13. Karissa
Chapter thirteen
Karissa
The photo is everywhere before I finish my first coffee.
Not the announcement photos. Those were staged, controlled, professionally lit. Derek approved every angle. This one is grainy, taken from across the street. It's me, back against a building, Noah's hand on my jaw, kissing him like I meant it.
Because I did.
That's the problem.
My phone has been going off since 6:00 a.m. Marcus texts a string of fire emojis.
Priya from Noah's PR team calls twice before I've brushed my teeth.
A food blog I follow has already posted a side-by-side of the announcement photos and the street kiss with the caption: okay but the second one is the real one.
They're not wrong.
I put my phone face down and drink my coffee standing at the kitchen counter, staring at the wall.
Theo shuffles out at 7:00 a.m., sees my expression, and immediately opens his own phone.
"Oh," he says.
"Don't."
"Kari—"
"I said don't."
He sits down at the table and keeps scrolling. I can hear him trying not to react. He fails.
"They're calling him down bad," Theo says. "Like, the comments are—"
"Theo."
"Right. Not doing it." He sets his phone down. "You okay?"
"I'm fine."
He gives me the look. The one that means you taught me to spot a lie and you're doing the thing right now.
"I'm handling it," I say, which is different.
Priya calls a third time and I answer.
"The photos are trending," she says. No preamble. "Three major outlets picked them up overnight. We need a statement before noon."
"I didn't authorize—"
"No one did. That's the point. They're organic, which means they read as real, which means they're better for us than anything we staged. But we need to get ahead of the narrative before someone frames it wrong."
"Frame it how?"
"Right now, the story is billionaire secretly in love. We want to keep it that way. What we don't want is someone connecting the dots and asking why a real relationship needed a staged announcement in the first place."
I stare at the wall again.
Because he had. He'd forgotten the cameras completely. I know what it looks like when Noah is performing. I've watched him do it in ballrooms, in boardrooms, in front of Gerald Holt's careful, measuring eyes. That version of him is precise. Contained.
The man who kissed me on that street corner was neither.
"I'll be in touch," I tell Priya, and hang up before she can schedule anything.
***
The bakery is a circus.
Not bad chaos. The kind that comes with too much attention, regulars wanting to be the first to congratulate me, two new customers who found us specifically because of the photos. Marcus is handling it with the cheerful efficiency of someone who has no idea what's going on.
"You're famous," he announces when I come through the back door.
"I own a bakery in Brooklyn."
"A bakery in Brooklyn whose owner is trending on three platforms." He hands me a coffee. "Also, someone left flowers at the front counter. No card."
I look at the flowers. Pale yellow. Simple.
Noah doesn't do simple.
So that's from a customer, then. Which is more unsettling, not less.
I get through the morning rush on adrenaline and routine.
Hands moving, orders filling, the familiar weight of the work.
It helps. It always helps. The bakery is mine.
The debt, the equipment, the early mornings, the flour under my fingernails.
It doesn't shift depending on what I did the night before.
The holiday order sheet is taped to the register, four columns deep, and for the first December since I opened this place, I'm not doing math every time someone adds a dozen sugar cookies to their pickup.
That's the part nobody photographs.
It only goes so far, and that's the point. The first payment caught up the accounts that had fallen behind and steadied the month-to-month. The rest I keep in its own account, walled off, untouched.
I took the deal to clear the sixty thousand. That was the whole math of it. Sign, wipe the debt, come out even.
I sat down last week to move the money. My hand wouldn't do it.
Because the sixty thousand isn't just a number.
It's my mother's name on loans I never signed.
Pay it off with Noah's money and the debt doesn't disappear.
It changes hands. One creditor I didn't choose swapped for another, and six years of paying it down myself gone in a single transfer that isn't mine.
So it stays where it is. I keep paying it by hand, the way I have for six years. I don't let his money near it. A cushion becomes a leash faster than anyone likes to admit.
Marcus catches me staring at the sheet longer than I need to. "You okay?"
"Fine." I'm not fine. I'm doing the thing where I add up what the contract money means and then feel guilty for knowing the number so easily. "Just a lot of orders."
"Good problem."
It is a good problem. Theo's Christmas list this year has actual items on it instead of the usual don't worry about it, Kari. The walk-in is full. Diego got paid in full, early, and didn't ask why.
I tell myself none of that has anything to do with a man taking my hand for cameras. I've gotten good at telling myself things.
At noon, Priya sends a calendar invite.
Joint Interview — Lifestyle piece, major feature. Wednesday 3:00 p.m. Easton Capital.
I accept it before I can think too hard about it.
***
Wednesday arrives faster than it should.
The interviewer's name is Claudia Marsh. She writes for a publication that sits somewhere between glossy and serious, the kind of long-form profile that gets shared by people who think they don't read celebrity content, even though they do.
Noah is already in the conference room when I arrive. No jacket. Sleeves rolled. He looks up when I walk in and something in his expression does the thing it's been doing since the elevator. The almost-shift, the fraction of a second before the control resets.
"Karissa." Professional. Measured.
"Noah." Same register, back at him.
Claudia is watching us with the particular attention of someone whose job is to notice things. She smiles, types something in her notes, and I don't love that.
We sit side by side. Close enough that I can feel the warmth coming off him, which I don't need to be noticing.
Claudia starts soft, how we met, what drew us to each other. Noah answers first. Clean, controlled, the version he's practiced.
Then she turns to me.
"How would you describe him? In your own words."
I don't look at him. I should not look at him.
"Exacting," I say. "He has very high standards and he doesn't lower them to make anyone comfortable. Which is annoying." I pause. "And useful. Depending on the day."
Noah says nothing. I feel him not saying it.
Claudia smiles. "Noah, same question."
"She doesn't need anything from me," he says.
It's so direct and so quiet that Claudia stops typing for a second.
"Can you say more about that?"
"No," he says.
Claudia laughs, a little startled. I press my lips together.
The questions get more specific after that. How do we navigate his world and mine? What does a Tuesday look like for us? Do we argue?
"Constantly," I say.
"She's right," Noah says, at the same moment.
Claudia looks between us. Types something longer this time.
There's a question about the photos. The street photos, the ones that started all of this. She pulls them up on her tablet and sets it on the table between us.
I look at them straight on for the first time.
It's worse in high resolution. You can see exactly how his hand is positioned. You can see that my hand came up and caught his lapel. You can see that neither of us is performing.
"Tell me about that moment," Claudia says.
The silence lasts one beat too long.
Noah speaks first. "It's private."
"Of course." Claudia nods. But she's still watching us. "I'll just say, for the record, that in fifteen years of this work, I can tell the difference."
She closes her tablet.
Noah and I don't look at each other.
We don't have to.
The elevator down to the lobby is empty except for us.
We stand on opposite sides of it, the way we did in the service elevator at the Calloway, except that one was dark and forced, and this one is bright and chosen, and that makes it harder.
"Claudia knows the photos weren't staged," I say. "That it's not just an arrangement."
"Yes."
"Is that a problem?"
He looks at me. Really looks, not the controlled version. "That depends."
"On what?"
The doors open on the lobby. He steps through first, holds it with one hand so it doesn't close on me, not a gesture, just reflex. For a second we're both standing in that small space between elevator and lobby with midday light coming through the glass front of the building.
"On what we decide it means," he says.
Then his phone rings. He answers it. Becomes the other version of himself again in the span of a single breath.
I walk out into the afternoon and tell myself I'm not thinking about it.
I'm thinking about it the entire subway ride home.
***
Theo is on the couch when I get in, textbook open, not reading it.
"How was it?"
"Fine."
"Just fine?"
I drop my bag, kick off my shoes, and sit on the other end of the couch. He waits. He's sixteen and he already knows when to wait.
"The interviewer could tell," I say.
"Tell what?"
I look at him.
He already knows. He's known since that afternoon at the bakery, the one where Noah almost smiled at one of Theo's terrible jokes and looked human for thirty seconds.
"Kari." He closes the textbook. "You don't have to make it a problem."
"I'm not making it—"
"You are, though. You do this thing where you find the angle that makes the thing you want into the thing that will hurt you. And you've been doing it since he walked into the bakery."
I don't answer.
"He looked at you today, didn't he," Theo says. Not a question.
I stare at the ceiling.
"Yeah," I say. "He did."
Theo picks his textbook back up. "Okay."
"That's it? Just okay?"
"I mean." He shrugs, fourteen-year-old energy in a sixteen-year-old frame. "You already know what you're going to do. You're just mad you know."
I throw a couch pillow at him.
He catches it without looking up.
The thing is, he's not wrong. I do know. That's exactly the problem.
I just haven't decided yet if knowing is the same as doing.
My phone buzzes. Noah's name on the screen. No message. Just a contact card forwarded through, the florist on Hudson Street, the one that does pale yellow arrangements. The yellow flowers were from him.
No explanation. No strategy.
Just that.
I set the phone down and look at it for a long time.