Lucy stood, vanished behind the counter, and came back with a plate piled high with chocolate chip cookies. “Emergency reserves. I keep them for exactly this kind of situation.”
“You have emergency heartbreak cookies?”
“I’ve emergency everything cookies. Heartbreak. Job loss. Bad haircuts. Existential dread.” Lucy pushed the plate toward her. “Eat.”
Tessa took one. Then another. They tasted like butter and dark chocolate, and the particular comfort of a friend who baked her feelings into everything she made.
“These are really good.”
“Of course they are. I’m a professional.”
Devney reached into her bag and pulled out a small package of tissues. Sunflower print. Bright yellow petals on white. “Here.” She pressed them into Tessa’s hand. “Because regular tissues are depressing, and you deserve something that reminds you the sun still exists.”
Tessa stared at the tissues. Then at Devney. “You brought me sunflower Kleenex.”
“I brought you optimism in portable form.” Devney smiled. “Also, I bought them in bulk. Ronan went through a phase where he cried at commercials.”
“Ronan cries at commercials?”
“Dog commercials. Every time.”
“These emotionally repressed billionaires,” Lucy said. “They’re disasters underneath all that tailoring.”
“All of them,” Devney agreed.
Tessa laughed. The first real laugh in two days. It surprised her enough to feel suspicious of itself, but it was a laugh.
She ate another cookie. The plate was half-empty before she stopped.
“You told me once,” she said to Lucy, “that he came twenty blocks out of his way and pretended it was a Knox favor.”
“I remember.”
“Are you allowed to take it back if it turns out the man also kept a framed pact in his desk?”
“You’re allowed to take anything back you want. That’s the rule. But I’m not taking it back, because the man came twenty blocks out of his way the first time, and that shows he has the basic ingredients to make something good.”
“Lucy.”
“What. I’m a baker. Ingredients matter.”
That made her laugh harder.
By the time she stood up to leave, she didn’t have answers. She didn’t know if she could forgive him, or trust him, or let herself fall back into something that had hurt this much when it broke. But sitting here, with Lucy’s cookies and Devney’s sunflower tissues and stories about Ronan crying at dog commercials, she felt like she could breathe again.
That was something.
Chapter 19
GABRIEL
Monday morning,Gabriel opened the refrigerator and closed it again.
The shelves were full. Tessa had stocked them before the Plaza event, her handwriting on masking-tape labels. Leftover risotto. Salad greens. The good cheese. He shut the door and drank water from the tap instead. The thought of food turned his stomach.
Tuesday, he knocked on his mother’s 5thAvenue door. She opened it wearing pearls she had no occasion for and the wary expression she wore for difficult negotiations.
“Sit down. I had Maria make tea.”
