10. Harper
HARPER
Vine is gorgeous without trying too hard.
Basically, it’s Asher. It lets the food and the wine carry the room instead of suffocating both under white tablecloths and ambient string music.
The lighting is warm and low, the ceiling beams are original stone, and the menu is the kind of thing where you read every option twice because you genuinely can’t decide which one you want most. Asher’s fingerprints are on every inch of it and I’ve been here four days and I already understand why people book months out for a table.
Tonight we have one without a reservation because Sophia Thorne has never once needed a reservation anywhere her father owns and she deploys this privilege with the cheerful lack of guilt of someone who earned it by proximity.
We’ve been here for two hours and I feel more like myself than I have since New York.
That’s the thing about Sophia. She has this specific gift for creating a pocket of warmth around the people she loves where the rest of the world just stops mattering for a while.
Lorenzo is across the table from me nursing a glass of something deep and red and watching Sophia the way he always watches her, like she’s the most interesting thing in any room, which is both extremely sweet and occasionally a little intense.
Raphael is beside him, loose and easy, laughing at something Lorenzo said, and I’ve decided somewhere over the last ten days that Raphael is genuinely one of the better people I’ve encountered in recent memory.
No agenda. No performance. Just a warm, funny man who makes excellent conversation and has the good sense not to make anything weird.
Sophia raises her glass across the table at me.
“To Harper Brooks,” she announces, loud enough that a couple at the next table looks over. She doesn’t lower her voice. “Who walked into a conference room with a tablet and saved my entire presentation and then somehow also got herself hired in the same afternoon. Iconic behavior. Truly.”
I cover my face with one hand. “Sophia.”
“Don’t Sophia me. This is a compliment, receive it.” She tips her glass at me. “To you. And to Rosé’s first flagship location, which is happening because of both of us but mostly me.”
“Mostly you,” I confirm.
“Toast,” Lorenzo says, already raising his glass.
Raphael raises his. I raise mine. We drink.
The wine is extraordinary. I don’t have the vocabulary for it the way Killian probably does or Maddox definitely does, but I know that it’s the kind of thing that makes you close your eyes on the first sip and just stay there for a second.
I’ve been doing that with most of the wine here, actually.
It’s becoming a problem in the best possible way.
Lorenzo pushes back from the table. “Another bottle?”
“Obviously,” Sophia says.
He stands and Raphael stands with him and the two of them head toward the bar, and the table settles into the quieter, easier energy of just the two of us the way it always does when Sophia and I end up alone somewhere.
She tops off her glass from the bottle we haven’t finished yet and looks at me.
I look back.
“I met your mom today,” I say.
Sophia’s expression does something immediate and specific. Not anger. Something more like the resigned, practiced wince of a woman who has been having a version of this reaction for most of her life.
“Oh god.” She sets her glass down. “Not her of all people on your first actual working day. Are you okay?”
I blink at her. “She was an experience for sure. I’m guessing you two aren’t close?”
Sophia leans back in her chair and tips her head.
“Where my dad wanted me to learn to fish,” she says, “my mom wanted me to bag a prize-winning husband so I’d never have to.
” She says it without bitterness, more like reciting a fact she’s made peace with through sheer repetition.
“She had a very specific vision for what my life was supposed to look like. Very specific. Very Evelyn. Very not me.”
“I’m sorry,” I say. “That couldn’t have been easy to grow up in.”
Sophia shrugs, but it’s not a dismissive shrug, it’s the shrug of someone who has done the work of processing something and arrived at a place that isn’t healed exactly, but is livable.
“I think that’s actually why you and I clicked so fast,” she says.
“Your bio-donors were an absolute shit show and my mom is a trophy. Pretty and shiny and completely cold. And that fucks a girl up good and proper early on, you know? Doesn’t matter how much money is in the picture. ”
It doesn’t. I know that more than I know most things.
“Yeah,” I say quietly. “I know.”
Sophia reaches across and squeezes my hand once. We don’t need to say more than that about it. It’s one of the things I’ve always loved about her, she knows when to let something be understood without being dissected.
I turn my wine glass in my fingers.
“What about her and your dad?” I ask. “How did that— I mean. I don’t need to know, it’s not my business—”
Sophia arches a brow. Very slowly. With the precision of a woman who has clocked something and is deciding whether to let it pass.
“Why do you want to know about my parents?”
I pull my hand back from the table. “You’re right, it’s not my business. Forget I asked.”
She stares at me for exactly three seconds.
Then she laughs, short and bright, and waves a hand.
“Relax. It’s fine, I’m not precious about it.
” She reaches for her wine. “The short version is that my dad tried. He genuinely tried for years. But my mom was the emotional equivalent of a gold bar. Beautiful, valuable, completely cold, and absolutely impossible to get warm.” She pauses.
“I love her. She’s my mom. But I don’t like her very much and I think she’d tell you the same about me if she was being honest, which she never is, so. ”
I nod slowly.
“I had a rough few years after the divorce,” Sophia continues.
“It was messy in the way divorces are messy when there’s money and a board seat involved.
But I think they’re genuinely better now than they ever were married.
Business first, business always, take the marriage completely out of it.
” She tilts her head. “My dad’s happier.
I think he’s been happier since we moved to that, actually.
Hell, I know I’m happier. Especially after you and I became friends. ”
Something warm moves through my chest at that.
I look at her across the table, this woman who packed my bags and dragged me across an ocean and gave me a reason to stop sitting in a guest room feeling sorry for myself, and I feel the particular gratitude that doesn’t have a clean way to be said out loud.
“Me too,” I tell her.
She grins. Then she leans forward on her elbows and narrows her eyes.
“So.”
“So,” I echo.
“Why did you want to know about my parents?” She taps one finger on the table. “Is there something you want to talk to me about?”
Um…
“I mean,” she starts, “you’re an adult, I’m not going to tell you who can and cannot be interested in.”
“Really?” Because that’s not the reaction I thought she’d have.
“Of course not,” she laughs, “I’ve seen how Uncle Asher and Uncle Mad Max look at you. And Dad…”
God, it’s so weird to hear her call Killian dad.
“As long as he doesn’t hurt you, it’s fine.”
“You care more about me getting hurt than me hurting them?”
“Well, duh,” she laughs, “we live together. I don’t want you taking your revenge on them by eating through my cookie-dough ice cream.”
Lorenzo appears at the table with a new bottle and Raphael behind him with another round of waters and the moment dissolves as cleanly as if it never happened.
Sophia straightens up and the question disappears into the noise of them settling back in and the new bottle being opened and Raphael saying something that makes Lorenzo groan and Sophia cackle.
I smile at all of it and reach for my glass and feel the wine and the evening and the specific looseness of a night that has gone genuinely, unexpectedly well settling through me.
I reach for my phone.
I tell myself I’m just checking the time.
I open my messages.
I tell myself I’m just checking my messages.
I navigate to the contact saved under his name and I type before I can talk myself out of it.
Harper: We’re celebrating at vine if you’re free
I set my phone face-down on the table and take a sip of wine and look at Sophia who is gesturing at Raphael about something and absolutely not paying attention to me.
My phone lights up.
I flip it over.
Maddox: Who is included in the ‘we’
I grin before I can stop myself.
Harper: Sophia, Lorenzo, and Raphael...
Three dots appear. Disappear. Appear again.
Maddox: Omw, sweetheart
I lock my phone and set it back down.
I reach for my wine and take a long, composed sip and look across the table at my best friend laughing at something her boyfriend said and feel the evening settle around me with all its complications and warmth and bad ideas and possibilities.