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“That’s—” His voice did something. “Nobody’s ever . . . it’s always been my job to—”

“I know it has—and that’s the problem I’m fixing first, before the money, before any of the rest.” I squeezed his hand. “You’re not the only one who gets to carry this. You don’t get to hog the whole weight and call it love. That’s not how love works. You taught me that, on your couch weeks ago, when you wouldn’t let me leave. So sit there and let me hand you forty pages and let the rest of us pick up our end. Okay?”

He looked at me like I’d rebuilt something in him with my bare hands. He stared so long I wondered if he’d speak again. Then slowly, quietly, words slipped free. “Okay,” he said. “Ours.”

Dosty sighed against my foot, as though signing off on the arrangement.

We called the family in the next afternoon, and I did a thing I hadn’t done since college: I ran the room.

“So it’s a war?” Benji breathed, delighted. “Dante’s giving us a war.”

“It’s a benefit,” I gently corrected.

“It’s a war with a benefit attached. Don’t take this from me—”

“Fine, it’s a war.”

“YES!” Benji spun to the others. “I told you. Floor-lamp man has been a general this whole time. He’s been standing at that door for two years running simulations in his head.”

“I need the mailing list,” I told him, desperate to keep things on track. “The real one, Benji, everyone who ever signed up.”

“Oh, I have lists you don’t even know about,” Benji said, with a look that was frankly a little frightening. “I have a spreadsheet. I have segments. You want the drag crowd? The sports crowd? The daytime regulars? The ones who only come when they’re sad? Those are different lists, Dante. You can’t blast them all the same. That’s amateur hour—”

I gaped at him.

“What?” Benji said.

“Nothing. You’re promoted. What’s your title?”

“Director of Communications,” he said instantly, like he’d been waiting his whole life, “and I want the ring light.”

“You get your ring light.” I suddenly remembered this wasn’t my bar and turned to Finn. He grinned and nodded without saying a word.

Benji made a sound I won’t try to reproduce.

Rod stepped forward next, wiping his hands on his apron, jaw set the way it got when he meant a thing. “I feed them,” he said. “At benefit, whatever night. I cook for all. I don’t care how many. I feed whole city if it keeps my kitchen. Reina and me, we cook until hands fall off.” He paused. “Also, I am close on investigation. The greasy back. I want that noted, is not forgotten. I will find who deflowered her.”

Beside me, I felt Mark go very still.

“Noted, Rod,” I said. “Keep at it.”

“I keep at it.”

Jacks raised his hand like we were in school. “I can get Skyler to post about it. He’s got, like, a lot of followers. That’s free, right? That’s a thing I can do?”

And there, for just a second, I saw it cross Mark’s face, the door he’d shut in the earlier meeting telling everyone we wouldn’t ask Skyler’s people for money. But this wasn’t that. This was a husband offering to share a bar with the world.

“Yeah, Jacks, that’s a thing you can do,” Mark said. “Not the team, though, and we’re not going after their wallets, just Sky’s voice. That’s a gift, Jacks. Take him up on it.”

Jacks beamed like we’d handed him a medal . . . and an ice cream cone.

Even Adrian, who’d said maybe nine words since the meeting began, who moved through his shifts these days like a man underwater, looked up from the corner. He didn’t smile, but he nodded once, slowly, and said, “I’ll do the socials, the video stuff. I know how to make it not look like garbage.” And he went back to staring blankly at the far side of the room. But he’d spoken. He’d offered. After weeks of that hollow quiet, Adrian had reached one hand back up out of the water. I marked it, and it mattered.

Finn stood at the back through all of it with his arms crossed, watching me run his bar’s rescue mission like I’d been doing it my whole life. When I finished, he was quiet a beat, then he tipped his head and said, dry as ever, “Well, look at you.”

“Is that approval?” I asked.

“That’s a full standing ovation in my language. Don’t get used to it.” He pushed off the wall. “Right, what do you need from me, general?”