LOGINThe whiskey room was small, dim, and smelled like leather and old wood, four glasses already poured and waiting on the table when they walked in."Okay," Zachary said, looking around. "This is not what I agreed to.""You agreed to a bachelor party," Caden said, dropping into the chair at the head of the table like he owned the place. "You didn't specify parameters on the venue.""I specified nothing embarrassing.""This is the opposite of embarrassing. This is tasteful. Sit down."Reid was already pulling out a chair, and Sloane took the one across from him, quiet as always, but there was something looser in his shoulders that hadn't been there in years."Nobody's going to recognize you here," Caden said, sliding a glass toward Zachary. "That's the whole point. This place doesn't do business crowds. It does people who actually care about whiskey."Zachary picked up the glass, turned it slightly under the light."How long have you had this booked?""Six weeks.""Six weeks.""I asked yo
Nobody said anything for a moment.The coffee cups sat between them, and the street kept moving, but the bench itself felt very still.Isla didn't reach for her hand. Didn't say anything soft or careful. She just sat there, letting the silence hold.Odette set her cup down on the pavement, slowly, and looked at Wren directly."I was engaged too," she said. "Before Sloane. You didn't know that."Wren turned to look at her."No," she said. "I didn't.""Isla knows," Odette said. "Has known for years. Never once brought it up, which I've always appreciated more than she probably realizes."Isla gave a small nod, but didn't speak."His name was Marcus," Odette said. "We were together four years. Engaged for one. Three weeks before the wedding, he told me he wasn't ready. Not that he didn't love me. Just that he wasn't ready, as if that made it kinder.""I'm sorry," Wren said quietly."Don't be, it was a long time ago," Odette said, waving a hand, though her voice didn't quite match the ges
The boutique smelled like champagne and fresh flowers, all soft gold light and racks of white and ivory fabric.Wren stood just inside the door in her blazer, looking like she'd wandered into the wrong building entirely."Okay," she said. "I feel very overdressed for being underdressed.""You look fine," Isla said, looping an arm through hers and pulling her further in. "You look like you're about to close a merger. It's a good look.""Is it, though.""No," Odette said, breezing past them both with the energy of a woman on a mission. "But we'll fix that later. Right now we need champagne and a chair for you and a dress for her."A young woman appeared from behind a curtain, clipboard in hand, smile enormous."Gorgeous, hi, welcome, I'm Becca, and can I just say, gorgeous dress energy in here already, I can feel it—""That's a lot of enthusiasm for a Tuesday," Wren murmured."She means well," Isla whispered back."Now," Becca continued, unbothered, "who's the bride, who's the mother of
He didn't answer immediately.He sat down on the kitchen stool, slowly, like the question needed him to be seated before he could think through it properly. She stayed on the counter, the plant between them on the windowsill, the city outside doing its ordinary Saturday thing.The silence lasted long enough to mean something."I chose you because of the deadline," he said finally. "That's true. I'm not going to pretend it isn't."She waited."But I fell in love with you because of you," he continued. "And those are two different things that happened to start at the same time.""How do I know that?"He thought about it for a moment, not reaching for the easy answer."Because the deadline is almost gone," he said. "The treatment is working. The timeline I built my entire plan around has basically dissolved." He looked at her directly. "And I woke up this morning and for the first time in over a year I didn't count anything. I didn't calculate. I just woke up. And the first thing I wante
She was already on the kitchen counter when he woke up.It was a habit he'd pretended to object to for three weeks before giving up entirely — the sitting on the counter thing, her legs dangling, her sketchbook open across her knees, coffee going slightly cold beside her because she always forgot to drink it while she was working.He stood in the corridor for a moment, watching her, the morning light doing what morning light did through their windows at this hour.She caught him looking."Stop," she said, not looking up from the sketch."No," he said.She picked up the dishcloth from the counter beside her and threw it at him without looking. He caught it one-handed."You're not even a little sorry," she said."Not even slightly," he agreed, walking fully into the kitchen, pouring his coffee, coming to stand beside her at the counter she was sitting on, which put them at almost the same height for once.She showed him the sketch without him asking. The view from their window — the cit
Odette looked at both of them for exactly one second, then picked up her book and her wine glass and walked to her bedroom without a word."Thank you," Isla called after her."I didn't do anything," Odette said, and closed the door.They sat down on Odette's secondhand sofa, which was nothing like their furniture at home — worn in the right places, slightly too soft, a throw blanket draped over the arm that had clearly been there long enough to become permanent.Zachary looked slightly displaced in it, the way a man who owned buildings looked sitting on something that cost two hundred dollars and had been loved into a particular comfortable shape. But something about the displacement made him easier, less like Zachary Cole and more like just Zachary."Reid helped me understand something," he said."Okay.""It's not actually about the guest list.""I know it's not," she said. "I knew that when I walked out. I just didn't know the other thing yet.""It's about being watched," he said. "
Isla didn’t do it dramatically.She did it the way she did everything — practically, without ceremony. A bag on Monday. Some books on Wednesday. The plant from her windowsill on Thursday because she refused to leave it behind — “My mother gave me that and it’s survived worse things than moving apar
Reid, Zachary and Isla sat at the kitchen table like a war council at three in the morning.The laptop was open. The discovery was very small and very large at the same time.Connor Dealt’s former company. Connected to the trial funding. Connected to Dorian.“Tell me what you know about this compan
She didn’t tell Zachary.She told herself it was because he was tired. That the treatment cycle left him exhausted and the last thing he needed was more weight. That she was just going to look. Just check. Just find out if there was anything there before she brought it to him.She told herself thos
The waiting room smelled like recycled air and coffee that had been sitting too long.Isla had been there for forty minutes before Zachary’s monitoring session ended. She’d found the chair closest to the window, positioned so she could see both the door to the treatment corridor and the street belo







