Chapter 5

I told Diana over lunch on a Thursday, at the Thai place on 46th where the tables were too close together and the pad see ew was the best in midtown. I had been planning to tell her since Tuesday. I had also been planning to frame it correctly.

"It's a tactical move," I said. "Thalia has been obsessed with him since college. She never got him. Now he's been seen with me twice, and she's already called my office four times this week."

Diana was eating her spring roll. She didn't say anything.

"He's useful," I continued. "He's visible, he's attractive, and he has exactly the kind of history with Thalia that makes this effective. It's not complicated."

Diana set down her spring roll.

"He showed up at your apartment," she said. "At ten at night. With a heating pad."

"I told you that as context."

"You told me that," she said, "because you needed to tell someone." She looked at me with the particular patience of a woman who had watched me run three product launches simultaneously without blinking. "Eileen. You're describing a man you're falling for. You know that, right?"

The table next to us erupted in laughter about something. I picked up my fork.

"I'm describing an asset," I said. "There's a difference."

Diana smiled. She picked her spring roll back up and didn't say another word about it.

That smile stayed with me for the rest of the afternoon.

---

The ramen place was his idea. No reservations, no dress code, a hand-lettered sign in the window and fluorescent lighting that was doing nobody any favors. I was in a silk blouse and heels because I had come straight from a client dinner, and I was the most overdressed person in the room by a significant margin.

I didn't care. That surprised me.

The menus were laminated and slightly sticky. The broth arrived in bowls the size of small buckets. Kashton ordered for both of us without making a production of it, and what arrived was exactly right — rich and hot and completely unpretentious.

"Tell me about the camping trip," I said, because he'd mentioned it on the walk over and then let it drop.

He looked up. "You want to hear about the camping trip."

"I want to hear about the camping trip."

So he told me. It involved a borrowed tent with a broken zipper, a bear that turned out to be a very large raccoon, and his college roommate attempting to start a fire with a single match and a philosophy textbook. The way he told it — dry, unhurried, with the timing of someone who understood exactly where the funny part lived — made it impossible not to follow him there.

I laughed.

Not the polished, social laugh I kept ready for client dinners. Not the controlled exhale I used when something was mildly amusing. A real one, sudden and unguarded, the kind that came from somewhere I hadn't accessed in a long time. It caught me off guard. I felt it in my chest before I heard it.

I stopped.

Kashton was watching me. Not with surprise, not with the particular male satisfaction of a man who thinks he's performed well. Just watching, the way he did everything — steady, unhurried, like he had all the time in the world and was choosing to spend it here.

He didn't say anything. He didn't point at it, didn't name it, didn't make it a moment.

He just picked up his chopsticks and went back to his ramen.

That restraint hit me somewhere I wasn't prepared for. A man who knew when not to speak. I had forgotten that was a thing that existed.

I looked down at my bowl. The broth was still steaming.

I ate, and I did not examine what was happening in my chest, and I told myself that was fine.

---

I started keeping a list. Not on paper — I wasn't ready to make it that real. Just in the back of my mind, the way I tracked inconsistencies in a vendor contract. Small things. Things that didn't add up.

The coffee order. Black, no sugar, no exceptions. I had never told him. He had never asked. The first time he handed me a cup, I assumed it was a guess. The second time, I noted it. By the third time, it was no longer a guess.

The college years. Every time the conversation drifted toward that period — his campus, his friends, the years when Thalia had been dragging her orbit of people to every event where he might appear — he redirected. Not awkwardly. Not with the visible effort of someone changing the subject. With a naturalness that read as simple disinterest, the way a person steers around a topic they find boring rather than one they find dangerous. I had redirected enough conversations in my professional life to recognize the technique. I recognized it because I used it.

The question he had never asked.

That one I kept coming back to. Any man who had been genuinely surprised by a woman approaching him at a bar — any man who was actually operating without context — would have asked eventually. Why me? What made you walk over? It was the most natural question in the world. Kashton had never asked it. Not that night, not in the coffee shop, not on the walk uptown, not in my apartment at ten-fifteen with grocery bags in his hands.

He had never once asked why I chose him.

I filed each observation in the back of my mind and did not take them out to examine them. Examining them would mean revising the story I had been telling myself since the night at the Black Maple — the story where I was the one with the plan, the one with the information, the one who knew exactly what this was.

I was not ready to revise that story.

But the list kept growing.

And Diana's smile kept surfacing at inconvenient moments, quiet and knowing, like a woman who had already read the last page.