I turned my hand over and laced our fingers together. “I asked for your investment.”
“After presenting a forty-page business plan and making me sign a contract that would have made my own legal team flinch.”
“I wasn’t taking any chances.”
“No.” His thumb traced across my knuckles. “You never do.”
We sat with that for a moment — the morning settling around us, the city coming awake outside the windows, all the ordinary machinery of a Tuesday that happened to be the anniversary of the first time we’d agreed, in any official sense, that this was what we were.
“Do you remember what you said to me?” I asked. “That first night. In your service corridor.”
“I said approximately forty things in that service corridor.”
“The one about ambition.” I met his eyes. “You said I had ambition and a general disdain for people who could afford yacht maintenance. And that you said it like it was refreshing.”
Something moved in his expression. “I remember.”
“I thought you were insufferable.”
“You’ve mentioned.”
“I also thought—” I stopped. Decided to say it anyway because that was what we’d built this on. Saying the things instead of managing them. “I thought you were the most interesting person I’d met in years. Before I knew your name. Before I knew what you were going to cost me.” I squeezed his hand. “I would do all of it again.”
Sebastian was quiet for a moment, and I watched him do the thing he still did sometimes — the brief internal reckoning of a man deciding to say the true thing rather than the safe thing.
“I left the balcony that night before you could ask my name,” he said. “Because I was rattled, and I needed to think, andcontrol was the only language I knew.” He looked at me steadily. “I’ve spent the past year learning a different one.”
“How’s that going?”
“Ask me in another year.” The corner of his mouth curved. “I’m told I’m getting better.”
“You are,” I said. “Incrementally. At a pace consistent with someone who spent four decades doing it the wrong way.”
“High praise, Rivera.”
“I thought so.”
The doorbell rang at eleven, and I opened it to find Jenna on the doorstep holding a box that was, conservatively, twelve cupcakes deep, wearing the expression of a woman who had been waiting to do this for a long time.
“Happy anniversary,” she announced, already moving past me into the hallway. “I brought red velvet because Sebastian looks like a red velvet person and chocolate because you’re a chocolate person and don’t argue with me about this, I’ve known you for eight years and I’m right.”
“You’re right,” I confirmed.
“Obviously.” She set the box on the kitchen island, spotted Sebastian, and pointed at him with the directness that had made her both my best friend and occasionally my greatest source of secondhand anxiety. “You. You’ve been good to her this year?”
Sebastian, to his credit, didn’t flinch. “I’ve been trying.”
“Good answer.” She opened the box. “Honest. I respect honest.” She glanced between us, and something in her expression softened from mock-interrogation into something genuine. “You two are disgustingly good together, you knowthat? Like, I was rooting for you before I was rooting for you, and it is genuinely satisfying to be right about people.”
“You spent six months telling me he was trouble,” I said.
“He was trouble. He was also eventually worth it, which is a different thing.” She picked up a red velvet cupcake and handed it to Sebastian with the gravity of someone presenting an award. “Congratulations on not screwing it up.”
Sebastian took the cupcake. “Thank you, Jenna. Truly.”
“Don’t make it weird.” But she was smiling.
She stayed for two hours — the conversation moving through the show’s new season and a story I was building about city planning corruption and a trip Sebastian and I were taking to Portugal in the spring and, inevitably, Jenna’s ongoing, elaborate opinions about everyone in her life. Sebastian sat with us at the kitchen island and contributed occasionally and laughed when she was funny, which was often, and I watched him do it and thought about the man I’d met at a charity gala who had looked at me like a problem to be solved and was now sitting in our kitchen eating cupcakes with my best friend on a Tuesday morning.
