Chapter 18
TESSA
She didn’t sleep.
She lay in the dark and turned the Saturday timeline over in her head until it stopped being a timeline and became something else: the Plaza event, the Oath discovery, Gabriel’s face in the foyer. His voice going quiet. I love you.
She understood the logic of what he’d done. She’d been running a version of the same calculation for as long as she could remember—building, proving, waiting for the day when the work would finally be enough to silence the question she’d never let herself finish asking.
When is it enough?
The answer had always been there. She’d just never looked straight at it.
It was never going to be a destination. No client list, no reputation, no man standing in a kitchen asking her to trust him could hand it to her. She had to decide she already had it.
She lay with that for a long time. Then she got up, made coffee, and went to find Lucy.
Monday morning, Tessa walked into Flour & Honey expecting coffee and Lucy’s latest creation. What she got was an ambush.
Lucy stood behind the counter in her flour-dusted apron. Devney sat at their usual table by the window. Both of them were watching the door.
“Oh no,” Tessa said.
“Sit,” Lucy called.
“I’ve work—“
“Sit.” Devney gestured to the chair across from her. “We have coffee pastries and time.”
“What did Ronan tell you?”
“Ronan told me he had to leave suddenly on Sunday morning because Gabriel needed him.” Devney’s expression was gentle but firm. “And then you didn’t answer any of my texts yesterday. So yes, I put it together. Sit down.”
Tessa sat. There didn’t seem to be another option.
Lucy appeared with three cups and a plate of croissants that smelled like butter and heaven. She slid into the seat beside Devney, forming a united front.
“Okay,” Lucy said. “Talk.”
“There’s nothing to talk about.”
“Tessa.” Lucy’s voice was soft. “You look like you haven’t slept.”
“I haven’t.”
Lucy pushed a croissant toward her. “Eat. Then talk.”
Tessa picked at the pastry. It tasted like cardboard, which wasn’t Lucy’s fault. Everything had tasted like cardboard since Saturday night.
“I found something. In Gabriel’s apartment.”
“Something bad?” Devney asked.
“Something complicated.” Tessa took a breath. “Did Ronan ever tell you about The Oath?”
Devney’s expression changed. “The stupid thing from college? With the three of them?”
“You know about it?”
“I didn’t until after we were already together. He told me after the fact. By the way, I signed a pact with my friends swearing off love until forty, but obviously that didn’t work out.”
“Were you mad?”
Devney laughed. “Over a stupid pact they made in college? Tessa, I once promised my freshman roommate I’d never eat carbs again.
That lasted exactly one week until somebody brought garlic bread to a study session.
” She shook her head. “People make dumb promises when they’re young.
It doesn’t define who they are years later. ”
“Gabriel never told me.”
Lucy glanced at Devney, then back at Tessa. The croissant sat untouched on her plate.
“Wait,” Lucy said. “What oath. What are we talking about?”
“The three of them—Ronan, Knox, Gabriel—made a pact in college,” Devney explained. “A formal agreement, written and signed. No serious relationships until they turned forty.”
Lucy stared. “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”
“Agreed,” Devney said. “But context matters. The oath itself is ridiculous. The fact that Gabriel kept it secret from you is the real issue.”
Tessa pulled at the edge of her napkin. “He should’ve told me. I asked him about the company name. He lied and said it was about commitment to investors. And I believed him.”
“He should’ve told you then. That isn’t a defense.” Devney squeezed her hand. “But Tessa, the wound is bigger than the Oath.”
“Yes.”
“His mother.”
Tessa exhaled. “His mother.”
Devney waited.
“I don’t think he has ever stood up to her. About anything. Not about anyone.”
“Probably not.”
“I ended it at seventeen, right after his mother told me I’d never be a Sterling.
And he didn’t fight me on it—he made it clean and logical, the way he makes everything.
The teenage part of me decided that meant she was right, that he’d finally seen what she saw.
So I spent eighteen years proving her wrong.
Then I found that frame in his drawer, his name signed to a promise never to love someone like me, and it felt like she’d won after all. Eighteen years later.”
Lucy reached across the table and took her other hand.
“I know it sounds dramatic.”
“It doesn’t sound dramatic. It sounds like the truth. He let his mother have him for years. He’s going to have to take himself back if he wants you.”
“That’s exactly the math.”
“Then he can do the math, or he can keep what he had.”
Devney nodded. “And until he does—you don’t have to talk to him.”
“He’s sent forty-seven texts.”
Lucy whistled. “That’s either very romantic or very stalker ish.”
“Somewhere in between.”
“The best relationships usually are.” Lucy paused. “What do they say?”
Tessa scrolled through the messages she hadn’t been able to delete. “Mostly apologies. Some explanations. A lot of please talk to me.”
“Has he groveled?”
“Extensively.”
“Good.” Lucy nodded with satisfaction. “What do you want to do?”
“I don’t know.”
“Nothing today,” Devney said. “Today you eat cookies and let us refill your coffee and complain about men who don’t know how to use their words.”
“And tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow you’ll know more than you know today. That’s how it works. You wake up, you assess, you decide. You don’t have to solve everything at once.”
Lucy stood, vanished behind the counter, and came back with a plate piled high with chocolate chip cookies. “Emergency reserves. I keep them for exactly this kind of situation.”
“You have emergency heartbreak cookies?”
“I’ve emergency everything cookies. Heartbreak. Job loss. Bad haircuts. Existential dread.” Lucy pushed the plate toward her. “Eat.”
Tessa took one. Then another. They tasted like butter and dark chocolate, and the particular comfort of a friend who baked her feelings into everything she made.
“These are really good.”
“Of course they are. I’m a professional.”
Devney reached into her bag and pulled out a small package of tissues. Sunflower print. Bright yellow petals on white. “Here.” She pressed them into Tessa’s hand. “Because regular tissues are depressing, and you deserve something that reminds you the sun still exists.”
Tessa stared at the tissues. Then at Devney. “You brought me sunflower Kleenex.”
“I brought you optimism in portable form.” Devney smiled. “Also, I bought them in bulk. Ronan went through a phase where he cried at commercials.”
“Ronan cries at commercials?”
“Dog commercials. Every time.”
“These emotionally repressed billionaires,” Lucy said. “They’re disasters underneath all that tailoring.”
“All of them,” Devney agreed.
Tessa laughed. The first real laugh in two days. It surprised her enough to feel suspicious of itself, but it was a laugh.
She ate another cookie. The plate was half-empty before she stopped.
“You told me once,” she said to Lucy, “that he came twenty blocks out of his way and pretended it was a Knox favor.”
“I remember.”
“Are you allowed to take it back if it turns out the man also kept a framed pact in his desk?”
“You’re allowed to take anything back you want. That’s the rule. But I’m not taking it back, because the man came twenty blocks out of his way the first time, and that shows he has the basic ingredients to make something good.”
“Lucy.”
“What. I’m a baker. Ingredients matter.”
That made her laugh harder.
By the time she stood up to leave, she didn’t have answers.
She didn’t know if she could forgive him, or trust him, or let herself fall back into something that had hurt this much when it broke.
But sitting here, with Lucy’s cookies and Devney’s sunflower tissues and stories about Ronan crying at dog commercials, she felt like she could breathe again.
That was something.