Chapter Seventeen — Friends First
She didn't call the number on the card. Not for three weeks.
When she finally did, it wasn't for anything romantic — she told herself that firmly, in the mirror, before she dialed.
Her lease renewal on Copper & Rye had a clause about liability insurance that her lawyer couldn't quite untangle, and somewhere in the back of her mind she remembered a man who'd once, over milkshakes at a diner, walked her through the difference between margin and markup with the patient, specific competence of someone who actually understood contracts for a living.
"I have a business question," she said, when he picked up on the second ring, sounding surprised and careful in equal measure. "Not a personal one. A liability clause I need translated out of lawyer."
"I can do that," he said, and if he was disappointed that it wasn't more, he didn't let it into his voice. "Email me the clause. I'll have an answer for you by tomorrow."
He did. Clean, thorough, no charge, no follow-up text angling for more.
It became a pattern, slow and careful on both sides — a question about a vendor contract, a referral for a liquor distributor he knew through the industry, small transactional exchanges that both of them understood were really about something else, without either of them saying so out loud.
They started meeting for coffee again, months into it, always in daylight, always somewhere public, always framed — by mutual, unspoken agreement — as two people who used to know each other catching up, nothing more.
He asked about the lounge. She asked about Kingston Freight Partners, and found herself genuinely proud of him in a way that surprised her, listening to him talk about clients he'd taken on specifically because his father's old company would have considered them too small to bother with.
"You built something real," she told him, one Tuesday — it was always a Tuesday, neither of them ever mentioned that out loud either. "That's not nothing, Zaire. Walking away from all that money to build something smaller and actually yours."
"You did the same thing," he said. "Copper and Rye. You didn't have to leave the club. You could've kept dancing and built the lounge on the side."
"I could've," she agreed. "But I wanted the whole thing to be mine. All of it. Not half a life built on tips and half a life built on hope."
"I understand that better than I used to," he said, and something in the way he said it made clear he wasn't just talking about lounges.
They didn't talk about Ty for months — Zaire mentioned, carefully, once, that they'd had a hard conversation, that Ty had cried, actually cried, apologizing for the tracking, for keeping the lie going long past the point where a real friend would have talked him out of it, and that Zaire had told him the friendship needed time to rebuild the same way everything else did.
Kamiko didn't ask for more than that. She wasn't ready to see Ty's face yet, glitter sash or otherwise, and Zaire seemed to understand that without being told.
They didn't talk about Sade at all, until the day Kamiko finally asked.
"Have you heard from her? Since?"
"Once," Zaire admitted. "She sent a card when I opened the company. Said she hoped it made me happier than the old one did. I think she meant it."
"That's generous of her."
"She's not who my father made her out to be," Zaire said, careful. "None of us were exactly who our families made us out to be, in that whole mess. She's engaged again, actually. Some guy from Charlotte, real estate. I hope she's happier. I think she probably is."
Kamiko turned that over — the specific grace of a woman who could have made both their lives miserable and chose, instead, to let go clean — and found she respected Sade Bennett more than she'd expected to, for a woman she'd never met and would probably never meet, who'd been hurt by the same lie from the other side of it.