The cold moved into something warmer. “I started it?”
“The comment about Frankfurt. That was a choice you made.”
“And answering the phone was a choice you made.” She kept her voice low, aware of the street around her. “A man who is, according to every magazine in this country, completely besotted with his fiancée does not take a business call in the middle of a romantic dinner. That’s not me starting something. That’s me pointing out that you gave them exactly what they needed to sell that story.”
“You could have let it go.”
“So could you,” she said. “You could have let the call go to voicemail.”
A silence.
“This isn’t productive,” he said finally.
“No,” she agreed. “It isn’t.”
“We need to fix it.”
“I know that.”
“So can we agree to fix it instead of rehashing last night?”
She briefly pressed two fingers against her forehead and looked up at the pale sky. He was the one who’d said they needed to talk about it.
He wasn’t wrong. He also wasn’t entirely right, and they both knew it, but the squabbling wasn’t going to stop the video from trending or close the gap in the story they were trying to sell the world. The question was whether the gap could be closed at all, or whether last night had given Graham exactly the evidence he’d been looking for.
“What does Dove suggest?” she asked.
“Something cozy. Low-key. The kind of picture that says we had a minor disagreement and we’re absolutely fine.” He paused. “She suggested your place. Paparazzi outside, us going in together, then moving some things out and to my house. Domestic. Normal.”
Her place. Her house, her oasis, the one corner of the world she’d kept entirely separate from all of this. She closed her eyes for a second.
“Fine,” she said.
“Today, if possible.”
“I heard you.”
Another silence, different from the first. Less hot. “Jasmine.” His voice had shifted, the argument draining out of it. “I should have let it go to voicemail.”
She hadn’t expected that, and she had to take a moment before she answered.
“I know your work is important,” she said. “I’m not asking you to pretend it isn’t. I just need you to understand that the picture we’re painting for the world requires a certain amount of consistency, and one crack is all Graham needs.” She paused. “That’s all I was trying to say.”
“I know,” he said. And then, because he was Nate and couldn’t let any exchange end on something soft: “You could have said it more diplomatically.”
Despite everything, despite the trending video and the coffee gone cold and the feelings she was firmly, actively nipping, she almost laughed. “I could have,” she agreed. “But where’s the fun in that?”
She heard something that might have been the beginning of a laugh on his end, quickly cut off.
“I’ll call Dove,” he said. “Be ready by two.”
She hung up and stood on the pavement for a moment, phone in hand, the morning moving cheerfully around her, and thought about the fact that they’d just had their first real fight and their first real apology in twelve hours, and that she wasn’t sure which one had done more damage.
CHAPTER 17
JASMINE
Her mother’s condo was on the fourth floor of a building in Koreatown, with a small balcony that looked out over a courtyard full of birds of paradise and a view, if you craned far enough left, of the downtown skyline. Jasmine had chosen it for the light, mostly. Her mother had spent twenty years in a house in Arizona where the light came in flat and relentless, and Jasmine had wanted her to have something softer. Something that felt like an arrival, like a new lease on life.
