Chapter 21
The Surprise
ZOE
There’s a dress on my bed.
Not a “grabbed it off the clearance rack” dress.
The dress: the one I pointed to in a magazine two weeks ago while Eli was reading Lego catalogs at the kitchen island, and Jonah was pretending to read his phone.
The midnight-blue silk one with the slit up the thigh that I’d held up and said, mostly to Eli, mostly as a joke, “If I ever got invited somewhere fancy, I’d rob a bank for this dress. ”
Eli, without looking up, had said, “That’s against the law.”
And Jonah, without looking up either, had said nothing at all.
And yet. Here it is. Draped across my comforter. There’s a shoebox next to it. Heels. Strappy. The kind of shoes that say “I’m going somewhere important.” There’s a note on top of the box, in Jonah’s blocky handwriting:
Be ready by six. Mom’s got Eli. Wear the dress. — J
I read it three times. I flip it over in case there’s more on the back. There isn’t.
My phone buzzes on the nightstand. Claire, because the Holts run on group-text efficiency.
Claire: Picking up Eli at 5! We’re doing dinner, that new Pixar movie, and way too much popcorn. Don’t worry about a thing, and have fun tonight. xoxo
The xoxo is doing a lot of heavy lifting. The xoxo knows something. The xoxo is from a woman who’s not subtle and has not, at any point in the last two weeks, stopped looking at me and her son like she’s already mentally choosing a wedding venue.
I sit on the edge of the bed next to the dress, throw my hands on my thighs, and breathe.
There’s a dress, a babysitter, a note that uses an initial, and I have approximately two hours to figure out what a person wears under a midnight blue silk dress when the goal is to remove it.
I said what I said.
I shower. I shave. I do the makeup I usually save for on-camera work, and then I do it again because the first time, I smeared it. I blow out my hair in big, soft waves that will probably last forty-five minutes, tops, but for now, they look like the kind of hair that gets handed champagne.
The dress fits like it was sewn by someone who made it just for me, with my exact measurements. Which, fine. I don’t want to think about it.
At five-fifty-eight, I come down the stairs. Slowly, because heels, and also because I’m seconds away from stress hives. Jonah’s in the foyer, leaning against the wall by the door, and when he hears me, he straightens up.
And then he just—stares. Hands at his sides. Mouth open. The kind of look a man gives a woman when he has, in fact, lost his entire vocabulary.
He’s in a suit. Charcoal. No tie, top button open, white shirt crisp enough to cut a finger on. His hair is doing the thing where it looks like he ran his hand through it twice and gave up, and somehow that even sexier.
“Hi,” I say.
“Hi.”
We stand there.
“You’re staring,” I tell him.
“I know.”
“Are you going to do that the whole night?”
“Probably.”
I laugh, mostly to release the pressure in my chest. “Cool cool cool.”
He pushes off the wall and walks toward me, slow, and stops close enough that I can smell the soap on him. He puts a hand on my hip, light, like he’s checking that I’m real, and his eyes do a tour from my hair to the slit and back up.
“Zoe,” he says.
“Yeah?”
“You look—” He shakes his head. Starts over. “You look stunning.”
“Stunning is a strong word.”
“It’s the right word.”
I want to make a joke. I have one ready, even, something about how a girl could get used to this, but his hand is still on my hip, his eyes are still on mine, and the joke dies somewhere between my brain and my mouth. “Thank you,” is all I manage.
He opens the door for me. He opens the car door for me. He puts a hand on the small of my back as I lower myself in, and the silk slides against the seat and he watches that too, before he closes the door like it’s taking all of his self-control.
He drives. He doesn’t tell me where we’re going. I try, for one mile, to play it cool.
“So,” I say.
“So.”
“Are we going to talk about the part where you turned my bedroom into a scene from Pretty Woman?”
“Not yet.”
“Are we going to talk about the countertop?”
His hand tightens on the steering wheel. He glances at me, and that look does something unhelpful to my pulse.
“Eventually,” he says.
The drive isn’t long. He turns into downtown Dickens, past the Stagger Inn, and heads down the wrong side of the river to go to the Velvet Steak.
He pulls up in front of the Kingston Hotel. It’s the only place in this town with a doorman, and the doorman is the same guy who once chased my brother off the property for trying to do a backflip in the lobby fountain.
Jonah hands the keys to the valet. Comes around. Opens my door. Offers a hand.
I take it.
I step out onto the sidewalk in front of the Kingston Hotel with Jonah Holt’s hand on the small of my back, and I say, “Wow. This is pretty forward of you, Holt.”
He huffs a laugh. “Is it?”
“A hotel? On the first date?” I shrug. “Well, unless you count the countertop as a first date.”
“The countertop was a lot of things,” he says it low, into my ear, as we walk, and I almost trip on my own shoes. “But it wasn’t a date. And I didn’t bring you here for a room.”
“Mm. Disappointing. Though I would point out, in the spirit of full disclosure, that after our first encounter—no pun intended—a bed seems generous.”
He actually stops walking, right in the middle of the Kingston lobby, with its enormous chandelier, fountain, and brass bellhop carts, and he closes his eyes for a beat and breathes out through his nose.
“Zoe.”
“Yes.”
“You’re going to be the death of me.”
“Probably.”
He shakes his head and steers me forward, and I let myself enjoy the small high of having broken him in a public space.
We approach the Kingston’s hotel restaurant, which is the second-nicest in town, all dark wood and white tablecloths. I mentally rehearse what to order from their menu, but then we walk right past it.
Past the bar. Past the elevators. Down a hallway lined with framed black-and-white photos of old Dickens—main street in the forties, Maisie Kingston’s grandparents on the front porch of the house she still lives in.
I grow increasingly confused. “Holt.”
“Mm.”
“Where are we going?”
“You’ll see.”
“You realize I work in news. I hate not knowing things.”
“I’m aware.”
We stop in front of a set of double doors at the end of the hall.
There’s a discreet sign on a stand outside.
I don’t get a chance to read it because a hotel staffer in a black vest is already there, smiling, and as he reaches for the handle, Jonah looks down at me with this expression I can’t read—nervous, almost. Which is so unlike him, I think something’s genuinely wrong.
“What did you do,” I say.
“Just—” He swallows. “Just trust me.”
The staffer opens the door.
I stop breathing.
“Surprise!” a collective group of voices yell.
The ballroom’s full. Like eighty people in cocktail dresses and suits, holding flutes of champagne, standing in clusters under soft gold lighting.
White linens drape high-top tables, and a string trio in the corner plays something low and pretty.
Along the back wall, in tall, elegant letters lit from below, is a sign that says:
Good Luck in Seattle, Zoe.
Below that is my Zoe Knows logo. The one I designed in Canva at midnight in my crappy apartment four months ago when I still wasn’t sure I’d ever finish an episode.
I make a sound; I don’t know what kind. Something between a laugh and a gasp. I want to cry.
And here’s the thing: it’d be happy and sad tears, and my brain’s recalibrating.
Because I can’t help the pang that hits as I realize, with clarity: this isn’t a date.
It's not a private candlelit dinner, not a dimly-lit booth where he’d drop the grumpy act and, I don’t know, confess to a crush, or at least say something inappropriate about the dress.
Still.
He planned this whole thing. Roped in a string quartet. Arranged for canapés. Gotten people—important people, the ones I religiously stalk on LinkedIn—to show up. All for the sake of my little podcast.
God, maybe I’m a terrible person. Because I want both. I want to be impressive, but I also want to be desired.
He keeps his hand on my back, barely touching, like he’s reminding himself I’m real. “You worked your ass off,” he says. “You built something from nothing. This is what you deserve.”
And just like that, I know he means it. I know it’s not just about fixing my career or undoing guilt or even about impressing me. It’s about believing in me more than I ever did.
“Jonah,” I whisper.
“Yeah.”
“Everyone’s staring at me.” I cannot be the center of attention, the person everyone’s watching and talking about.
He turns to me, keeping his voice low. “They’re here to celebrate you.
” He shrugs, like this is a small thing, like a man casually filling a ballroom with friends, locals, and industry people is nothing.
“And, you know. See about any collaborations that could be mutually beneficial for your podcast.”
“Collaborations.”
“I made some calls.”
“Some calls.”
“A lot of calls.”
I stare at him. I am, possibly, blinking, but I’m not sure because I can’t feel my face.
“Why?”
“I’m kind of the reason you got fired,” he says, low.
“So it made sense to do something that might help you celebrate your new job and network for Zoe Knows. But more than that—” He stops.
Starts again. He is, for the first time since I’ve known him, fumbling.
“You deserve it, Zoe. You’re amazing. In so many ways.
It wasn’t even hard to convince these people to come.
They were excited. They want to talk to you. ”
“Jonah,” I croak, and my voice has gone thick. “This is the nicest thing anyone has ever done for me.”
“Good. Then I did it right.”
He puts his hand on the small of my back—warm, solid—and he guides me into the room, and the second we cross the threshold, someone calls my name.