Chapter 2
TESSA
Tessa made it to the service entrance before her legs gave out.
She braced her hand against the cool stone wall beside her catering van, the rough texture catching at her palm while her knees threatened to buckle.
Gabriel Sterling had been standing at that bar, looking at her with those same green eyes that had haunted her for years, and the confirmation of it knocked the breath from her lungs.
Her pulse refused to settle. One look from him, and she was ducking behind a catering van while the fallout stacked up fast—an entire tray of Veuve Clicquot shattered across the stone terrace, with two hundred of New York’s elite watching.
They’d remember a dropped champagne tray long after they forgot the bride’s dress.
She wanted to get in her car and drive until Martha’s Vineyard was a dot in her rearview mirror and the miles erased the memory of his face.
Instead, she straightened and walked back into the service kitchen.
David was plating appetizers, calm despite the chaos. He looked up when she came in, and whatever he saw in her face made him pause. “Boss, are you okay?”
“Fine.” The word dropped like a deadbolt, ending the conversation. “What’s our status?”
“Tray service is covered. Jessica’s rotating champagne. We’re ten minutes ahead on the canapé timeline.”
“Good.” Tessa grabbed a clean
apron from the hook and tied it, willing herself to find the rhythm of routine. “I’ll coordinate from back here. You run the front of the house.”
David studied her face with the measuring look he’d developed after five years of working together. He knew something was wrong, and he was smart enough not to press her.
“I’ve got this.” She pulled her phone from her pocket and opened the service timeline. The familiar spreadsheet was a lifeline. “The ferry leaves at nine-thirty. We need to hit every time mark to make load-out on time.” She looked up. “Go.”
He went.
She spent the next few hours in the back kitchen coordinating everything. She called timing. She checked the plating. She communicated with the venue staff about table turns and drink service. She did everything except go back out to that terrace where Gabriel Sterling might still be standing.
Her team was flawless. They’d worked together long enough to read her signals and anticipate her standards, and they knew that perfection wasn’t a goal but a baseline.
The dinner service flowed seamlessly, each course arriving exactly on schedule, food plated with precision, garnishes placed with the skill of surgeons.
Plates were cleared without a single misstep.
By eight fifteen, the bride and groom were cutting cake while guests cheered under string lights that had turned the terrace into something from a fairy tale. By eight forty-five, the final dessert plates had been cleared, and by nine fifteen, Tessa’s team had packed the last crate into the vans.
David found her doing a final walkthrough in the service kitchen, running her fingers across surfaces that were already spotless. “We’re loaded. Ferry in ten.”
“The terrace?”
“Spotless. Checked twice.”
“Good work tonight.”
“Boss.” David caught her arm as he turned, his grip gentle but insistent. “Whatever happened out there, we handled it. Nobody’s talking about broken champagne flutes. They’re talking about how that lemon ricotta appetizer was the best thing they’ve ever tasted.”
The breath she’d been holding since the terrace let go. “Get everyone to the ferry. I’ll follow.”
She found Eleanor Beauchamp on the terrace, overseeing the final guests as they filtered toward their cars.
“Mrs. Beauchamp.” Tessa kept her voice steady, the mask she’d learned to wear, professional and seamless.
“Everything’s been cleared and cleaned. I’ve left the bride and groom’s gift with your venue coordinator—the two champagne flutes with their wedding date etched in the crystal.
She’ll make sure they receive them when they return. ”
Eleanor turned, her expression warm despite the late hour. “Tessa, thank you. Everything was absolutely perfect. The Wilders have already left for their suite, but Devney made me promise to tell you how thrilled she was.”
“I’m glad.” Tessa managed a smile. “If you need anything else…”
Eleanor squeezed her arm, a maternal gesture that caught Tessa off guard. “I’ll be recommending you to everyone I know. That lemon ricotta was exquisite.”
Tessa thanked her and walked toward the parking area. She was done, and the job had been handled professionally. She could leave now.
Then she saw him.
Gabriel stood at the valet station, keys in hand. He wasn’t getting into the sleek black car waiting with its door open. He was looking around the nearly empty lot, scanning the remaining vehicles. He was looking for someone.
Tessa pressed herself against the side of the building, into the shadow at the edge of the staff lot. The brick was cool against her shoulder blade. Her heart hammered loud enough that she was sure the valet could hear it.
His posture held something she remembered—the stiff tension he’d carried the day after they’d ended it senior year, the day after his mother had cornered her in the Ashford hallway to explain exactly why a scholarship girl would never be good enough for a Sterling.
He’d looked at her then like he didn’t care, and she’d let herself believe it because believing was easier than fighting the truth his mother had just made plain.
He was scanning the area, looking for someone, and the cold certainty that it was her drove her back against the brick, trying to make herself small enough to disappear.
The valet said something. Gabriel shook his head and scanned the lot once more. His gaze swept past the corner where she stood hidden, close enough that she could see the set of his jaw, the way his fingers tightened on the keys like he was holding onto something that kept slipping away.
Then he got in the car.
Tessa watched the taillights disappear down the long driveway and forced herself to breathe.
She had stayed, finished the job, and maintained every standard. She had also hidden in the shadow of the building rather than face him again.
The ferry horn sounded once, and the line of cars in front of her began to roll down onto the car deck. Tessa drove on, killed her engine, and stayed in the driver’s seat. Above her, heading toward the passenger deck, her team was already laughing. .
David tapped on her window before he climbed the stairs. “Coming up?”
She shook her head and waved him on. He gave her a long look, but he went without her.
The forty-five-minute crossing to Woods Hole felt like an hour. By the time the boat docked, she had calmed down. She still had four hours of highway between her and Brooklyn, and she used the time to pretend she was someone who hadn’t seen Gabriel Sterling at all.
Somewhere on I-95, she pulled into a truck stop. Not because she needed gas. Because her eyes had gone blurry and the white lines wouldn’t stay still.
Inside the convenience store, the fluorescent lights buzzed.
Tessa filled a paper cup with coffee that smelled burned and tasted worse.
A man in a Patriots jersey was arguing with the cashier about lottery tickets, his voice carrying the certainty of someone convinced the universe owed him something.
She leaned against the counter and waited him out.
Her reflection stared back at her from the dark window behind the coffee station.
Mascara smudged beneath her eyes like bruises.
Her hair had escaped its bun in rebellious wisps.
The face in the glass belonged to a woman who had built an empire from nothing, and she was standing in a truck stop at midnight trying to remember how to breathe.
“Miss? You okay?”
The cashier was looking at her now. The lottery guy had left with his tickets and his dreams.
“Yes. It’s been a long night.”
She paid for the coffee. The cashier glanced at the door, where the Patriots jersey was disappearing into the parking lot. “Could be worse,” he said. “You could be selling lottery tickets to guys like that.”
Tessa let out a breath that was almost a laugh. “Fair point.”
Back in her car, she set the cup in the holder, looked into the rearview mirror, and tucked her loose hair back into its bun. Every motion was a stall, anything to keep her from circling back to green eyes and the boy she had never stopped wanting.
Gabriel Sterling had never been just an ex-boyfriend.
He’d been the first person at Ashford Academy who looked at her like she belonged there. Not at her secondhand blazer with the sleeves she’d lengthened herself or her free lunch vouchers. Just at her.
She had arrived at Ashford at fifteen on a scholarship that covered tuition and meals.
It didn’t cover the crushing weight of not belonging.
She was the daughter of a nurse and a construction worker at a school full of heirs whose futures had already been mapped out in trust funds, and every day she had been sure they could see it.
Gabriel had sat next to her in calculus. He’d shared his notes without being asked. When he looked at her in her secondhand uniform, she felt as if he saw nothing but the person wearing it.
Junior year, he’d kissed her in the library stacks between Modern Poetry and British Literature.
She had been reaching for a book on the top shelf—Eliot’s collected works for required reading—when he’d reached past her.
Somehow his mouth was on hers and she was gripping his shirt, and the book had fallen and neither of them had cared.
They were together for two years after that. Two years of stolen hours, hidden notes, kisses in the stacks that left her breathless and rearranged. She had loved him with the passion only a teenager possesses, when the world feels like it’s about to end.
Then graduation, and his mother’s expectations, and her mother’s medical bills, and the impossibility of pretending geography wouldn’t eventually destroy them. Harvard for him. Culinary school for her. Hundreds of miles apart and two completely different lives.
When she said it wouldn’t work, Gabriel had done what Gabriel did. He’d made it logical. He’d written an agreement on Ashford letterhead like a business proposal: a clean break, no contact, move on. He presented their ending like a quarterly report.
She had signed because arguing would’ve meant admitting she wanted to fight for something she couldn’t have.
So she’d spent years telling herself she had made the right choice, and years building a life that proved to the world she didn’t need Gabriel Sterling, or anyone like him.
One look across a terrace, and all of that crumbled.
Brooklyn materialized around two in the morning. Tessa parked outside her building and sat there, exhausted, unable to make herself move.
The brick facade looked the same as it had when she’d left for Martha’s Vineyard. The flower boxes she had planted herself, with herbs and trailing vines, still bracketed the windows. The bodega on the corner was still open, its neon beer signs humming their eternal invitation.
She climbed the stairs to her apartment on legs that felt borrowed from someone else.
She unlocked the door and stepped inside to the familiar smell of her own space—herbs from the kitchen, lavender from her favorite candle, wood polish from the floors she’d refinished herself with nothing but YouTube tutorials and stubborn determination.
Her grandmother’s cookbook sat open on the kitchen counter, propped to the page Nana had marked with a smear of dried tomato. Tessa walked past it without stopping.
Eight notifications waited on her phone. The previews told her enough. Five were from David, all variations on you killed it tonight, and three missed calls from a number she didn’t recognize. She read none of them.
She peeled off her catering blacks, stepped into the shower, and turned the water as hot as she could stand.
It pounded against her shoulders while mascara washed down the drain in dark ribbons.
She stood there and pretended the heat could reach the places inside her that had split open on that terrace.
Half an hour later, wrapped in her bathrobe with wet hair soaking through the terrycloth, she lay in bed and stared at the ceiling. The same ceiling she had stared at for six years in this apartment.
She could do this. She could take the clients, build the relationships, and exist in Gabriel’s world without falling apart.
She had survived worse. At nineteen, with her mother in the hospital and no money for treatment, she had gone door to door selling homemade cookies to cover what insurance wouldn’t.
Culinary school had followed on four hours of sleep and three jobs that left her hands raw and her feet aching.
The business had come after that, built from a used food truck and sheer determination.
If she could survive that, she could deal with Gabriel Sterling.
The danger wasn’t professional. That part she could manage.
The danger was the old feeling, the one she’d spent years outrunning. Sterling’s world had a way of reminding her exactly how much she’d built and how little of it would ever be enough for the people born into rooms like his. She knew that particular math. She’d grown up on the wrong side of it.
She could do the job. She had to be careful not to start needing his approval while she did it.
She fell asleep with that thought on repeat.
Tessa woke to her phone vibrating against the nightstand.
It was six in the morning, and sunlight cut through the gap in the curtains. The phone wouldn’t stop buzzing.
She reached for it.
Jessica: You need to see this.
Jessica: Mrs. Wilder posted last night. Our DMs are flooded.
Jessica: Like, FLOODED.
Tessa pulled herself upright and opened Instagram.
A gorgeous photo of the reception at sunset, the terrace bathed in the last golden light before dusk. The champagne tower she had designed glowed warm against the evening sky. String lights hung scattered like stars.
Caption: Absolutely obsessed with @ThorneEventsNYC. That lemon ricotta appetizer alone was worth the trip to the Vineyard. If you need catering that’s flawless from the first bite to the last, hire Tessa Thorne immediately. Already planning all our Oath Capital events with her.
Tessa read the last sentence twice.
Mrs. Wilder was Devney. Devney was the bride. The bride had married Ronan. Ronan was Gabriel’s partner.
She hadn’t put it together. Eleanor had handled the menu personally, and Tessa had never thought to ask who Devney was marrying.
Oath Capital was Gabriel’s firm.
She set the phone face down on the bed.
She had succeeded. Validation was hers. Everything she had spent decades working toward had been delivered, wrapped in irony, and every bit of it required walking back into Gabriel Sterling’s world.