Chapter 1 Chapter 1 #2
Felix laughed so hard he nearly choked on his crumpet.
Anya patted him on the back, then caught Cassian's eye across the table, and he looked away first, but not before she saw it — that thing in his face that he kept not quite knowing how to wear.
Not quite a smile. Something more interior than that.
Something that was learning its own name.
She thought: he's going to be a good father.
The thought arrived without warning, fully formed, and she sat with it for a moment before she understood why it was remarkable — not because it was surprising, exactly, but because the version of Cassian Sterling she had met in a Tube carriage fourteen months ago would have seemed like the last man on earth about whom you'd think such a thing.
The version with the signature watch and the architectural posture and the capacity to make an entire boardroom feel like a weather event.
That version would not have sat at a kitchen table at six-fifty in the morning discussing Alan Turing with a seven-year-old.
This version did.
She was still learning, she thought, that people changed. That the changing didn't mean the original version was a lie; it just meant you were seeing more of the architecture.
* * *
She took the children to school at eight-fifteen, walking because the morning had cleared to something almost respectable, and when she came back Cassian had gone to the office and the house had its ten-to-five quality — that particular quality of a large house in the middle of the day, its rooms patient and waiting.
She made a second cup of coffee she didn't need and sat at the kitchen table with her laptop and her notebook and the series of half-formed thoughts she'd been trying to turn into a plan for three months.
The bakery.
Pemberton's. The family bakery in Derbyshire, which her parents had run for twenty-three years and which had survived, technically, the period of crisis that had brought Anya and Cassian into contact with each other in the first place — Sterling Tech's fingerprints on the development deal that had once threatened the building's lease, a fact that had nearly ended everything before it could begin.
That was resolved. Cassian had made it right.
But making it right meant the lease was secure and the business was still standing, and standing was not the same as thriving, and Anya had been watching her parents' margins with the quiet, specific dread of someone who understood that a building saved was not a business saved.
Her mother, Celeste, was sixty-one and still getting up at four in the morning to prove the dough, the way Anya's father had before her.
Kofi had been gone two years now; his hand-painted sign still hung over the door.
Celeste managed the bakes and the front of house and the books and the Instagram account she'd started in what she called a spirit of experiment and Anya called a minor miracle, given that the account had fifteen thousand followers and a regular stream of people asking whether they could order the rum fruit loaf for Christmas.
She was managing. She was not comfortable.
The plan Anya was trying to write was: how to turn managing into thriving without my fiancé solving it with a cheque.
This was the part that kept snagging. Because Cassian could solve it with a cheque.
He had offered, twice, gently, in the specific way he had when he understood that directness was a gift he could offer her, not a demand.
He had said: I can make this easier. And she had said: I know you can, and I don't want that.
And he had looked at her for a long moment, reading the particular frequency of the statement, and then he had nodded and said: tell me what you want instead.
What she wanted was to do it herself. What she wanted was a version of her family's future that she had built with her own hands, from her own competence, funded by her own credit and her own proposal and her own capacity to make a business case that stood on its own legs.
She wanted to be able to look at the thing that saved Pemberton's and know that she had done it.
She understood that this was a form of pride that would strike most people as absurd, given that she was engaged to a man with more disposable income than some small nations.
She also understood that she had not grown up with money, which meant that money had never been the measure she reached for.
The measure she reached for was can I manage this.
The measure was competence, and the space between her and her dream was a gap that competence could cross if she could find the right fulcrum.
She had a meeting today, at two o'clock, with a woman named Britta Sandoval, who ran a small business accelerator in Hackney that specifically supported food businesses with roots in BAME-led community commerce.
Anya had found her through a network she'd been quietly building over the summer — not Cassian's network, which was vast and gleaming and would have gotten her into any room she wanted, but her own, assembled through calls and coffees and the careful application of her graduate degree in a way she hadn't managed when she'd first earned it.
She had not told Cassian about the meeting.
This was, she acknowledged, not entirely reasonable.
They were engaged. They had a relationship characterized by a level of frankness that she had not previously experienced in any relationship in her life.
She had told him things that she had never told anyone — about her fear, about her body, about the specific texture of the anxiety she carried.
And yet this meeting she was keeping to herself, and when she examined why, the answer was something like: if I tell him, he'll want to help, and if he wants to help, I'll have to choose between accepting help I don't want and disappointing him, and I am not ready for that conversation.
This was, she acknowledged further, exactly the kind of thing she was supposed to be working on.
Firm boundaries, not people-pleasing. Say the true thing.
Anya Pemberton, who had spent twenty-five years calibrating herself to the emotional weather of other people, was trying to learn how to want things plainly and to defend those wants plainly, and it turned out that two months of wanting it didn't make it easy.