Chapter 30
I move through the next few weeks as if in a dream.
Everything is falling into place, everything feels so right.
Our date calendar is on fire, constantly updated.
There is such an ease in folding Daniel into my daily life.
On the days we start together—whether at his house or mine—we brush our teeth at the same time, our electric toothbrushes whirring while the kettle is heating up water for coffee.
I shower at night, him in the morning. Sometimes together.
Daniel and I are on the same page about our eggs-and-toast breakfast—especially on the days he’s made bread. The first time he made me a loaf of sourdough, I almost got pregnant from my first bite.
And we excel at evenings. Between Daniel and me, we have the entirety of the L.A.
restaurant scene covered. Some nights it’s Szechuan in the San Gabriel Valley.
Other times it’s old-school steak houses in Beverly Hills, sometimes tacos grabbed from a truck and eaten on the hood of our cars.
Sushi in the Valley and handmade pasta in the arts district.
We catch movies, comedy shows, and concerts at the Hollywood Bowl and the Greek.
Daniel always scores the best seats—whether it’s front row or in a box.
I feel taken care of, shepherded from one lovely activity to the next without effort.
But I can’t fully relax—Daniel is my fated and that comes with a heaviness inherent in the promise of it.
This isn’t casual dating, even if it feels like it to him.
But I hide that pressure, bury it to try and just be present with Daniel as we get to know each other.
If weekday evenings are packed, weekends are lazier.
When we’re feeling up for it and Daniel wants to cook something good, we might hit up a farmers market.
If there’s a particularly exciting exhibit, we might stop by a museum as well.
But most days we do what we love to do best: work.
Next to each other either on his giant dining room table or side by side on my kitchen counter.
Turns out, dating a guy who runs his own business can help you with your own. “Hm, I think you can raise prices. You guys are pretty affordable considering your clientele,” Daniel says as he scrolls a financial report.
“Just a matter of convincing my grandmother,” I say with a sigh. “I’m taking over at the end of the year, but I still feel like she doesn’t fully trust me with the big decisions.”
He kisses my forehead. “It’s just because you’re her granddaughter. She’ll get over it.”
I barely get to see Mar in all this dating frenzy, and a cloud of guilt hovers over me. At one point, I send over a dozen bagels to her new restaurant and that evening she calls me as I’m doing a load of laundry.
“Oh my god, I was about to leave a message,” she says when I answer. “Your voicemail greeting is my new best friend.”
“Ha,” I say as I throw some towels into the washer. Betty roosts on the dryer, basking in the vibrating warmth as it runs. Weirdo. “Sorry, it’s just been nonstop. How are you?”
“Me? I’m great now because of those bagels. Thanks for that. It kept the electrician jazzed a couple hours longer. But yeah, same ol’ new-restaurant stress. Oh, and Mica’s teeth are falling out all at once.”
“Ew, what? Is he okay?” I start the washer and head to the kitchen.
“Yeah, yeah. Just, three teeth got loose. At the same time? No one told me about this in my parenting orientation.”
“Poor guy. Can I take him out for ice cream this week?” I put the call on speakerphone as I pull on rubber gloves to start scrubbing the hell out of my sink.
It’s the third Tuesday of the month, which means it’s Kitchen Deep Clean Frenzy night.
I set my egg timer for fifteen minutes so I know when to move onto the fridge.
“Ah, this week might be hard because of some dumb stuff,” she says, her voice sounding hollowed out.
I pause my scrubbing. “You okay?”
“Yeah. Just overwhelmed.”
Her faraway voice reminds me of the days when Mica was a toddler and Ozzie was a newborn. Drained and hanging on by a thread. “Mar, do you need some help?”
A pause. “No, it’s fine. I just…I miss you.”
My throat tightens. “I’m sorry. I know I’ve been really busy with Daniel and work.”
“Hey, don’t feel bad! That’s not why I called. This helps, I just wanted to talk.”
But I still feel terrible. “I’ll come by this week with dinner for you guys. I’ll bring soup dumplings, Mica and Ozzie’s favorite.”
“Really?” Her voice perks up and it makes me feel doubly bad.
“Of course, bro.”
I do manage to swing by with boxes of dumplings and noodles later in the week and am treated to a live demonstration of all of Mica’s loose teeth.
Later in the week, I tell Daniel all about Mica’s teeth woes while he’s roasting me a chicken at his house, something jazzy and inoffensive playing on his fancy speakers, and I’m watching him from the marble counter, drinking an ice-cold gin and tonic.
“So when will I be properly introduced to them? And your family?” he asks as he rubs olive oil over the chicken.
There is just one little thing I haven’t shared with him yet.
“I don’t know,” I say, keeping my voice light. “I’m kind of being greedy keeping you to myself for now. Once we open those doors—we shall never be able to close them again.” I’m trying to be funny, but he frowns slightly.
“Well, I don’t really plan on closing those doors, do you?” He has his hands held up in front of him, not wanting to contaminate anything with his raw-chicken-juice fingers.
“No, it’s not that,” I say, feeling like I messed this up somehow. “It’s just…I like this. And my family, I love them, but they’re a lot.”
He washes his hands and dries them on the checked towel tossed over his shoulder.
Then he walks over to me, bracing his hands on either side of me on the counter.
He ducks down to look directly at me with those serious brown eyes of his.
“I grew up with a tiny family and have always wanted to know what it was like to be in one like yours—spanning generations and cultures. I’m not scared. ”
It melts me from the inside out. “Of course. I’ll plan it, okay?”
He kisses the tip of my nose. “I’m looking forward to it.”
As I set the table, my phone blows up. A string of texts. It’s the interns.
omfg Gemma Flores posted about O&O!!!
I immediately tap the link to the post. It’s a video of Gemma and Peter walking on a sidewalk, his arm around her shoulders as she smiles radiantly at the camera.
There’s dreamy music playing and the text over the video says, “POV: You find your true love via ancient matchmaking methods.” In the caption, she tags the One & Only account.
The post already has more than twenty thousand likes and hundreds of comments:
@friendor imagine being matched with gemma fucking flores?????
@spideydaddy brb going to one & only
@tcmc YOU need a matchmaker?? Not me dying alone
@wednesdaycake DROP THE MATCHMAKING DEETS
I check One & Only’s account and find that we’ve more than quadrupled our 1,900 followers in the half hour since Gemma posted. We now have nearly eight thousand followers. In thirty minutes.
“Holy shit.”
Daniel comes over to see what I’m looking at. “What?”
I hold the phone out to him. “Gemma posted about us, and we’ve gone viral.”
He scrolls through, his eyebrows shooting up. “This is incredible!”
“Right?” I can’t stop smiling. “Oh, I’m so happy for her.”
“Happy for her? Happy for you!” Daniel exclaims. “Cass, you’ve gotta capitalize on this ASAP. This is great for your company!”
He’s right, but in the moment I can’t absorb it. “Okay, but how?”
Dinner’s forgotten as Daniel clears the table and brings his laptop out to help me brainstorm leveraging this viral moment into a new marketing campaign.
He’s a machine, and I’m impressed by how quickly his brain works.
By the end of the night, the chicken is left cold, but we’ve come up with some ideas for social media posts and advertisements based on Gemma’s endorsements.
And then, on a late-July afternoon, Daniel asks if I will attend a wedding with him—a wedding for one of his employees.
We haven’t talked about Ellis in weeks, since our first date, actually.
But that doesn’t mean I haven’t thought about him.
And so, I pause when I get the email from Daniel.
It has a link to a wedding website for Max, the young Latino guy with the paint-splattered pants who I remember from Joshua Tree.
He’s marrying a man named Curtis at the Madonna Inn—a wonderfully kitschy hotel up the central coast. We’ve had a couple of our clients marry there in the past, so I am very familiar with it.
In the email, he apologizes for the last-minute ask—it’s in two weeks—but he says he forgot it was on his calendar for months until today and he’d love for me to go with him.
So, not only is this going to be our first weekend trip together, it will be with Ellis.
I assume he’s going, anyway. I feel the pressure of it bubble inside of me before I twist my jade bracelet around my wrist. My anxiety dissipates with the assurance of the cold band on my skin.
It reminds me of my gift, of who Daniel is to me.
Sounds great, I reply. Should I get Betty stuffed and take her as a purse? Daniel and I have a running joke that we’re going to hire a hit on her, since the first night he slept over she shat on his Wales Bonner sneakers.
I try not to remember how much Betty liked Ellis.
I need to give him a heads-up before the wedding.
It’s the right thing to do. It’ll also give him an opportunity to duck out of it if he wants to, although that makes me feel shitty.
My phone still in my hands, I start texting him: Hey Ellis.
Daniel asked me to go to Max’s wedding. I wanted to make sure that was okay with you first?
I stare at the text and feel lightheaded at the thought of sending it.
It also feels weirdly passive-aggressive.
I delete and try a new one: Sorry for the rando text lol but just thought you should know I’ll be at Max’s wedding.
I can hear the interns’ “cringe.” Delete, delete. Hi Ellis, I hope you’re doing well—
Omg delete. Finally I draft: Hey, just wanted to give you fair warning that I’ll be at Max’s wedding. It’s the right text but I just can’t hit send.
Someone knocks on my doorframe—it’s Shreya, smiling. “Gemma Flores posted about us again.”
I put my phone down, relieved. “Oh, a good post, right?”
She nods as she walks in. “Very good. She’s all in with Peter.”
We sit at my desk as she shows me the latest video Gemma posted—this time with both of them holding hands walking along the beach. She shouts out One & Only and tags us as well.
They look genuinely head over heels in the video and it makes me smile. “Bye to all the fuckboys, am I right?”
Shreya shakes her head. “Please don’t, Cassia.”
“Got it, got it. Did we get a ton more followers?” Our follower count topped out at twenty-two thousand after her first post.
“Beyond. And now we’re booked until the end of summer. The Instagram ads seem to be working well, too. So much traffic is directed from there.” She’s hesitant before she says, “Maybe it’s time to pull the trigger on higher pricing?”
I nod slowly, thinking about it. “Yeah, I think you’re right.”
We high-five when there’s another rap on the door and a giant flower arrangement appears, held by Matteo. His face is obscured and his disembodied voice says, “A delivery for you, Cass.”
They both look at me with undisguised curiosity as I pluck out the card tucked into the flowers, taking in a heady whiff of the garden roses and peonies. The loopy cursive on it reads: See you at the Madonna Inn xx DNW
This little acknowledgment from Daniel—that the wedding won’t be easy for me—takes the tension out of my shoulders. His thoughtfulness steadies me.
“Send in the next client,” I say to Shreya.
“Where should I put the flowers?” Matteo complains, still staggering under the weight. I put them on my desk so that I can be reminded of Daniel all day as I find love for other people.