If I called him . . .
I took a deep breath and pressed the call button before I could talk myself out of it.
The phone rang twice before he answered.
“Grey.”
“Heeey ... ” I began slowly.
“Valentina.”
I curled my fingers tighter around my phone. “So we have a problem.”
A pause. Then, calmly, he said, “You usually do.”
I rolled my eyes even though he couldn’t see me. “Okay, let me rephrase,” I began. “Youhave a problem.”
“Ido?”
“Yeah. My sister invited you to dinner tonight.”
Marco was quiet for exactly three seconds. Yes, I counted.
“Is that the problem?”
“Are you joking?” I asked, pacing around the kitchen island. “This is Isabel we’re talking about. She’ll smile politely, ask youabout your childhood, and within fifteen minutes, she’ll know your blood type and every secret you’ve ever kept.”
“I don’t have secrets.”
I laughed. “Right. Just ‘confidential matters,’ right, lawyer?”
“It’s dinner. How complicated can it be?”
Clearly, he underestimated the situation.
How on earth was he so calm?
“Marco, Isabel doesn’t do small talk. She does deep psychological excavation. She’ll figure out we’re”—I hesitated, searching for the right words—“notexactlya love match.”
“Is that what worries you?”
“Yes,” I admitted. “No. I don’t know. Maybe.”
“It’s dinner,” Marco said calmly. “Not an interrogation.”
“You say that now, but I guarantee you have no idea what you’re walking into.”
“I think I’ll survive.”
I gripped my phone tighter. He wasn’t getting it. Of course he wasn’t getting it—this was Marco after all. Unfazed, unreadable Marco. But me? I was very much fazed.Extremelyfazed. Possibly more fazed than I’d ever been. Because this wasn’t just dinner. It was Isabel, and Isabel was basically a human polygraph test wrapped up in sisterly concern and freshly baked bread. She could smell bullshit from three zip codes away. Maybe four.
“She’s going to ask how we met,” I warned.
“We met outside of José’s.”
I cringed, remembering exactly how we’d met. José’s wasn’t a cute little café, and our meet-cute had been anything but cute. He’d found me drunk, desperate, and dangerously close to losing whatever scraps of dignity I had left. Not exactly a story we could share over Isabel’s chicken parmesan.
The fact he’d seen me at one of my absolute lowest points and still stuck around—well, that raised questions. Questions I definitely wasn’t ready to have answered.
