2. Tristan
TRISTAN
Everyone was leaving, and she was still working.
The rehearsal dinner had wound down the way these things always did. Beckett and Hadley were the last couple to go, Hadley pulling Eloise into a hug by the stairwell door while Beckett waited with his hand on the small of Hadley’s back.
The others had filtered out in pairs. Saylor and Maddox. Lark and Kit, her bare feet quiet on the concrete. Sayer with his arm around Tatum, the two of them moving like a single unit.
Now the rooftop was empty except for me and the woman who’d crashed into me four hours ago and hadn’t left my head since.
Eloise was rearranging chairs into ceremony rows, moving quickly and efficiently with her binder tucked under one arm while she worked with the other.
Her hair was starting to slip from the twist at the back of her neck.
One piece had come loose near her jaw, and she kept pushing it back with her wrist because her hands were full.
I should have gone downstairs. I had a condo twelve minutes away, a suit I still needed to steam for tomorrow, and a toast I should probably look at one more time even though I’d told her it was finalized. It was finalized. I just wasn’t sure I liked the ending.
But I didn’t move.
She reached for a chair that was caught on the edge of a planter, and it stuck. She pulled harder, one-handed, and the binder slipped. I crossed the rooftop and swept it up from the ground.
She looked up. Green eyes, flushed cheeks, that same startled expression from the stairwell. Like she wasn’t used to someone helping her.
“I’ve got it,” she said.
“I know.” I handed the binder back. “You’ve also got all these chairs and no help.”
“The ceremony layout is different from the dinner layout. I’m resetting tonight so tomorrow morning is just final touches.”
“At 10:30 at night?”
“It’s easier to do it now while the rooftop is empty.”
“Let me help,” I said.
She hesitated. I watched it move across her face. The instinct to refuse, to say I’ve got it again, to keep the wall between working and not working.
Then something shifted, and she nodded once. “Ceremony rows face the alcove, angled southwest. I’ll show you the spacing.”
I took off my jacket, rolled up my sleeves, and started moving chairs.
She worked the other end, and for a few minutes, we didn’t talk.
We just moved through the rows in a rhythm that found itself without either of us forcing it.
The rooftop was quiet. The city hummed below, and the last of the sunlight had finally gone, replaced by the warm glow of the string lights she’d hung along the railing.
“You did all this?” I asked, straightening a row.
“It’s my job.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
She paused, a chair in each hand. “Yes. I did all this.”
“It’s good.”
“Thank you.”
“The solstice thing. Timing the ceremony for the light. That was yours?”
She set the chairs down and turned toward me. “How did you know about that?”
“Beckett told me. Said the date was chosen specifically so the light would hold through the vows. Said Hadley cried.”
Something moved across her face. Not quite a smile. Closer to surprise that someone had noticed a detail she’d buried in the logistics.
“I wanted them to have the longest possible golden hour,” she said. “No artificial lighting during the ceremony. Just the sun.”
“Longest day of the year.”
“Longest day of the year.”
I leaned against the railing and watched her. She’d stopped moving for the first time since I’d gotten here, and the stillness looked unfamiliar on her, like a coat she’d borrowed from someone else.
“How long have you been up here?” I asked.
“Since noon.”
“Have you sat down at all tonight?”
The pause told me everything. She opened her mouth, closed it, and then said, “I sat for about two minutes when the caterer was plating.”
I pushed off the railing and walked to the folding table by the east wall.
The caterers had packed out their equipment, but they’d left a tray of leftovers wrapped in foil—bread, cheese, grilled vegetables, a few of the skewers that had been the best thing on the menu.
I unwrapped it and brought it over. Set it on the wall next to her binder.
She stared at it.
“You don’t have to make a plate for me,” she said.
“Already made.”
She looked at the plate, then at me, and something shifted in her expression. Just a hairline fracture in the composure she’d been wearing all night. Like she wasn’t used to someone noticing the gap between how hard she was working and whether anyone had taken care of her while she did it.
She sat on the low stone wall near the alcove and picked up a skewer.
I sat next to her. Not close enough to crowd her. Close enough that our shoulders could have touched if either of us leaned an inch.
“So,” she said, between bites. “Verbena. Beckett said you run a hotel company.”
“Boutique hotels. Small collection, five properties. Each one designed around where it is, not what the brand manual says.”
“Where?”
“Coast of Maine. Hudson Valley. New Mexico. Two in California.”
“No Pleasure Valley?”
“No Pleasure Valley.”
“Why not?”
I thought about it. The honest answer was that Pleasure Valley was Beckett’s territory. I’d never said it out loud, never framed it that way, but the logic was simple. They’d built their empire here. I’d built mine somewhere else. The way I’d always worked around other people.
“Never found the right property,” I said instead.
She studied me for a second. Those green eyes were sharper than they looked. “You’ve been friends with Beckett for a long time.”
“Seventeen years.”
“College?”
“Frat house. Same year. He and Sutton were building Myrror on their laptops in every common space they could find. People kept kicking them out.” I almost smiled at the memory. “I let them use my room.”
“That’s where it started?”
“My room. Two in the morning. Sutton on the floor, Beckett on my bed, me trying to sleep at my desk because they’d taken over every flat surface.
” I looked out over the rooftop. “They got teased for it. I got teased for letting them. But they were building something big, and I could tell. Even then.”
She was quiet for a moment. “And you? What were you building?”
The question hit differently than I expected. People asked about Verbena all the time. Investors, journalists, other founders. Tell me about Verbena. But nobody asked it the way she did. What were you building? Like the company was secondary to the person behind it.
“Something smaller,” I said. “Hospitality. The idea that a place could feel like it was made for you, even if you’d never been there before.”
“That’s not small.”
“It’s not Myrror.”
“I didn’t ask about Myrror.”
I looked at her. She was holding the skewer in one hand, her knees drawn up, her face turned toward me. The string lights caught the loose piece of hair near her jaw, and I had to stop myself from reaching over and tucking it behind her ear.
“No,” I said. “You didn’t.”
We sat there for a while after that. She finished the plate.
I told her about the Maine property—the one on the cliffs where the fog came in at four in the morning and the breakfast chef had been there longer than the building.
She told me about Whim & Wit, about the first wedding she’d ever coordinated by herself, a backyard ceremony where the bride’s dog had eaten half the bouquet and Eloise had rebuilt it from the garden in eleven minutes.
She laughed when she told it. A real laugh, not a polished one. It changed her whole face.
The string lights hummed above us. The city was quiet. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d sat with someone like this, no agenda, no role to play, no reason to be here except that I wanted to be.
And that was the problem.
I knew what it felt like to be the person who showed up.
I’d been doing it my entire adult life. Showing up for Beckett, for Sutton, for every friend and every woman and every room that needed someone steady in it.
I was good at it. Comfortable with it. It was the one thing I could always count on about myself.
But nobody had ever stayed for the breakdown. Nobody had ever looked at me the way she was looking at me right now, like she’d asked a question about Myrror and I’d answered with something true instead.
She stood up, brushing her hands on her dress. “I should go. Tomorrow’s going to be long.”
“The longest day of the year,” I said.
The almost-smile again. “The longest day of the year.”
I stood too. Walked with her to the stairwell. She pulled the door open and stepped into the landing, and I followed her to the top of the stairs.
“Thank you,” she said. “For helping with the chairs.”
“Anytime.”
“And for the food.”
“You hadn’t sat down all night.”
“I sat for two minutes.”
“That’s not sitting.”
She looked up at me, and I watched the flush move across her cheeks, slow and warm. She was close enough that I caught something clean and light on her skin. Not perfume. Something simpler.
My hand moved. Instinct, not decision. Toward the small of her back, the way I might guide someone through a door, the way I might close the last inch of distance between us.
I stopped. Let my hand fall.
“Good night, Eloise,” I said.
“Good night, Tristan.”
She went down the stairs, and I stood there listening to her footsteps fade. The rooftop was empty behind me. The string lights were still on. The chairs were in neat rows, the plates were cleared, and the longest day of the year was twelve hours away.
I was in trouble.