Page 32 of Howl Lotta Love

“Diesel would tower over the folders and end the bit in one second flat.” Nora set the phone down, still grinning. “Anyway. Don’t change the subject. You were about to tell me everything.”

“I wasn’t.”

“You were about to. I could see it building. Let it build. I’m very patient and I ordered you a second drink preemptively.” Nora nodded at the server already approaching with exactly that. “Speaking as someone who has watched approximately four hundred people almost die and then decide, on their way back from the brink, that their first priority was texting an ex—nobody gets to pretend they don’t feel things around me. I’ve earned the right to call it.”

“That’s morbid.”

“That’s my job. I contain morbid and delightful in equal measure, ask anyone.” Nora leaned in, all teasing dropping into something gentler. “Talk to me. For real this time.”

Emma turned her glass by the stem, buying a second she didn’t need, and the low light and the second drink and two weeks of carrying this alone finally wore her resistance down to nothing.

“It stopped being fake.” She said it fast, like ripping off a bandage, before she could talk herself out of it. “I don’t know exactly when. Somewhere around the first week, maybe sooner. It stopped being a cover story and started being the one part of my day I genuinely looked forward to.”

Nora didn’t say anything yet, which was, for Nora, an act of remarkable restraint.

“I’m terrified of it,” Emma admitted, quieter now. “Not of him. Of what happens to the rest of me if I let this be real. I’ve spent my whole career being the smartest person in a room full of people who resented me for it. I don’t actually know how to be someone’s partner instead of someone’s problem to manage. What if I’m good at being needed and terrible at just being loved, day to day, with nothing on fire?”

“Oh, honey.” Nora’s voice softened, all the interrogation gone out of it at once. “You say that like loving someone comes with a final exam. It doesn’t. You show up. You get it wrong sometimes. You show up again. That’s the whole test, and you pass it just by staying in the room.”

“That’s not comforting.”

“I’m not in the comfort business. I’m in the truth business.” Nora reached across the table and squeezed her hand, quick, fierce. “Go home. Tell him. Or don’t tell him, and stop pretending you don’t mean every look you give him, because I promise you, the entire safe house already knows, and you’re the last person still performing for an audience that stopped watching the show days ago.”

“That’s oddly exact.”

“I’ve met your team. They’re not subtle. None of them are subtle. It’s honestly a little exhausting, being around that much repressed feeling at once.” Nora sat back, delighted with herself the way she got when she’d successfully bullied someone she loved into being honest. “Stop being careful. You’ve been careful your entire life and look where it got you—engaged to a man you have to lie about loving.”

Emma’s phone buzzed. She glanced down, and the message rearranged her whole chest in about half a second.

Diesel wants it on record he’d have caught the folders with more grace than I did. I’m choosing violence later tonight.

She was still smiling at her phone when Nora reached over and stole it clean out of her hand.

“Oh, this is adorable, I hate it, give me a second to compose myself.” Nora read the exchange twice, cackled, and handed the phone back. “You’re going home tonight and you’re going to stop being a coward about it. I’m not asking.”

Emma didn’t have an answer for that. She didn’t try to find one. She finished her drink, hugged Nora goodbye a little longer than usual, and caught a cab back to the safe house with her heart going too fast for a woman who told people for a living that feelings weren’t data.

Her phone rang halfway home. Claire, whose internal radar for Emma’s emotional state had never once needed an explanation to activate.

“You sound different.” No hello. Claire never bothered with one either, which Emma had always privately suspected was a family trait. “Good different. Suspicious different. Explain.”

“I don’t sound like anything. I’m in a cab.”

“You sound like a woman who just admitted something to somebody who isn’t me, and I am deeply offended on principle.” Her voice dropped, softer. “Is it the fiancé? The real one, not the wedding-blog one Mom’s book club found on the internet and has apparently been discussing for a week.”

“There’s a wedding blog?”

“Don’t change the subject.”

“It’s real,” Emma admitted, and felt the truth of it land somewhere new, now that she’d said it twice in one night to two different people who loved her. “It got real. I only just ’fessed up to it.”

“Good.” Claire didn’t sound surprised, which was its own kind of comfort. “You’ve spent ten years building a life nobody could take anything from, and I love you, but that’s not the same thing as a life you actually want. Go have the real thing. I’ll be insufferable about it at Christmas.”

“I’m counting on it.”

Somewhere around the third red light, after they’d hung up, Emma gave up pretending she wasn’t smiling at nothing out the window.

The kitchen light was on when she got back, which meant Jace was home too, and the two of them arrived at the same conclusion at the same moment: the pretense that had gotten them this far had officially run out of road.