“It’s just a meeting, Will,” he replied.
His friend didn’t look convinced.
“Okay, enough work talk.” George lined up another shot, then sent his driver slicing through the air. “Now, what about the housewarming party? Is that still on, or has it been canceled due to the current situation at home?”
Shit. The housewarming party. Freddie had almost forgotten about that. He had sent out a text inviting all his friends in the city before his run-in with Anne. Now the impending party felt more like an obligation. “It’s still on.”
“Good. I was worried I’d have to break the news to Emma that you canceled it. She would have never forgiven you,” George said, the corner of his mouth ticking up like it always did when he mentioned his girlfriend.
Will hummed behind them. “But if youneedto cancel, we understand.”
Freddie’s brows creased together. “What?”
George laughed, sliding his club back in the stand. “What Will’strying to say is please cancel the party, because Emma and Lizzy are using it as an excuse to take us to karaoke afterward.”
“No, you’re going to karaoke,” Will said, glaring at George from under his brow. “I’m going to observe.”
Freddie almost wanted to laugh. When he first met Will and George, the three of them had decidedly been bachelors. It was a fact he had almost taken for granted, until George finally admitted to being in love with his neighbor and best friend Emma. As if that wasn’t bad enough, Will went and fell in love with a Hamptons local the following summer. Freddie was the last man standing and, thanks to past experience, happy to stay that way.
“The party is happening.” Freddie said it like he was issuing an edict. “I’m back in New York and I want to celebrate. One ex-girlfriend isn’t going to derail that.”
He forced the words out, but they still felt sour on his tongue.
“Fine,” Will said with a disappointed sigh. He took his phone back out of his jacket and began typing, only to pause and shoot them both an expectant look. “Are you two playing golf or what?”
CHAPTER 6
The offices for Kellynch Productions were empty and dark when Anne walked in Friday morning. Thank God.
She arrived early, bundling up in her peacoat and knit hat to face the first below-freezing temperatures of the year on her trek from the Uppercross. She told herself it was because there was work to do—the network needed to see past contracts and she needed to make sure all the footage had been sent over as promised. The fact that it had given her a convenient reason to avoid another run-in with Freddie Wentworth was just an added benefit. At least that’s what she told herself.
The office was on Fifth Street and Third Avenue, just a few blocks from Tompkins Square Park. The rent was eye-wateringly high, which was made worse by the fact that there was no strategic reason to be there other than her father being able to brag about the address. When she had first come on board to save the company, she had begged him to relocate, but he was adamant about staying. So the cuts came from other departments, and she had picked up the slack. Honestly, she hadn’t minded. She needed a distraction to keep herself from pondering just how far her life had veered off course.
Such as going to your closed-down office to pick up a few documents rather than risk running into your ex?a voice murmured in her head.
She frowned. Apparently, old habits die hard.
Bianca Russell used to say Anne’s brain was a perpetual motion machine. Since she was little, she would lose herself in a task, be so absorbed that the world would almost fall away. Anne never had the heart to tell her mother that the skill was born out of necessity, to avoid her parents’ screaming matches, another attempt at finding control in a world where she felt like she had none. It was also what helped her deal with being an introvert in a beautifully extroverted city. When she got into NYU, it was as thrilling as it was terrifying. There was no question she would live at home—the apartment was just a few blocks from campus—but it only made it harder to make friends, to find her place. So she threw herself into school, taking on extra classes, volunteering for study groups. It worked for a while, too.
Then she met Freddie.
He made it impossible to hide. She didn’t even want to. They were like two puzzle pieces that fit so perfectly, they didn’t have to worry about anything else. Then, when they finally did, it was too late.
The weeks after he gave her that ticket to Buenos Aires, she had tried to pull away slowly, hoping it would ease the conversation she knew they eventually had to have. The one she’d practiced for days, had taken careful notes on so he didn’t think she’d come to the conclusion to break up lightly. She didn’t mention the fact that she was doing it so he wouldn’t turn down the opportunity to go to Argentina—forcing him to live with that would have been just as bad as letting him stay. Instead, she’d only asked to stay friends.
And then he blocked Anne’s number.
She hadn’t realized at first. But after not hearing from him fora week, then two, she had tried to call him. The phone rang and rang, and it wasn’t until the eighth ring that she realized why it wasn’t going to voicemail: He had blocked her.
The confusion was followed by anger, and then pain, then such a heady mix of both that there was nothing to do but fall back on that need for control again. She threw herself into school, and then her job at the hedge fund, not taking time to celebrate her graduation or even move out of her father’s apartment. That was the point. She had needed to stay in motion, to keep her brain engaged so it wouldn’t linger on what she’d lost along the way.
Except it didn’t work. Diving headfirst into her job only made her notice every detail that she hated, the lists of numbers that were only that. Flat and binary.
She had tried hard to ignore that, too. But it only lasted so long before she knew she needed to quit.
That was the first time she had looked up Freddie. The day after she walked out of that office building on Wall Street for the last time, she’d caved and pulled out her phone. She opened Instagram and typed out his name.
And there he was. Speaking Spanish.
