"He put the prospectus in his pocket."
Rafe smiled at that — wide and real, the smile I'd first seen at a drive-through window in Nevada and had been collecting ever since. "That's really good," he said. "You should be proud of that."
"He said the vision statement was strong."
"It is strong. It was strong in the second draft when I read it off the table."
"That was private. It was face-down."
"The title was visible and I wanted to read it." He looked at me steadily. "I wanted to read it because everything you build is worth reading. I'm not sorry about that."
I looked at him for a moment. Outside, the wind came off the Delaware and the last light went out of the sky, and the apartment went low and close around us, and Lumberjack exhaled from his end of the couch with the full satisfaction of a dog who had found his place in the order of things.
"I applied to Wharton in secret," I said. "Twice. The first time someone found out and told me it was a waste. The second time I got in and came here and apparently everyone is reading my drafts off the kitchen table."
"That's progress," Rafe said.
"It really is," I said.
He turned toward me then, shifting on the couch so he could look at me fully, and Lumberjack accommodated this rearrangement with a long-suffering sigh and resettled his chin on my knee. Rafe took my hand in both of his.
"I need to tell you something," he said.
"Okay."
"I came to your door in Beverly Hills to do a job," he said. "I told myself that was the whole of it — a job, a client, get it done and walk away. I was wrong about that inside of an hour and I knew it and I kept driving north anyway because I didn't have a better plan and because even then I didn't want to let you out of my sight. Not because of the job. Just you."
My breath went quiet. Outside, the wind moved through the last of the leaves.
"Four months ago I had a lot of rules," Rafe said. "And then you opened your door with your phone already in your hand and looked at me like I was a problem you were about to solve, and I've been in love with you since roughly that moment." He squeezed my hand once. "I should have said it before now."
I looked at him — at this man who had driven me north and named my hair and read my drafts off the kitchen table and brought a Bernese Mountain Dog home because eleven weeks was too long, who had stood at a rusted gate in Idaho and handed me the most carefully kept part of himself without being asked twice, who had told my father directly and without aggression that I was not a liability and I was going to Wharton — and I thought: obviously. Obviously it was always going to be him.
"I love you too," I said. "I've loved you since you let me keep the hot pink Jimmy Choos. I just didn't have the vocabulary for it yet."
He laughed — full and wide, filling the apartment — and pulled me in and kissed me, and that was when Lumberjack decided the moment called for his full participation. He stood up on the couch with no structural justification whatsoever, stepped directly across both our laps with the careful deliberation of a dog who understood he weighed over a hundred pounds and had chosen to deploy that fact, turned one slow circle, and collapsed back down between us with a sigh ofprofound personal satisfaction, his considerable head on Rafe's thigh and his back legs draped across mine.
We both looked at the dog. We both looked at each other.
"I want you to know," I said, "that I had a very romantic moment planned for immediately after that."
"I know," Rafe said, his hand already moving to scratch Lumberjack behind one ear. "Me too."
"He did this on purpose."
"He absolutely did this on purpose." Rafe looked at the dog with an expression that was not even slightly stern. "He's going to keep doing it."
"Every time," I agreed.
Lumberjack thumped his tail twice against the couch cushion and closed his eyes, deeply unbothered, a Bernese Mountain Dog in a Philadelphia apartment who had correctly identified where he belonged and had every intention of staying.
I leaned back against Rafe's shoulder and looked at our apartment in the evening dark — the second bedroom with the closed door and the aspirational cable management, the bag with the wool jacket by the door that was going to win eventually whether Rafe was ready for it or not, the fortune slip folded once in the flannel pocket on the back of the bathroom door. The program and the prospectus and the comment thread waiting in my inbox and the Grant name finally pointed at something I'd built myself.
Rafe pressed his mouth to my hair and I felt it move through me all the way down.
"Tell me something," I said.
"What do you want to know?"
