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“Stay,” I say again. Quieter this time.

He lifts his hand from mine. Puts it on my face. His palm is warm and his fingers curve around my jaw, and he tips my head up the way he does—the way he did at the rehearsal dinner, the way he did on the dance floor—and he looks at me like I’m the first thing he ever saw and the last thing he ever wants to see.

“Okay,” he says.

“Okay?”

“I’m staying.” His thumb brushes my cheek, wiping a tear I didn’t feel fall. “Not because the math changed. Because you asked. And because you’re right—leaving isn’t brave. It’s just math. And I’m tired of math.”

I pull him down and kiss him. Hard. Messy. Tasting like tears and the rawest conversation I’ve ever had in my life. His arms go around me and he holds on.

“Come to bed,” I say against his mouth.

He does. We lie down together. His arm goes around me, my back against his chest, his warmth soaking through my shirt.

“Aiden?”

“Yes.”

“If you ever pack that bag again, I’ll have Gemma disable your legs.”

“Understood.”

“And Aiden?”

“Yes.”

“I love you.”

He presses his mouth to my hair. I feel the words more than I hear them—low, warm, vibrating against the back of my head.

“I love you, Ruby. And that’s never going to change.”

I close my eyes. His arm tightens around me. The hum is there, steady against my spine, and outside the window the sky is just starting to lighten—not sunrise yet, just the first suggestion of it, and I’m exactly where I want to be.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Ruby

From Scratch

The drive to Caroline Whitfield’s office takes twenty-two minutes, and I use every single one of them to panic.

Not visibly. Visibly, I’m a woman driving a car, wearing the nice blouse Liv helped me pick out and the earrings my grandmother gave me, with a folder of materials on the passenger seat that Aiden assembled, organized, and labeled with colored tabs because he doesn’t believe in unorganized folders or in letting me walk into an important meeting without backup data.

Internally, I’m disintegrating.

The folder contains: my menu offerings for the festival, my production capacity projections, my ingredient sourcing breakdown, my customer retention data, and a one-page summary of Hart’s Bakery that reads like a legitimate business profile instead of the panicked napkin math I’ve been doing for two years. Aiden wrote most of it. I edited it. He re-edited it. I told him it was fine.

He wanted to come. He offered three times this morning—once while making eggs, once while I was getting dressed, once while I was standing at the door with my keys, and that last one almost got me because he was holding my coffee and looking at me with those steady eyes and the offer wasn’t about the meeting. It was about not wanting me to be afraid alone.

“I need to do this by myself,” I said.

“I know.”

“If I can’t pitch my own bakery without my boyfriend doing the numbers, then what does that say about me?”

“It says you have a strong support system.”