“You’re doing it again,” Sebastian said without looking up from his phone.
“Doing what?”
“Staring at your coffee like it’s a source you’re trying to break.”
“I’m studying it.” I wrapped both hands around the mug and took a sip. Still perfect. Infuriating. “There has to be a trick.”
“There isn’t.”
“There absolutely is.”
He set his phone down and looked at me across the kitchen island — unhurried, the morning light catching the silver at his temples, wearing a shirt I was fairly certain he’d pulled from my side of the closet by accident. The controlled authority he’d carried into every room for thirty-nine years had softened into something easier. Still precise. Still him. But less armored, in the way that only happened when he’d decided somewhere was safe.
Our kitchen, apparently, had made the list.
“Happy anniversary,” he said.
“Is it already?” I set my mug down. “Seems like just yesterday you were catching me in your service corridor and threatening to have me removed.”
“I never threatened to have you removed.”
“You absolutely implied it.”
“I implied you were trespassing.” The corner of his mouth moved. “That’s different.”
“The distinction is noted and rejected.” I reached across the island and stole a piece of his toast. “One year.”
“One year.”
He said it simply, but I heard what was underneath it — the same thing I’d been sitting with all morning. The specific, improbable weight of a year that had started with corruption and death threats and a series of spectacular decisions and had somehow produced this. Coffee at a kitchen island. A corkboard in his library. The easy shorthand of two people who had learned each other’s rhythms well enough to navigate them without a map.
The townhouse had settled into itself around us over the past months — his clean lines interrupted by my organized chaos, my lone plant on the windowsill that he’d started watering without being asked, the reading glasses he left on my side of the bed thatI’d stopped returning to his. Small invasions. Small decisions. The slow accumulation of a life shared rather than managed.
“Jenna texted,” I said. “She’s coming over later. Wants to celebrate with cupcakes.”
Sebastian made the expression he always made when Jenna was mentioned — somewhere between fond and slightly wary, the expression of a man who respected someone’s loyalty and their complete lack of filter in equal measure.
“How many cupcakes?”
“She said, and I quote, enough to constitute a health risk.”
“Naturally.” He picked up his coffee. “And what are we celebrating, from her perspective?”
“She’s had approximately seven different theories about us over the past year. Currently she believes we’re a case study in what she calls the enemies-to-lovers-to-functional-adults pipeline and she’s very proud of her role in it.”
“Her role being?”
“She lent me dresses.” I smiled into my mug. “Apparently that counts.”
Sebastian laughed — the real one, unhurried and warm, the one I’d been quietly cataloging since a balcony in November when a stranger who hadn’t yet told me his name had laughed at something I’d said and I’d thought, absurdly, I want to hear that again. I’d heard it hundreds of times now. It still did the same thing to my chest.
“The show’s second season got picked up,” I said. “Officially confirmed this morning.”
“I know. You woke me up at six to tell me.”
“You pretended to be asleep.”
“I was celebrating privately.” He reached across and covered my hand with his — warm and certain, the gesture as natural now as breathing. “Em. I’m proud of you. You built that fromnothing, on your terms, without anyone’s help except the help you specifically asked for.”
