16. Jasmine
JASMINE
The coffee shop Eden chose was a small place in Silver Lake, the kind with mismatched chairs and a chalkboard menu out front.
It was the sort of neighborhood where nobody looked twice at anyone, which was the whole reason Jasmine loved it.
She could sit here in sunglasses and a baseball cap and be entirely unremarkable, which was its own kind of luxury.
She wrapped both hands around her cup and watched Eden across the small table.
“So what’s new?” Eden asked, leaning back in her chair and embracing the sunshine coming through the window.
“I think I’m developing feelings for him.”
Eden’s expression didn’t change by so much as a millimeter. She took a slow sip of her cortado and set it down. “Okay.”
“You don’t sound surprised.”
Eden smiled the smallest bit. “I’m not.”
“I’m nipping it in the bud,” Jasmine added. “I just wanted you to know, because you’re the only person I can tell, and it felt like the kind of thing that needed to be said out loud at least once before I stuff it down into a dark chest in my soul.”
“Right.” Eden turned her cup in a slow circle on the table. “And you think you can just do that? Nip it in the bud?”
“I have to.”
“That’s not what I asked. You’re smart, Jasmine. You know that repressing feelings doesn’t work. It makes people sick.”
Jasmine pulled her sunglasses up and rubbed the bridge of her nose.
Outside the window, Silver Lake went about its Saturday morning unhurriedly.
A man walked a very small dog. Two women pushed strollers side by side, deep in conversation.
Normal life, proceeding normally, entirely indifferent to the mess she’d managed to make of her interior landscape in the space of a few weeks.
“He took a work call,” she said. “In the middle of dinner. And then had the nerve to act like I was being unreasonable when I pointed it out.”
“That does sound annoying.”
“It’s more than annoying. It’s a pattern. It’s who he is.” She set her sunglasses back down. “He’s the same man who stood me up six years ago because the work was more important, Eden. He hasn’t changed. Last night just reminded me of that.”
“Or,” Eden said, in the careful voice she used when she was about to say something Jasmine wasn’t going to like, “last night reminded you that you have feelings for him, which then made the phone call hurt more than it would have otherwise.”
Jasmine opened her mouth.
“I’m not defending him,” Eden said quickly. “Taking a call mid-dinner is rude regardless. I’m just saying that the reason it landed so hard is probably information worth having.”
“The information I have is that he’s not available.
Not really. Not in the way that matters.
” Jasmine picked up her coffee. “His work will always come first. I’ve seen it every day for the past few weeks.
He’s up before I am, and he’s still on his laptop when I go to bed.
His phone never stops, and that’s fine because that’s his life.
But it’s not a life that leaves room for an actual person in it.
And I have enough to manage without adding unrequited feelings for my fake husband to the list.”
“Who says they’re unrequited?”
Jasmine sucked in a long breath. No. She wouldn’t allow herself to entertain that possibility. Couldn’t allow it. “Eden,” she said as a warning.
“I’m just asking.”
“They’re unrequited,” Jasmine said firmly. “He held my hand at dinner and I read into it, which is my own fault, and now I’m correcting course. That’s all this is. A correction.”
Eden looked at her with the expression she’d been wearing for the better part of a decade, the one that meant I love you and I think you’re lying to yourself, but I’ll let you get there in your own time. She’d perfected it somewhere around year three of their friendship.
“Fine,” Eden said. “You’re nipping it. Consider it nipped.”
“Thank you.”
“I still think it’s not that simple.”
“I didn’t ask what you thought.”
“You absolutely did. You called me at eight thirty on a Saturday.”
Jasmine conceded this with a tilt of her head and drank her coffee, and for a few minutes they sat in the easy silence of people who had been through enough together that silence was enough.
The coffee shop filled up around them. A child knocked a pastry off a table and yelled about wanting to go home.
The barista called out names in a voice that suggested she’d rather be elsewhere.
Jasmine felt her shoulders come down a fraction.
Then she heard it.
“Oh my God, is that Jasmine Caulfield?”
She kept her face neutral as a young woman materialized at the edge of their table, phone in hand, already recording.
“Trouble in paradise, Jasmine?” the woman asked, with the bright, performative concern of someone who was absolutely not concerned. “Are you and Nate calling off the wedding?”
The coffee shop did not go quiet, but it tilted. Jasmine was aware of several heads turning.
“Sorry?” she said pleasantly.
But Eden had already picked up her phone, and the look on her face was the one that meant something had happened. Jasmine reached for her own phone. She’d had it on silent since leaving the house, and now she discovered notifications stacked up on the screen.
Her heart slamming against her ribcage, she unlocked the phone.
The video was everywhere. Someone had gotten a clear shot of them from across the restaurant last night, the angle catching the set of Nate’s jaw and the careful flatness of Jasmine’s expression in a way that told a very clear story.
Nate Aaron and Jasmine Caulfield: Trouble Already?
one headline read. Another had gone with Wedding Bells or Warning Signs?
A third: The Honeymoon’s Over Before It Began.
The woman with the phone was still standing there.
“We’re having a lovely morning, thank you,” Jasmine said, in the voice she used for situations that required warmth applied like a very firm lid. “I hope you enjoy your weekend.”
The woman hovered a moment longer, then moved away, sullen but out of steam, which was the best possible outcome for a situation like this.
“This is bad,” Jasmine whispered to Eden, nausea climbing up her chest.
Eden was scrolling. “It’s trending. Not at the top, but trending.” She turned the phone so Jasmine could see, and Jasmine looked at the numbers and felt the cold wash of failure move through her.
Her phone lit up with Nate’s name. Third missed call. She hadn’t noticed the first two.
She stood up from the table. “I have to call him back.”
Eden waved her toward the door.
Outside, she found a patch of quiet beside a planter and called him back before she’d fully decided what she was going to say. He picked up on the first ring.
“Have you seen it?” he said, no greeting, already moving.
“I’ve seen it.”
“Where are you?”
“Silver Lake. With Eden. What are you thinking for damage control?”
“I’m thinking we put out something today. A photo, a story, something that counters the narrative before it hardens. Dove’s already working on it.” A pause. “I also think we need to talk about last night.”
Here it was. She’d known it was coming. “What about it?”
“You started it.” His voice was measured, but she heard the edge underneath it. “I was gone for ten minutes on a legitimate call, and you made it into something, and now we have a trending story about our engagement falling apart.”
The cold moved into something warmer. “I started it?”
“The comment about Frankfurt. That was a choice you made.”
“And answering the phone was a choice you made.” She kept her voice low, aware of the street around her.
“A man who is, according to every magazine in this country, completely besotted with his fiancée does not take a business call in the middle of a romantic dinner. That’s not me starting something.
That’s me pointing out that you gave them exactly what they needed to sell that story. ”
“You could have let it go.”
“So could you,” she said. “You could have let the call go to voicemail.”
A silence.
“This isn’t productive,” he said finally.
“No,” she agreed. “It isn’t.”
“We need to fix it.”
“I know that.”
“So can we agree to fix it instead of rehashing last night?”
She briefly pressed two fingers against her forehead and looked up at the pale sky. He was the one who’d said they needed to talk about it.
He wasn’t wrong. He also wasn’t entirely right, and they both knew it, but the squabbling wasn’t going to stop the video from trending or close the gap in the story they were trying to sell the world.
The question was whether the gap could be closed at all, or whether last night had given Graham exactly the evidence he’d been looking for.
“What does Dove suggest?” she asked.
“Something cozy. Low-key. The kind of picture that says we had a minor disagreement and we’re absolutely fine.” He paused. “She suggested your place. Paparazzi outside, us going in together, then moving some things out and to my house. Domestic. Normal.”
Her place. Her house, her oasis, the one corner of the world she’d kept entirely separate from all of this. She closed her eyes for a second.
“Fine,” she said.
“Today, if possible.”
“I heard you.”
Another silence, different from the first. Less hot. “Jasmine.” His voice had shifted, the argument draining out of it. “I should have let it go to voicemail.”
She hadn’t expected that, and she had to take a moment before she answered.
“I know your work is important,” she said. “I’m not asking you to pretend it isn’t. I just need you to understand that the picture we’re painting for the world requires a certain amount of consistency, and one crack is all Graham needs.” She paused. “That’s all I was trying to say.”
“I know,” he said. And then, because he was Nate and couldn’t let any exchange end on something soft: “You could have said it more diplomatically.”
Despite everything, despite the trending video and the coffee gone cold and the feelings she was firmly, actively nipping, she almost laughed. “I could have,” she agreed. “But where’s the fun in that?”
She heard something that might have been the beginning of a laugh on his end, quickly cut off.
“I’ll call Dove,” he said. “Be ready by two.”
She hung up and stood on the pavement for a moment, phone in hand, the morning moving cheerfully around her, and thought about the fact that they’d just had their first real fight and their first real apology in twelve hours, and that she wasn’t sure which one had done more damage.