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I look at Wren. Wren’s posture is the controlled upright of someone who is winning. “No.” I almost smile. “She’s fine. She’s winning.”

We collect Wren, who concedes the argument with the graceful finality of someone who has made her point and no longer requires the other party’s acknowledgment of it. She asks no questions until we’re out the front door and onto the porch steps, coats retrieved, the night air cool and clean after the heat of the party.

Then she looks at me and says, “Evan?”

“Evan,” I confirm.

She nods once, with the economy of someone who has already done the math. “Cash is going to hear about it.”

“Cash doesn’t need to do anything.”

“Cash is going to anyway.”

This is probably true. Cash and Wren’s relationship might be best described as two people who communicate primarily through mutual irritation and would absolutely have each other’s backs in an emergency, which this technically was, which means Cash is going to know about it by morning regardless of what either of us wants.

“Let him.” I pull my coat closed against the cold.

We walk down the Raven House’s porch steps and onto the path toward campus proper, the four of us shoulder to shoulder the way we’ve been shoulder to shoulder since freshman year, the maples dark overhead, the lampposts throwing down their yellow light.

I don’t look back at the house.

I don’t think about blue eyes, or the flat, carrying voice, or the way he said Margaret’s Sloane with the tone of someone who has heard a name enough times to have a feeling about it.

I don’t think about any of that.

I think about tea, and the Sailmaker, and my own bed, and how tomorrow I’m going to go to the bookshop and have a very direct conversation with an eighty-two-year-old woman about the appropriate limits of matchmaking.

The night is cool and the path is quiet and my arm aches in a way that’ll be a bruise by morning.

That’s fine.

I’ve had worse.

Chapter 5

Beau

She’s gone before I get back across the room.

I know this because I look — not obviously, not in a way anyone would notice, just the automatic sweep of a person checking a room the way I check a room, which I do constantly and have done since I was old enough to be responsible for a locker room. The four of them moved fast. White coat, dark coat, the taller one with the braid — gone, all of them, the front door already closed by the time I’ve cleared the knot of people near the hallway.

I stand there for a second.

Then Cash materializes at my shoulder.

“So,” he opens with.

“I know.”

“Football player.”

“I know, Cash.”

“Grabbed her arm.” He falls into step beside me as I move toward the kitchen, because standing still at a party is an invitation for conversation and I need approximately two minutes of not being talked at. “You stepped in. Very cinematic. I watched the whole thing from the stairs.”

“Why were you on the stairs?”

“Better sightline.” He grabs a drink off the counter — not his, by the look of it, but Cash has never in his life been precious about whose drink is whose — and leans against the cabinet with the ease of a person standing in the exact center of his natural habitat. The Raven House at a party is Cash’s element the way the ice is mine. He runs it without seeming to run it. “You know her?”