Everything Sabrina said last night about the other reason she called Mimi is tumbling through my head and clicking like a key in a lock.
Mimi holds my gaze. She’s not sad. Not slow. Not weak. “Very briefly.”
I lift my brows.
“She was Harry’s best friend’s little sister.”
“Best friend from here, or from school?”
“Both. They grew up here together, then both went to Carnegie Tech before it became Carnegie Mellon.”
“And Elsie?”
“Came to visit on occasion.”
I swallow.
I can’t ask the next question.
I can’t ask and not betray the trust I want Sabrina to have in me.
“They got married when she got pregnant,” Mimi says. “Harry thought it was important to do right by his best friend’s little sister.”
I stare at Mimi.
Zen’s staring at me. I can feel it.
But I willnotask what I still want to ask.
Was Harry really the father of Elsie’s baby?
“He broke my heart, but for the very best reason,” Mimi says.
And then she goes back to her breakfast like she didn’t just sayI forgive him for dumping me to marry a woman who was pregnant with another man’s baby.
“How did I end up buying a café to get revenge on the grandson of the man who broke your heart in college?” I ask Mimi.
The man that Sabrina says isn’t her real grandfather.
The man that Sabrina also says is the gold standard against whom she judges all other men.
Mimi laughs. “The world works in mysterious ways. Now eat. I have a date with Harry in an hour, and I’m not sitting here with you while you don’t eat your breakfast when I could be doing my hair and makeup instead.”
I dive into my breakfast.
It’s good to eat. Definitely worked up an appetite last night.
“I mean it,” I tell Mimi. “If you want to run a café in the mountains, it’s yours. Five years or five minutes. I don’t care. Spend some time living a dream.”
“Greyson, that is a ridiculous way to spend your money.”
Zen snorts in utter amusement. “Take the café, Mimi. By my calculations, he could buy and ruin a café every month and still reach billionaire status in another seven years.”
“Do you want to keep working as my personal assistant or not?” I interrupt.
They grin and don’t answer me.
Directly, anyway.
