She reads the subject line (Briefing Materials. Please Review) and makes a sound like a Victorian woman being informed of a scandal.
"'Briefing Materials,'" she says, her voice climbing a full octave.
"He wanted to make sure I had everything I needed," I say, which somehow sounds more incriminating out loud than it did in my head.
She scrolls slowly, lips moving, and I watch her face move through confusion, then delight, then something approaching reverence. "Acceptable Behaviors," she groans. "Tessa. This is arulebook."
"Rules can be helpful. Going into an unfamiliar situation."
Callie scrolls further and her jaw drops in increments, like a building being condemned floor by floor.
"'Appendix B: Family Notes,'" she reads aloud, and then simply holds the phone up to show me, as if I haven't already read it four times this morning.
"This man didn't ask you out," she says, setting the phone down. "He issued a project charter."
"He's incredibly thorough in everything he does." The defense slips out softer than I intend, and I hear it immediately, hear the fondness sitting right there in the middle of the sentence with nowhere to hide.
"Tessa."
"He built ERS's entire algorithm from scratch, Callie, the manthinks in systems—"
"You're defending the girlfriend manual."
"I'm providing context."
She points at me with her cookie. The look on her face is insufferable. "You still like him."
Heat climbs straight up to the tips of my ears. I wrap both hands around my latte as if ceramic and caffeine can save me now, and say absolutely nothing, which is, of course, a spectacularly loud answer.
Callie cycles through her reactions: first the shriek she swallows down into a grin, then the narrowed eyes, then the slow, dangerous nod of someone hatching something genuinely inadvisable.
"Here's what I think —"
"What if I'm his last resort," I say, cutting her off before she can get momentum. "What if I'm convenient."
The word sits badly in my mouth. It sounds practical on the surface and bruises on impact.
Callie goes still. Not the bright, performative stillness from before. This is the real kind, the kind she reserves for when she's actually listening.
"What if he looked around for someone low-risk and landed on me because I'm easy to manage."
"Or," she says, carefully, "he looked around and pickedyou."
I look at the phone between us on the table. It's open to the backstory section, to the gallery cover story. March. Three months ago. Which means he didn't choose a random date. He chose a beginning for us, a version of our story that had already been taking shape in his head before he ever crossed the office to my desk.
"Did you meet at a gallery opening?" she asks.
"No," I say. "He invented a meet-cute." I say it mostly to myself, and something in my chest does a strange, weightless, swooping thing that I'm not going to examine in a coffee shop.
"He invented ameet-cute," Callie repeats, and now she sounds almost awed, the teasing entirely gone out of her voice.
She takes a sip. "Well, have fun on your dates with the robot."
"He's not a robot," I say.
"Tessa. He sent you a six-page girlfriend manual."
"Five pages. The sixth is just the appendix."
She stares at me for a long moment. Then she starts laughing, real laughter, helpless and full-bodied and impossible to resist, bent forward over the table like the sheer force of it has knocked something loose. And despite the email, the appendix, the low-grade emotional fever I have been running since yesterday, I laugh too. It spills out of me like something I didn't know I'd been holding.
Callie wipes her eyes with the back of her hand, lifts her mug, and says, with total and utter sincerity, "I hope you love every single second of thisromance."
I walk out into the cold a few minutes later, the email still glowing on my phone screen, the gallery cover story blinking up at me. March. A start date. A beginning he'd already chosen.
George Maddox, it turns out, has already decided how our story starts. And I desperately want to know how he thinks it ends.
