Back in her car, she set the cup in the holder, looked into the rearview mirror, and tucked her loose hair back into its bun. Every motion was a stall, anything to keep her from circling back to green eyes and the boy she had never stopped wanting.
Gabriel Sterling had never been just an ex-boyfriend.
He’d been the first person at Ashford Academy who looked at her like she belonged there. Not at her secondhand blazer with the sleeves she’d lengthened herself or her free lunch vouchers. Just at her.
She had arrived at Ashford at fifteen on a scholarship that covered tuition and meals. It didn’t cover the crushing weight of not belonging. She was the daughter of a nurse and a construction worker at a school full of heirs whose futures had already been mapped out in trust funds, and every day she had been sure they could see it.
Gabriel had sat next to her in calculus. He’d shared his notes without being asked. When he looked at her in her secondhand uniform, she felt as if he saw nothing but the person wearing it.
Junior year, he’d kissed her in the library stacks between Modern Poetry and British Literature. She had been reaching for a book on the top shelf—Eliot’s collected works for required reading—when he’d reached past her. Somehow his mouth was on hers and she was gripping his shirt, and the book had fallen and neither of them had cared.
They were together for two years after that. Two years of stolen hours, hidden notes, kisses in the stacks that left her breathless and rearranged. She had loved him with the passion only a teenager possesses, when the world feels like it’s about to end.
Then graduation, and his mother’s expectations, and her mother’s medical bills, and the impossibility of pretending geography wouldn’t eventually destroy them. Harvard for him. Culinary school for her. Hundreds of miles apart and two completely different lives.
When she said it wouldn’t work, Gabriel had done what Gabriel did. He’d made it logical. He’d written an agreement on Ashford letterhead like a business proposal: a clean break, no contact, move on. He presented their ending like a quarterly report.
She had signed because arguing would’ve meant admitting she wanted to fight for something she couldn’t have.
So she’d spent years telling herself she had made the right choice, and years building a life that proved to the world she didn’t need Gabriel Sterling, or anyone like him.
One look across a terrace, and all of that crumbled.
Brooklyn materialized around two in the morning. Tessa parked outside her building and sat there, exhausted, unable to make herself move.
The brick facade looked the same as it had when she’d left for Martha’s Vineyard. The flower boxes she had planted herself, with herbs and trailing vines, still bracketed the windows. The bodega on the corner was still open, its neon beer signs humming their eternal invitation.
She climbed the stairs to her apartment on legs that felt borrowed from someone else. She unlocked the door and stepped inside to the familiar smell of her own space—herbs from the kitchen, lavender from her favorite candle, woodpolish from the floors she’d refinished herself with nothing but YouTube tutorials and stubborn determination.
Her grandmother’s cookbook sat open on the kitchen counter, propped to the page Nana had marked with a smear of dried tomato. Tessa walked past it without stopping.
Eight notifications waited on her phone. The previews told her enough. Five were from David, all variations onyou killed it tonight, and three missed calls from a number she didn’t recognize. She read none of them.
She peeled off her catering blacks, stepped into the shower, and turned the water as hot as she could stand. It pounded against her shoulders while mascara washed down the drain in dark ribbons. She stood there and pretended the heat could reach the places inside her that had split open on that terrace.
Half an hour later, wrapped in her bathrobe with wet hair soaking through the terrycloth, she lay in bed and stared at the ceiling. The same ceiling she had stared at for six years in this apartment.
She could do this. She could take the clients, build the relationships, and exist in Gabriel’s world without falling apart.
She had survived worse. At nineteen, with her mother in the hospital and no money for treatment, she had gone door to door selling homemade cookies to cover what insurance wouldn’t. Culinary school had followed on four hours of sleep and three jobs that left her hands raw and her feet aching. The business had come after that, built from a used food truck and sheer determination.
If she could survive that, she could deal with Gabriel Sterling.
The danger wasn’t professional. That part she could manage.
The danger was the old feeling, the one she’d spent years outrunning. Sterling’s world had a way of reminding her exactly how much she’d built and how little of it would ever be enoughfor the people born into rooms like his. She knew that particular math. She’d grown up on the wrong side of it.
She could do the job. She had to be careful not to start needing his approval while she did it.
She fell asleep with that thought on repeat.
Tessa woke to her phone vibrating against the nightstand.
It was six in the morning, and sunlight cut through the gap in the curtains. The phone wouldn’t stop buzzing.
She reached for it.
Jessica: You need to see this.
