoped would open and was surprised to find unlocked.
“Robert would have loved that story,” I said before I could stop myself.
Her smile tilted, not disappearing, just changing. “He would have made it worse.”
“Much worse.”
“He would have asked what the sexiest fern was.”
“Boston ferns. Obviously.”
Avery laughed again, and a knot in my chest tightened at once.
That was the problem with the dinner. It did go well.
Better than it should have, even. When she spoke about her old jobs, I could see the pattern beneath the comedy from how she had made herself agreeable to unreasonable people, to how she had mistaken endurance for professionalism, and how each bad environment had taught her to mistrust her own judgment a little more.
But she told it well. Too well, maybe. Marlena became a character with a voice like freezing rain.
Lydia became a floral war criminal. Avery could make nearly anything funny, which meant I had to listen for the places where the humor thickened over pain.
I did not scold her.
I had done enough of that in the office.
Instead, I gave her my attention without turning it into instruction.
I asked what she had liked about the work before the people ruined it.
I asked what she had been proud of. I asked who, in all those chaotic rooms, had trusted her, and why.
Those questions did more than another lecture would have.
She answered slowly at first, then more honestly. She liked being useful before anyone noticed there was a problem. She liked taking messy information and making it understandable. She liked remembering details, making people feel taken care of, the calm that came after a plan finally worked.
“That’s not nothing,” I said.
She looked down at her wine. “It feels like nothing when you put it on a resume.”
“Most important things do.”
“Is that supposed to be comforting?”
“No. Just accurate.”
“You’re very committed to accuracy.”
“It has saved me from having several buildings fall down.”
“Only several?”
“A gentleman does not count his near-misses at dinner.”
Her smile came again, easier this time.
I told her a few stories of my own, carefully chosen.
I told her about the first engineer who had red-penned my calculations so aggressively it looked like a crime scene.
The project manager who once told me I had ‘the interpersonal style of poured concrete in winter.’ The client who had fired me from a small renovation job when I was twenty-eight because I refused to sign off on a load path that existed only in his imagination and possibly a cocktail napkin.
“You got fired?” Avery asked, visibly delighted.
“More than once.”
“You?”
“Me.”
“But you’re so…” She waved a hand at me in a way that should not have pleased me. “You.”
“At twenty-five, I was mostly shoulders, arrogance, and student debt.”
“That’s hard to picture.”
“It shouldn’t be. You probably only remember me after I became respectable.”
“I was a child. Everyone over thirty seemed respectable.”
She was not a child anymore though. That was the fact I could not escape.
She was twenty-five, an educated adult, bruised but not broken, sitting across from me with a sharp tongue and tired eyes and a dress that made restraint feel less like a virtue than a physical task.
I had known her as a child, yes, but that girl belonged to another time, another house, and another version of me. The woman was here now.
And I wanted her.
I wanted to touch the loose hair near her cheek, to know whether that blush I had seen in my office would return if I lowered my voice, to put my hand at the back of her chair and lean close enough that she had to decide whether to move away.
I wanted things I had no business wanting from a woman who would walk into my company tomorrow and try to prove she belonged there.
I reached for restraint the way a man reached for a railing on icy stairs.
Across the table, Avery was telling me about Marlena’s coffee preferences.
“She once said oat milk made lattes taste apologetic,” Avery expounded. “Which was annoying because I knew what she meant.”
I forced myself back into the conversation. “Unfortunately, I also know what she meant.”
“See? This is why tyrants win. They’re sometimes right about things.”
“Marlena Cross is not a tyrant. She’s a mediocre executive with good tailoring and poor impulse control.”
Avery blinked, then smiled slowly. “That was mean.”
“That was accurate.”
“Sometimes your accuracy wears a mean little hat.”
“I’ll drink to that.”
She laughed, and the sound moved through me with a tenderness that made the desire worse, not better.
Desire said: touch her.
Tenderness said: protect her.
Honor said: do not confuse the two.
So I kept my hands on my wineglass, my silverware, the edge of the table.
I let myself look at her face and not the neckline of her dress.
I let myself make her laugh, but not too often with my voice lowered.
I let the old warmth exist, the godfather’s warmth, Robert’s best friend’s warmth, the man who had known her parents and could tell her without cruelty that she had not ruined her life by twenty-five.
But there was another warmth beneath it now, darker and less charitable.
I did not feed it.
I did not starve it either.
That was perhaps the most honest thing I could say about the evening.
At some point after the entrées arrived, Avery asked, “Did my dad ever ask you for help?”
I looked up. “Constantly.”
Her eyes widened. “Really?”
“Not with money, if that’s what you mean. But with advice or decisions or things he pretended were casual questions until I realized he had been worrying them to death for weeks.”
“That sounds familiar.”
“He would call and say, ‘Quick question,’ which meant clear your whole afternoon.”
Avery’s smile softened with a flash of sadness and a glimmer of warmth. “What did he worry about?”
“You.”
She glanced down.