Chapter 14
TESSA
It was Sunday afternoon, and Tessa didn’t want to leave.
The thought surprised her. She was a city person. She loved the noise and the concrete and the constant hum of energy that made Manhattan feel alive. The Hamptons was supposed to be a pleasant escape, not somewhere she’d want to stay.
But there she was, sitting on the porch with Lucy while the boys cleaned up from brunch, watching the ocean. Her shoulders had dropped for the first time in weeks, and she couldn’t remember when she’d last sat still without a spreadsheet in front of her.
The weekend had been a revelation, and not Gabriel only, though Gabriel was a significant part of it. The easy rhythm of meals together. The way Devney pulled her into conversations like an old friend. The sight of Gabriel laughing unguarded as she’d never seen him do in the city.
This was who he was outside the office, at least the version he showed her. When he wasn’t the polished private equity partner or the controlled businessman, only Gabriel, in bare feet and a faded T-shirt, arguing about the proper technique for scrambling eggs.
She had fallen for teenage Gabriel years ago. She was falling even harder for the man he’d become.
“You’re glowing,” Lucy said.
“I’m sunburned.”
“You’re glowing. There’s a difference.” Lucy stretched her legs out, bare feet crossed at the ankle. “This is the happiest I’ve seen you since we met.”
“We met because you refused to toast my bread properly.”
“I don’t toast. It destroys the crumb structure.”
“It was seven in the morning. I needed toast.”
“You needed better taste.”
Tessa laughed. This was what she had missed, she realized. Not romance, but this. A circle of people who felt like home. She was used to earning her place. Proving she deserved a seat at the table. No one here had asked her to.
Inside the house, something crashed. Knox’s voice carried through the open windows.
“That wasn’t my fault.”
“You literally dropped it.” Gabriel’s voice was amused.
“The handle was wet.”
“The handle was dry. You were gesticulating.”
“I was making a point.”
“You were destroying Devney’s serving platter.”
Lucy rolled her eyes. “He’s such a disaster.”
“You could go help.”
“I could also not.” She turned to look at Tessa, expression shifting to something more serious. “Can I ask you something?”
“Depends on what.”
“How did you know? With Gabriel. That it was real and not leftover feelings from before.”
Tessa considered the question. “I didn’t, at first. But he kept showing up. Kept proving he meant it.”
“That’s terrifying.”
“It really is.”
“Because of the money? Or because of you two?”
“Both. And fear. A lot of fear.”
“Fear of what?”
Tessa looked out at the water. The ocean stretched to the horizon, blue and endless. The breeze carried salt and the distant cry of seabirds.
“I grew up counting grocery money. Wearing other people’s clothes. Learning not to expect more than what was in front of me.”
Lucy stayed quiet.
“I built my own safety net after that. My own business. My own life. I had no one to answer to, no one who could pull the rug out from under me.”
“And he changed that.”
“Yes.” She drew her knees up, resting her chin on them. “He makes me want more than safe.”
“And now?”
“Now I’m scared for a completely different reason.” She gave a small laugh that wasn’t really a laugh. “He’s the best thing that has happened to me in years. What if I mess it up? What if I don’t fit into his world the way he thinks I do?”
“Tessa.” Lucy’s voice was steady. “He lights up when you walk into a room. Every time.”
“He doesn’t.”
“He does. Around Knox and Ronan, he’s all edges. With you, he softens.”
Tessa’s throat tightened.
They sat there a moment, the ocean keeping its rhythm.
“I don’t want to live like I’m waiting for it to fall apart,” she said finally.
Lucy glanced at her. “Then don’t.”
The door opened. Gabriel stepped onto the porch, wiping his hands on a dish towel. “Brunch cleanup complete. Knox only broke one thing.”
“Only one?” Lucy asked.
“I heard that.” Knox appeared in the doorway, expression murderous. “And that platter was clearly defective.”
“It was an antique,” Devney called from inside.
“An antique with structural weaknesses,” Knox shot back.
Lucy asked, “Did it collapse before or after you touched it?”
He straightened. “It was already compromised.”
“Of course it was.”
“Children.” Devney’s voice floated from inside. “No one is pressing charges. Let it go.”
Knox and Lucy glared at each other for another moment, then retreated to separate corners of the porch like boxers returning to their corners between rounds.
Gabriel caught Tessa’s eye. His expression said everything: amusement, exasperation, and a silent apology for the chaos.
She loved him.
Her wineglass paused halfway to her mouth. The realization hit like vertigo. Her hand tightened on the stem, and she set the glass down before she dropped it.
She loved him. Gabriel Sterling, here and now. The man who made her breakfast and argued with his friends about dishwashing technique and showed her his whole life without reservation.
And she hadn’t said it to him yet.
The realization sat heavy for the rest of the afternoon. Through packing, through goodbyes, through the careful negotiation of fitting weekend bags into Gabriel’s car while Knox and Lucy exchanged parting insults.
She almost said it when he caught her watching and gave her that slow, private smile.
But saying it felt like stepping off a cliff.
The drive back to the city was quieter than the drive out.
Gabriel held her hand across the center console. Traffic was light, the Sunday exodus still hours away.
“You’re quiet,” he said.
“Thinking.”
“About?”
“This weekend. Your friends. How strange it is that I fit.”
“Is that strange?”
“For me? Yes.” She watched the skyline emerge through the windshield, distant and glittering at first, then the bridges, then the familiar press of Brooklyn streets. “I have never been good at fitting. I’ve always been the outsider. The caterer. The one who didn’t quite belong.”
Gabriel pulled to a stop at a red light and turned to her.
“You belong. With them. With me. This is real.”
“Thank you.”
“I mean it. Devney asked twice before we left when you’re coming back. Knox told me, in his own horrifying way, that you’re ‘acceptable.’ Ronan said you’re the first woman I’ve dated who doesn’t seem to actively dislike me. Which, coming from him, is significant.”
“That’s a lot.”
“It’s the truth.” The light changed, and he drove forward. “Tessa. You have nothing to prove.”
She didn’t know what to say.
“You fit. With all of it. With all of us. Ten times over.”
“Stop.” Her voice was thicker than she wanted. “You’re making me—“
“What?”
“Feel things.”
“Good.” He brought her hand to his mouth and kissed her knuckles. “You should feel things. Preferably about me.”
She laughed despite herself. “Arrogant.”
“Honest.”
“That’s the same thing.”
“It really isn’t.”
They arrived at her building. Gabriel parked illegally with the confidence of someone who had seen a lot of parking tickets and found them an acceptable cost of doing business.
“Come up,” she said.
“I should let you rest. You have to work tomorrow.”
“I don’t want to rest.” She unbuckled her seatbelt. “I want you to come upstairs.”
“Tessa.”
“Please.”
He glanced down the block. “Then I’ll need to find a real spot.”
She leaned forward, scanning past him. “Half a block up. On the right.”
He followed her gaze and nodded. “I see it.”
He pulled into the space and cut the engine. When he opened the trunk, she reached for her bag.
“I’ll get that.”
“I’ve got it.”
He lifted her bag, slung his own over his shoulder, and closed the trunk. They started toward her building. The sidewalk was warm and crowded, a summer Sunday that made Brooklyn feel like its own country.
Halfway up the block, a woman came out of a brownstone doorway in pearls she had no occasion for and a navy coat she didn’t need in June. She saw Gabriel before he saw her, and her whole face arranged itself into the small, sharp pleasure of a society woman with new information to deploy.
“Gabriel, is that you?”
“Mrs. Whitcomb.” He moved his bags into one hand and offered the other. “How are you?”
“Good, thank you. I was dropping off a casserole for a parishioner who lost her husband last week. Now I’m on my way to tea at Eleanor’s.” Her eyes drifted to his bags. “And what brings you here? This is not your usual haunt.”
“Tessa lives here.” Gabriel turned. “This is Tessa Thorne. Tessa, this is Genevieve Whitcomb. Old friend of my mother’s.”
“It’s a pleasure,” Tessa said, putting her hand out without hesitation. She held the woman’s gaze.
“Thorne. Are you one of the Connecticut Thornes?”
“South Jersey, actually. My grandmother’s people.”
“Oh.” The woman repositioned. “And what’s it you do, dear.”
“I run a catering company in Brooklyn. We did Eleanor’s anniversary in May, and Devney Wilder’s wedding.”
“Did you, now?” The smile got a degree warmer, because the names had landed. “I think Eleanor was talking about you only this morning. That young woman who did the champagne tower. Yes.”
“That was me.”
“Well.” She turned her gaze fully on Tessa now, taking inventory of the dark hair, the easy posture, the hand still held out a beat longer than it needed to be. Tessa didn’t retract it. Mrs. Whitcomb shook it again.
“Nice to meet you, Miss Thorne. Gabriel, do tell your mother I asked after her. We’ve been due for lunch for months.”
“I’ll tell her.”
She moved on toward the corner.
Tessa watched her go.
“That was efficient,” she said.
“What was?”
“She decided I was worth a handshake in about thirty seconds.”
“She thawed the second you said the champagne tower.”
“That’s how it works.”
“Only in certain rooms.”
He looked at her then and she wasn’t rattled. She had handled the woman the way she handled clients, which was the way she handled everything: by knowing what she could do and not pretending otherwise.
“You’re going to be fine in those rooms,” he said.
“I know.”
A man was sitting on the corner outside the bodega, his back against the brick. He looked up as they passed. Then he looked again, and his face changed, and he stood.
“Hey. Hey, mister.”
Gabriel slowed. “Hi.”
“You’re the McDonald’s guy. From Forty-Second. You gave me a card a week ago, the day it rained. I just wanted to say thank you.”
Tessa stopped walking. She looked at the man. She looked at Gabriel, whose ears had gone visibly red. Then back at the man.
“You’re welcome,” Gabriel said. “How are you doing today?”
“Better today than yesterday.”
“That’s all anybody gets to ask for.”
The man almost smiled. He nodded once and sat back down against the brick.
Gabriel and Tessa kept walking.
She didn’t say anything for half a block. Gabriel didn’t look at her. He looked at the sidewalk like it had personally offended him.
She stopped on the corner of her own street, set her bag down on the curb, and waited until he turned to face her with the expression of a man who knew he had been caught at something.
“Tessa—”
She kissed him. She kissed him on a Brooklyn sidewalk with two bags at their feet and tourists giving them dirty looks for blocking the curb.
She kissed him until she had said everything she didn’t have words for yet.
Then she pulled back, picked up her bag, and walked the rest of the way to her building without looking back to see if he was following.
She didn’t need to look. She knew he was.
Inside, her apartment felt smaller after the Hamptons house. More lived-in. More hers.
Gabriel set his keys on the counter. It was only his second time here, but he moved without hesitation, setting the bag down without bumping the chair by the window and stepping aside to give her room.
“It’s weird being back,” she said.
“Good weird or bad weird?”
“Different weird. This is no house in the Hamptons.”
“It’s you.” He moved to her bookshelf, scanning titles. “Organized chaos. Nothing wasted. Everything with a purpose.”
“You’re being generous.”
“I’m being accurate.” He turned to face her. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong.”
“You’ve been holding something back all day. I can see it.”
She should deflect. Change the subject. But she was tired of protecting herself from the one person she didn’t need protection from.
“I love you.”
The words came out before she could stop them.
Gabriel went still.
She kept talking, because if she stopped she might lose her nerve.
“I know you said it first. I know you’ve been waiting.
And I wasn’t ready before. I wasn’t ready for weeks.
But this weekend changed something. Watching you with your friends.
Seeing who you are when you aren’t trying to be anything. I love that person. I love you.”
He crossed the room in two steps. His hands cupped her face. His forehead pressed against hers.
“Say it again.”
“I love you.”
“Again.”
“Gabriel—”
“Please.”
That did it. Not the word. The tone. His voice had shifted, quieter, rougher, stripped of the confidence he wore everywhere else. His hands were steady on her face, but his eyes weren’t. There was something unguarded there. Something that looked almost like fear.
He needed to hear it.
“I love you,” she said again, softer this time.
His exhale left him like he had been holding it. Then he kissed her, deep and urgent but controlled, as if he were steadying himself against her. “I was starting to worry,” he said against her mouth.
“About what?”
“That you’d never let yourself get here.”
“Here where?”
“With me.”
She looked at him for a long second. Really looked at him.
“I’m here.”
His exhale brushed her cheek. “I know that now. I just needed to hear it.”
She kissed him again. Slower this time. Certain. She let him guide her backward toward the bedroom and let herself stay present instead of calculating what it might cost. This was real. It felt steady. Not fragile. Not imagined.
“Stay.”
“For how long?”
“As long as you want.”
He studied her face like he was measuring the weight of that.
“That’s not a small thing.”
“I know.”
“Then I’m not going anywhere.”
Later, curled against him in the dark, she listened to the city humming beyond the windows.
“Gabriel.”
“Mm.”
She traced a line across his shoulder, quiet for a moment. “You know why we didn’t work the first time?”
He didn’t move. “We were kids.”
“We were scared.” She shifted onto her side to look at him. “We said what we thought the other person needed to hear. We left out the parts that felt risky.”
He watched her carefully.
“That’s how most relationships fall apart,” she continued. “Not because of one big thing. Because of the small things people don’t say. The choices they don’t make.”
His hand moved slowly along her arm.
“If we’re doing this,” she said, softer now, “we can’t do that again. No pretending. No leaving things out because we think it’s easier. No secrets.”
His hand stilled for a fraction of a second.
“No secrets.”
She studied his face in the dim light. He looked steady and certain, and she believed him because she had no reason not to.