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“Sending the chart.”
“You already sent me a chart this week.”
“That was an emotional processing chart. This is a love language chart. Different taxonomy.” He straightened his cuffs, a habit he’d picked up from Knox and executed with none of Knox’s subtlety. “Knox.”
“What?”
“The 2018 files. Whatever you find, it doesn’t change who you are now. It changes what you do next.”
He left. Knox sat in his office with two empty coffee cups, a phone full of texts from a woman he’d never met, and a question waiting in the 2018 archives like a grenade with the pin half-pulled.
At noon he left the office and told Sarah he was going to lunch. He didn’t go to lunch.
He took the 7 train to Queens.
The address wasn’t hard to find. Golden Lotus had occupied the ground floor of a four-story building on a commercial block between a dry cleaner and a hardware store. Or it had, eight years ago. The dry cleaner was still there. The hardware store had become a phone repair shop. The ground floor where Golden Lotus once stood was a chain smoothie franchise with vinyl signage and a menu listing fourteen varieties of kale.
Knox stood on the sidewalk across the street and studied the building. The bones were old, prewar, a structure that survived because nobody cared enough to tear it down and nobody valued it enough to restore it properly. The upper floors were residential. The windows needed washing, and the fire escape had rusted at the joints.
He imagined it with a restaurant on the ground floor. Gold lettering on a red awning, a family inside, a father in chef’s whites, a mother running the front of house, two daughters doing homework on produce boxes. Thirty years of that had accumulated, worn and real, and then a document had arrived from an investment firm and the whole structure of a life had collapsed, not because anyone was cruel but because someone, somewhere, decided the building was underperforming.
He knew that someone might be him.
His stomach turned. He crossed the street and pressed a hand flat against the wall of the phone repair shop and breathed.
Beside him, the smoothie franchise was busy. College students, delivery drivers, a woman in workout clothes ordering something with turmeric. None of them knew what had been here before. The neighborhood had moved on. Neighborhoods always did. The people who’d been displaced were the ones who remembered, carrying the loss forward into everything they built next, as Lucy carried Golden Lotus into everything she baked and every business decision she fought to make on her own terms.
Knox rode the 7 back to Manhattan, sat at his desk, and opened the 2018 archive request form.
He filled in the fields. Building address, portfolio category, date range. His cursor hovered over the submit button for eleven seconds.
He counted.
He clicked.
The confirmation email arrived within thirty seconds, automated and impersonal. The system didn’t know or care what was in the files. It processed the request the same way Knox had processed hundreds of portfolio restructurings in his first year on the restructuring desk. Efficiently, without context, without asking who lived inside the numbers.
The request would take days to process, days that stretched between the question and the answer, between who he might have been and who he was becoming.
His phone buzzed. It was Jane again.
Jane: Four o’clock tomorrow. Don’t be late. And don’t bring flowers. Lucy hates flowers from men she’s pretending not to like. Bring yourself. That seems to be working.
Knox read the message, then read it again.
Bring yourself. That seems to be working.
He thought about the night before. The ganache, the spoon passing between them, Lucy’s hand over his, adjusting his grip. She’d said, “be lighter” and meant the fold and also, maybe, something else. She’d told him to go and hadn’t moved. He’d stood close enough to see the tired lines around her eyes and the chocolate on her wrist, and he hadn’t kissed her, and the not-kissing had said more than either of them risked out loud.
He closed the laptop. For the first time since he was sixteen, the numbers weren’t enough. He needed to know the story behind them. And he was terrified that the story might end with his signature on a piece of paper that destroyed everything Lucy Wang had lost before he ever learned her name.
Chapter 10
LUCY
Lucy watched Knox walk into Flour & Honey carrying a tray of coffees from the single-origin roaster on Lafayette, the one whose beans Lucy loved and refused to pay Manhattan prices for.
He moved to the counter and removed the coffees one by one. She saw the labels in his handwriting, each with a name and an order. Marco’s oat milk latte, extra shot. For Bree, the afternoon counter girl, iced chai with almond milk. Mrs. Hadley’s Earl Grey, bag in, no sugar. Mr. Petrov’s black, large, no modifications. And Lucy’s cortado, oat milk, served at exactly one hundred and fifty degrees because she’d mentioned the temperature once, weeks ago, during a budget meeting, in passing, as an aside to a conversation about vendor contracts.
