Chapter 17 #2
“You like the flowers,” he said, glancing toward Emil. “And your boyfriend likes the water.”
“He’s not my boyfriend.”
The man smiled like I’d just handed him a toy. “Does he know that?”
Heat crawled up my neck. “You’re not wrong about the flowers,” I said quickly, pointing at a watercolor of ranunculus. “They’re just…nice. How do you not like something that pretty?”
He hummed. “Seems like he’s asking himself the same question.”
And then he walked away, cane tapping like punctuation, leaving me standing there feeling like I’d been nudged off balance on purpose.
He was too much. And he clearly did it on purpose.
“All right,” Emil said when he came back. “Delivery’s next week. And you keep ending up over here.”
“I wasn’t—” I started, then stopped.
The older man reappeared like a curse. “It’s that one,” he said cheerfully, pointing at the painting I’d been hovering near. “You’ve circled it three times.”
Actually, it was gorgeous. Flowers in the foreground, Discovery Bay stretched out behind them, misty and soft like looking out a window, waiting for your sea captain husband to return and not being sure he will.
And like someone had been forced to watch Pete’s Dragon on repeat. Me. The someone was me.
Emil looked at the painting. Then at me. I couldn’t quite meet his eyes.
“Then we’re getting it,” he said, already turning away. Emil didn’t hesitate. He didn’t look back to see if I was panicking. Which, in a surprise to no one, I low-key was.
Behind me, the older man chuckled.
“Enjoy,” he said, sounding entirely too pleased with himself.
“Jakob, I promise I will be at your birthday party. There’s no way I’d ever miss it.”
After the gallery, Emil and I decided to head down to the café for lunch.
We walked down the street hand in hand because every time I tried to put space between us, Emil returned to my orbit.
No matter how many times I drifted away, he was right there.
He finally gave an exaggerated sigh and captured my hand.
I was speechless and secretly giddy when Emil lifted my hand and kissed it.
“I need you close.”
Then he kept walking like he hadn’t just rocked my entire world. The man even whistled. What the hell was that about?
For the sake of my own sanity, I forced myself to think about the weather. It was safe. It was easy. It was remarkably lovely this time of year. A rare sunny spring day, warm enough to eat outside.
Emil nodded toward the small pocket park just ahead of us. “Go grab a table. I’ll get the food and meet you there.”
I hesitated for half a second, waiting for instructions that didn’t come. Emil was already turning toward the café, trusting I’d be exactly where he left me.
I crossed the grass and slid onto one of the picnic tables tucked under the budding trees, the bench still warm from the sun. My phone rang as I sat down.
“I’m gonna have an extra surprise for you.” Jakob’s happy voice came through the speaker, loud and clear.
“Why are you making surprises for me on your birthday?” I asked incredulously. It wasn’t his job to smooth things over for me. It was my job to smooth things for everyone else.
“Because it’s been too long since I saw you, and I wanted to tell you that I missed you.”
“You just told me that.”
“And now I’m gonna show you,” Jakob said brightly.
In the tiny FaceTime window, his curls bounced as he jumped around on the sofa. I could hear Reed chuckling in the background at his silliness.
Then a throat clearing behind me made me want to sink straight into the ground.
“Oh, hello,” Jakob said with his usual friendliness. “Are you a friend of Anders?”
Dammit.
“Hi, yes, I am,” Emil said easily. “I’m Emil. And you are?”
“Jakob, and that’s Reed,” Jakob said, jerking his head toward Reed behind him.
“Nice to meet you,” Emil replied. “Happy early birthday, by the way.”
Oh. He’d heard everything. Fantastic.
“Thanks,” Jakob said, then paused, his face lighting up like he’d just had the best idea of his life. “You could come with Anders. Any friend of his and all that.”
I opened my mouth. To say something. Anything. A polite out. A not-yet. A later, maybe. But Emil didn’t look at me. Didn’t check. Didn’t hesitate. And my stomach dropped.
“I’d love to,” Emil said without hesitation. “Thanks so much.”
He smiled at Jakob in that indulgent way everyone seemed to smile at him, and I knew, with sudden clarity, that I was absolutely done for.
“Okay, bye!” Jakob signed off, and Emil started opening food like there hadn’t been some kind of seismic shift under my feet.
“You don’t have to go to the birthday party if you don’t want to. Jakob would understand.”
Emil studied me quietly before he said, “I like birthday parties.”
“If you go, they’re going to think we’re together.”
Emil looked at me again. “I’m fine with that.” He nudged my to-go container toward me and added, “Eat before it gets cold.”
My fate had apparently been decided. He was going to the party with me. But my burger smelled too good to spiral about it when I could eat instead.
We talked about the park, the weather, the food. Everything except the party. When we finished eating, Emil carefully cleaned his fingers with a napkin. I could tell he wanted to say something. It was unusual to see him look uneasy. He was usually so calm. So self-assured.
“I got the results of the investigation,” he said.
“I see.”
“You were cleared,” Emil said carefully. Then, after a beat, “You were deliberately targeted.”
“John?”
“Yeah. It’ll be a couple of weeks while we clean him out of the company before you can go back.”
“I see.”
What Lacey had told me rattled around in my head. Being cleared didn’t erase the fact that my coworkers had believed what John said about me. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to go back and face them.
“What’s going on in that head of yours?” Emil asked.
He reached across the table and laced our fingers together, right there in the middle of the park. No one was close enough to notice, just a few kids on the playground and their parents nearby. I felt the claim anyway.
“Lacey told me people really bought into what John said about me,” I admitted. “And yeah, maybe I’ll be cleared, but that doesn’t erase how they see me now.” My voice stayed steady until it didn’t. The tightness in my throat made it hard to swallow.
“You don’t have to stay at McIntyre,” Emil said. “You could move to another division.”
“I’m not sure I want to stay in the same job at all,” I said quietly. “Maybe this is a chance to think about something else.”
Emil didn’t jump in. He didn’t reassure or redirect or solve it for me. He just let the idea sit between us.
And somehow, that meant more than anything he could’ve said.