"Two weeks."
"Two weeks. I suggest you start by calling your childhood friend."
Emmy made it to her car before the panic hit.
She sat in her Civic and stared at Cecelia's business card.
Cecelia Ferrance
Elite Connections
Boston's Premier Matchmaking Service
Premier. Not good. Not adequate. Not ‘impressive for your age or ‘you have such potential.’ Premier. The kind of success that made people stop asking when she was going to figure out what she wanted to do with her life.
The kind of success that required Grant Knight to agree to something he had zero reason to agree to.
Emmy pulled out her phone. Opened her contacts. Scrolled down toSir Grant-a-Lot—her revenge forTinsel Teeth, circa sixth grade.
She stared at it for a moment, then changed it toGrant Knight.
It felt like closing a door.
Their last exchange was still there. June, West's wedding. She'd been in a bridesmaid dress, he'd been best man, and apparently the sum total of their communication had been:You have your boutonniere?Grant's reply:got it.
Before that? She honestly couldn't remember. Maybe a Christmas text? Maybe nothing.
Grant had practically grown up in their house—Sunday dinners, summer cookouts, every holiday her mother could get her hands on him. He'd been as close to a second brother as you could get without the paperwork.
When his parents died his sophomore year of college, her parents had simply refused to let him drift—kept setting his place at the table, kept calling him on his birthday, kept treating him like he'd always belonged there.
Because he had.
But then he'd gone pro and she'd gone to college, and by the time she came back to Boston, the version of Grant she knew was the one that showed up with West, at West's things, in West's orbit. They'd never had the chance to become their own separate thing.
They were connected through West. Not through each other.
And now she was supposed to convince him to let her find him a wife.
Emmy dropped her phone in her lap and pressed her palms against her eyes. The smart thing to do—theethicalthing—would be to text Cecelia right now and say she'd been wrong, she didn't actually have that kind of access to Grant, she'd gotten caught up in the moment and exaggerated.
The smart thing would be to walk away. Start over. Find something safer.
But Emmy had spent six months working toward this exact door. She hadn't quit her job to hedge her bets. She'd quit because she knew what she wanted and Elite Connections was it—the only firm in Boston doing this work at this level. There was no plan B. She hadn't made one.
Elite Connections was different. Elite Connections was perfect. Everything she was good at, everything she wanted to do, packaged into one legitimate career at Boston's most prestigious firm.
All she needed was Grant.
Emmy opened her eyes and picked up her phone again. She could call him right now. Explain the situation. Appeal to whatever residual fondness he might have for West's little sister.
Except Grant had his face on billboards advertising sports drinks and energy bars. He didn't need her help finding dates. He probably had women pursuing him constantly—athletes always did. And even if he didn't, he definitely didn't need Emmy Woodhouse organizing his romantic life like it was a logistics problem to solve.
But Cecelia didn't know that.
She couldn't jump into this blind. This needed to be planned. She'd need to do her research—know exactly what she was walking into before she said another word to Cecelia or Grant.
But she couldn't ask West. He'd been in a bubble of wedded bliss since he and Brynn absconded to the suburbs, only emerging for football practice and games and the occasional Sunday dinner where he talked about gutters with their father.
