Chapter 7
GAbrIEL
The Union Square Farmer’s Market sprawled across the north end of the park in organized chaos, wooden crates stacked with heirloom tomatoes and canvas awnings shading honey jars that caught the afternoon light.
Wednesday meant decent crowds but not the weekend crush, enough space to move without fighting for position at the arugula display.
Gabriel had a list, and the list was in Devney’s handwriting.
She had ambushed him after the morning briefing. Saturday dinner party. Heirloom tomatoes, fresh basil, good mozzarella if he could find it, and whatever else looks inspiring. The last part had been deliberate. Gabriel didn’t do vague well. Vague was the enemy of efficiency.
He had tried to delegate. “Knox can pick this up.”
“Knox thinks vegetables come pre-washed in plastic containers.”
“Ronan, then.”
“Ronan will come back with a plan to revolutionize the agricultural supply chain instead of tomatoes.” Devney had given him the look that meant she had already won. “Besides, you have an investor meeting in the Flatiron. Union Square is a short walk. You can be in and out in ten minutes.”
He couldn’t argue with the logic. Which was how he had become his partner’s wife’s personal shopper.
The tomato vendor had six varieties displayed in wooden crates.
Gabriel studied them like contracts requiring due diligence.
Red. Yellow. Dark purple. Something striped that looked vaguely alien.
He reached for the one labeled Cherokee Purple because the sign said excellent for caprese, and that sounded like something Devney would make.
His hand closed over warm skin instead of tomato.
Someone else’s fingers had wrapped around the same fruit.
He looked up.
Tessa stood close enough to touch, in fitted jeans and a cream sweater and a canvas tote over her shoulder, her hair loose around her shoulders in dark waves that caught the sunlight. Her hand was still on the tomato. It was still on his.
They stayed frozen for one beat. Then her eyes went wide, and the laugh came out of her soft and breathless, and Gabriel started laughing, too, the laugh of someone finally giving up.
Tessa pulled her hand back, and her fingers slid against his palm slowly enough to send heat all the way up his arm.
“You know,” she said when she could breathe again, “I’m starting to think you might be stalking me.”
“If I were stalking you, I’d be better at it. You’d never see me coming.”
“Reassuring.”
“Tessa.”
“Gabriel.”
The tomato vendor cleared his throat. “I have more Cherokee Purples.” He produced another from beneath the table and handed one to each of them like a man solving a diplomatic crisis with produce.
Tessa tucked hers into her bag. “What are you doing here?”
“Devney sent me with a list.” Gabriel held it up. “Vague at the bottom. Whatever looks inspiring. I’m out of my depth.”
“You’re at a farmers’ market with a handwritten list. You’re already past most men I know.”
“Set the bar low and be celebrated.”
“It’s the secret to a happy life.” She took the list from him. “Tomatoes. Basil. Mozzarella. Caprese, then. Followed by something with the basil—probably orecchiette, if she’s the woman I’m starting to suspect she is. Get the burrata, not the mozzarella. Tell her to have the bread warm.”
He stared at her. “You did all that from a list.”
“I do this for a living.”
He turned to the vendor. “Six more like that one.”
The vendor’s brows rose a quarter inch, the look of a man who’d been handed a request worth respecting. He picked six more Cherokee Purples, slid them into a brown paper sack the size of a child’s lunch bag, and handed it over. Gabriel paid in cash and tucked the sack under his arm.
Tessa watched the whole transaction with her head tilted. “You’re a closer.”
“Devney said the list was non-negotiable.”
They moved away from the stall and walked together without discussing it. The market stretched ahead of them, other vendors and other vegetables, the city humming around them with its usual sirens and conversation.
“What are you here for?” he asked.
“I have three client events this week and the warehouse inventory for the weekend. I come Wednesdays because the weekend crowds are unbearable and the Tuesday produce is half asleep. Wednesday is the sweet spot.”
“You have a Wednesday.”
“Wednesdays for produce. Tuesdays for The Strand. Thursdays for the coffee shop.”
“And Mondays?”
“Mondays I’m at the warehouse by six in the morning. I get a reprieve when I go to Lucy’s to argue about menus, and then I don’t come up for air again until seven at night.”
“That isn’t a day. That’s hostage-taking.”
“It’s the price of running a business.” She paused at a stall selling fresh mozzarella, weighed two containers like she was negotiating, read the labels, and tossed one into her bag. “I wouldn’t trade any of it. Even when Mondays are trying to kill me.”
He reached for a container too. Tessa caught his wrist before his fingers landed.
“Not this one. Burrata, remember. The cheese stall by the south flag does her own, hand-pulled. Worth the extra five dollars.”
She walked him over. The vendor was a stocky woman in a flour-dusted apron who knew Tessa by name.
They exchanged a few sentences in fast Italian, and the woman packed two rounds of bread into a paper carton lined with damp parchment.
Gabriel paid. Tessa pressed a business card into the woman’s hand on the way out.
“You give your card to cheese vendors.”
“I give my card to anyone who feeds me well. That’s how you build a network.”
“Tell me you don’t have a spreadsheet.”
“I have three.”
Two stalls down she lifted a bunch of basil to his nose. The scent came up sharp and green, alive in ways the plastic clamshells he’d been bringing home for years had never been.
“Two bunches,” she said to the vendor without looking. “The middle ones. The middle came in this morning.”
The vendor gathered them. Gabriel paid and laid the basil across the top of his sack, careful of the leaves.
“You’re fast at this.”
“I’ve got a lot of experience.”
He watched her pick out the rest of her cheese at her own pace, the way another man might’ve watched her dance.
The crowd at the bread vendor pressed close, and someone with a stroller pushed through, knocking them sideways. His hand was at her lower back before he registered moving it. She turned her head. Her mouth was inches from his.
“Sorry,” he said. He didn’t move his hand.
“It’s fine.”
The crowd shifted. The space opened. He dropped his hand and stepped back.
He turned to the bread case while he still had something to do with his hands and pointed at a round country loaf with a darkly blistered crust. The baker bagged it, told him to warm it for ten minutes at three twenty-five, and not to fight the crust with anything but a serrated knife.
Gabriel paid and nested the loaf at the top of his sack, paper still warm against his palm.
She moved on to a farm stand of squash and root vegetables and started filling her bag from a list he couldn’t see. The strap was cutting a line into her shoulder.
“Some of this is for donations,” she said without looking at him.
“Donations.”
“Ten percent of every event. Every buy. No exceptions. It’s in every contract I sign. Standard policy.”
“Most of it is food. Money when food won’t travel or store. Two food banks in Brooklyn, one in the Bronx.”
“Why?”
“Because nobody should be hungry. Ever.” She didn’t look up from a butternut squash. “And because if you can give it, you give it. You don’t wait for someone else to do it.”
“I imagine that’s something your grandmother would say.”
She glanced at him then, and her mouth softened. “It’s exactly something she would say.”
He reached for the tote. “Let me carry that.”
“I’m fine.”
“Twenty pounds of produce says otherwise.”
She handed it over.
They walked together while he carried her bag and she examined herbs with the care she probably brought to multi-course menus. The silence between them wasn’t uncomfortable. He’d spent two years learning the shape of it, and his body remembered.
“What happened after graduation?” he asked.
“You mean after you left for Harvard?”
The words landed where she had aimed them.
“Yes.”
She paused at a flower stall lined with cut sunflowers and zinnias, and the colors did the work of giving her time.
“I went to a state school upstate on a scholarship that covered tuition and the dorm. I worked the dining hall for spending money. After two years, a culinary program in the city picked me up on a full ride. I realized halfway through that I was a better manager than I was a line cook, and I pivoted to events.” She looked up at him with pride.
“You know how the rest started. The truck became a real kitchen. The kitchen became a warehouse. Fifteen employees now, and a contract list with names you’d recognize.
The day I handed my mother the keys to her house in South Jersey, she cried for three days.
I’m very good at what I do, Gabriel. I don’t say that to impress you. I say it because it’s true.”
“I know it’s true.”
“Good.”
“I’m sorry I missed it.”
“So am I.”
At the edge of the produce section he checked his sack against Devney’s list one last time. Tomatoes. Basil. Burrata. Loaf. He pulled out his phone with the hand not holding the sack and thumbed a text.
Gabriel: Caprese to start, orecchiette to follow. Burrata, not mozzarella. Bread warm. Don’t ask how I know.
Devney: I love you.
Gabriel: Don’t tell Ronan.
They reached the end of the market where vendors thinned and the park opened beyond, and Gabriel’s stomach growled loud enough that she heard it.
She laughed. “Hungry?”
“Starving.”
“There’s a hot dog cart near the southwest corner.”
“Then hot dogs it is.”
The cart was run by a man who looked like he’d been slinging franks there for thirty years. He saw Tessa coming, and his whole face changed.
“Tessa Thorne. Where have you been?”
“Henry. Hi. How’s your mother?”
“She’s good. Volunteers at the library and brings home too many books. It drives my dad crazy.”
“She always was busy. Dora?”
“Third year of med school. Surgery rotation. She loves it.”
Henry handed them their dogs and pointed his tongs at Gabriel. “He a boyfriend?”
“No.” Tessa hesitated. “We dated in high school. Now we’re... figuring it out.”
Henry studied Gabriel for a beat. “So you messed it up the first time.”
“I did.”
“Well, don’t do that twice. This one’s the real thing. She taught my Dora hopscotch when Dora was eight and I had to keep her with me Saturdays. Dora still talks about her and how that was her favorite summer.”
Gabriel paid. Henry winked at Tessa as they walked away.
They found a bench near the chess tables, the only open spot, and sat down close enough that moving apart would have taken effort.
“He likes you.”
She smiled. “Well, I’m likeable.”
“I’ve noticed.”
The wind kept pushing a strand of hair across her face, and she kept tucking it behind her ear, and he watched her do it twice before he made himself turn toward the chess players.
“This is absurd,” she said after a while.
“What is?”
“This. Us. Eating hot dogs in Union Square.” She paused. “We were kids the last time I sat on a bench with you. Thank God I’m not that young anymore. I wouldn’t want to go through any of that again.”
“Any of it?”
“None of it. The waiting. The wondering. The notes folded into squares and slipped into lockers. The ridiculousness of letting your mother decide who I was.”
“My mother said a lot of stupid things to you.”
“She did.”
“I’m sorry for that. I should’ve said it sooner.”
“You can say it now.”
“I’m sorry.”
She nodded. They sat. The chess players slapped their clocks.
“Why did we let it end?” she asked.
“Because we were eighteen. Because we believed the practical thing was the safe thing. Because I was terrified of getting it wrong, and ending it felt easier than fighting.”
“That’s the most honest thing you’ve said all afternoon.”
“I’ve been working up to it.”
“It shows.”
He laughed.
“For what it’s worth,” he said, “we’d have failed at eighteen, made it at twenty-five, and been all right by thirty.”
“We’ll never know.”
“No. We won’t.”
They finished their hotdogs. The afternoon stretched, and the wind did its work, and he watched her tuck the same strand of hair behind the same ear for the fourth time.
“Dinner tomorrow,” he said. “Still picking you up at seven.”
“Yes.”
He held his hand out for her empty paper, and when she gave it to him, their fingers met in the exchange, and he didn’t let go right away.
“Tessa.”
“Gabriel.”
He leaned in and paused half an inch from her mouth because he wanted her to know he was asking.
“Yes,” he said, “or no.”
“Yes.”
He closed the distance.
It wasn’t the kiss of two people figuring out how.
It was the kiss of two people remembering.
His hand found her jaw, and hers fisted in his shirt, and she made a sound against his mouth he had been waiting to hear again.
She softened against him. Her free hand slid around his neck and held him there, and the bench and the chess players and the city all fell away. There was only her. Only this.
He pulled back before he forgot how to.
“Just an appetizer,” he said.
He stood, gathered the wrappers, picked up his sack from the bench leg, and walked away before she could respond.