I lay in the dark of that and thought about what I was doing. I knew what it cost, because I’d done it before — let someone get this close against my own rules, watched myself cross the line I’d set, and paid three years for the education. The prior client — the one whose name I didn’t say out loud anymore, not even in my own head — had been a lesson I’d paid for in full and had not planned to repeat.
I could feel the difference the way you could feel the difference between weather coming and weather gone. Before, something had been off from the beginning and I’d talked myself past it, all the way to the end of it. This felt like the opposite of off. This felt like the first honest thing in a long time.
I couldn't find the part of myself that wanted to stop.
London's breathing had gone slow and even against my chest. The mountains outside the window were going to dark shapes in the blue dusk, and I stayed where I was and did not move, and thought about what came next.
It was new information about myself.
Chapter Five
LONDON
THE CABIN KITCHEN WASthe size of a generous closet, which was either charming or a problem depending on the ambition of the project. I found eggs. I found a cast iron skillet that weighed approximately as much as a small sedan. I found butter, which I knew was a good sign, and a pepper grinder shaped like a bear, which I felt was a comment on the location.
I had watched omelettes being made. Not made them — watched them. Bastian’s building had a breakfast concierge who did eggs to order every morning in the lobby, and I had stood approximately four feet from that process no fewer than forty times in the last year. I had the sequence. Crack, whisk, heat, pour, fold.
The cracking went fine. The whisking went fine. The heat was where things began to develop their own point of view.
Rafe came in from outside — he’d been on the porch since before I woke up, his version of early-morning administration — and stopped in the kitchen doorway with his coffee cup halfway to his mouth.
“It’s almost done,” I said.
He looked at the skillet. He looked at me. He looked back at the skillet.
“Smells good,” he said.
“I know. I used the whole block of butter.”
He set his cup down and leaned against the counter and watched me plate it. The omelette had its own opinions about folding — it came out less as a fold and more as a kind of geological event, the edges browning in a way I was choosing to call caramelized, the center doing something liquid and optimistic. I plated it with the conviction of someone who had decided the presentation was intentional and slid it across the table to him.
He sat down. He picked up a fork. He took a bite.
Something moved across his face — controlled, fast, gone before it committed — and he said, “This is good.”
I sat across from him and felt a brief, genuine warmth about this. Then I picked up my own fork.
The outside was on the wrong side of browned. The inside was enthusiastically liquid. What I had made was, technically, buttered eggs in the general vicinity of an omelette shape.
I looked at my fork.
I looked at Rafe.
He was looking directly at the window.
I put the fork down. He found crackers in the cabinet without being asked and set the box between us. I ate four of them and most of a second sleeve and neither of us mentioned the omelette again.
The morning stretched out. I wasn’t used to mornings that stretched. My schedule at home ran from the moment Bree’s first text came through — usually around seven, always organized, always with a color-coded structure I’d stopped questioning because it worked — until the last event wrapped and I could finally be still. Here there was no structure, no calendar, no deliverable waiting on the other side of the next hour.
I thought about Bree, who was probably managing a minor professional crisis on my behalf with her usual combination ofwarmth and tactical ruthlessness. I thought about the brand partnership call I’d missed. I thought about the feed, which was now four days dark, which was the longest it had been since I’d started it at twenty-one and figured out I was good at this.
I thought, briefly, about Whitney.
Whitney was fully settled into the life our parents had offered and had looked at it and said yes without reservation — the engagement to Preston Lancaster, the events, the place in the machine. She was genuinely happy in it. I knew that. I had spent years trying to find a fault in her happiness and never found one, and the thing I’d eventually understood was that it wasn’t a performance. She actually wanted what she had.
I didn’t resent her for it. I just couldn’t explain myself to someone who had never looked at the available options and wanted a door that wasn’t on the board.
The Wharton application surfaced in my head the way it kept doing — not anxious, just present. A fact sitting there waiting to be made a decision.
