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“Mark. I invented the ‘nope’ voice. I hold the patent.” Benji hopped up to sit on the clean end of the prep counter, funeral adjourned without a vote. “Tell me everything. Did you meet someone? Did you go on a date? Did you go on a date and it was terrible? For the love of the gay gods, did you get laid? Your face is doing the terrible thing.”

So, surrounded and outnumbered, I surrendered.

I told them about Grant, who had seemed like a miracle right up until the tequila proposition. I got as far as “basically runs itself” before Finn had to sit down. I told them about the high-energy connector, and his Thursday group that was definitely not a pyramid scheme, and how somewhere over an untouched plate of pasta I’d understood I wasn’t a date; I was a lead. Benji made a groan of real pain, hand to his heart, more moved by this than he had been by Sir Reginald. Rod’s tears still flowed, though the cause had shifted from our frozen knight to the onions he was now chopping.

“Two men?” Benji said. “One wanted your liquor license and the other wanted your downline?”

“That’s about the size of it.”

“Nobody wanted the coffee?” Jacks asked.

“Nobody wanted the coffee.” I shook my head.

I didn’t tell them about the grid or the wall of torsos or the man four hundred feet away who’d sent me a photograph that left nothing to translate. I especially didn’t tell them about the message I’d sent, in earnest, to a stranger about my short ribs and my back patio being nice this time of year. Some things a man takes to his grave, ideally next to Sir Reginald.

But Benji was Benji.

“Wait.” His eyes narrowed, then his head cocked, veil rustling. “What app did you use?”

“You told me to use an app. You didn’t say which one.”

“Markus Arellius Cleopatra Darnel Walker Delgado, which app did you use?”

Finn lost it.

My head lowered, along with my voice. “The one with the mask.”

The kitchen went silent.

Rod’s chopping stilled.

Even the dirge, which Jacks had turned back up, seemed to lower itself out of respect.

Finn’s whole face changed.

Benji’s mouth dropped open and hung there.

And down at the end of it all, leaning in the kitchen doorway with his beefy arms crossed and a book tucked under one of them, Dante, who I hadn’t even heard come in, because you never do, let the corner of his mouth curl into the smallest smirk I have ever seen a man permit.

“Oh, honey,” Benji said, and there was so much love in those words—and so much horror. “Oh, no, baby doll, just no. That’s not a dating app.”

“I’m aware of that now.”

“That’s a hunting app,” he added.

“I said I’m aware.”

“Did you write a bio?” Finn asked.

“. . . No.”

“You wrote a bio.” Benji steepled his fingers and grinned.

“It was a nice bio,” I said, with the last shred of dignity I owned.

The kitchen came down around me, Finn openly weeping again, Benji clutching his veil, Jacks asking with total sincerity whether short ribs were a euphemism and being told, gently, by Rod, that they were not.

Only Dante didn’t laugh.