Chapter 2: Blind Dates and Bad Ideas

My mother called on a Tuesday, which meant she’d been holding it in since Saturday and finally broke.

“I just think,” she started, and I already knew where the sentence was going, “that sitting at home isn’t doing you any good.”

I was, in fact, sitting at home. I had tea. I had the specific kind of quiet that follows a betrayal, the kind that feels less like peace and more like a room with all the furniture removed. Three days since I’d walked out of Ryan’s building. Three days since I’d slept through the night.

“Mom.”

“I’m not pushing.”

“You’re calling.”

“Calling is not pushing.” She paused. “I have someone I’d like you to meet.”

I set down my mug. “Absolutely not.”

“He’s very respectable. My friend Patricia’s nephew, works in finance, Patricia says he’s been looking to meet someone genuine and I thought—”

“Mom. It’s been three days.”

“Which is exactly why. You cannot sit in that apartment letting Ryan Blake take up space in your head. He doesn’t deserve the real estate.”

Despite myself, I almost smiled. “Did Maya tell you to say that?”

“Maya told me many things. I selected the appropriate ones.” A brief silence. “One dinner, Lena. You eat anyway. You might as well eat across from someone new.”

I looked at my tea. At the wall. At the very small and very empty version of my evening stretching out ahead of me.

“One dinner,” I said. “And you owe me.”

She made a sound that meant she’d already won and was being gracious about it.

—

The restaurant was the kind of place that suggested effort without being aggressive about it, soft lighting, real tablecloths, a menu that used full sentences. I arrived three minutes early because I always arrived early to things I didn’t want to do, some compulsive need to control the one variable I could. I checked my reflection in the dark glass of the entrance and thought, you’re fine, you look fine, this is one dinner and then it’s over.

I gave the host my name. He smiled and said my table was ready, and I followed him through the room thinking about whether I’d left the stove on, whether the tea was still warm on my counter, whether this was the worst idea my mother had ever had or merely the second worst.

Then I saw the table.

And I stopped walking.

The man sitting there was not Patricia’s nephew. He was not someone’s nephew at all. He was tall, even seated, with the kind of stillness that didn’t come from being relaxed but from having spent years deciding that the world would come to him rather than the other way around. Dark jacket, no tie, a glass of water he hadn’t touched. His eyes were already on me, cool and completely unreadable, and I recognized him in the specific way you recognize someone you’ve heard described in frustration a hundred times but never actually seen.

Adrian Cole.

Ryan’s boss. CEO of Cole Industries. The man Ryan spent every Sunday morning quietly resenting over coffee.

My legs made the decision to keep walking because stopping in the middle of a restaurant was worse, so I made it to the table and stood there while every logical thought I had dissolved into a single, useless question: what.

“Ms. Carter,” he said. His voice was exactly what I’d have guessed if I’d been guessing, even and unhurried, like someone who’d never needed to raise it.

“Mr. Cole.” I pulled out the chair and sat down, because sitting was something to do with my body while my brain ran its calculations. “I think there’s been a misunderstanding.”

“Patricia’s nephew had a work conflict.” He said it without apology. “She asked me to come to his place.”

“You know Patricia.”

“Her husband and my father have done business for fifteen years.” A pause. “She didn’t mention the connection.”

No. Of course she hadn’t. Because my mother’s friend Patricia apparently operated without a concept of consequences, and now I was sitting across from Ryan’s CEO at a restaurant with real tablecloths and nowhere to go.

“I can go,” I said. “If this is uncomfortable.”

“Is it uncomfortable for you?”

I looked at him. He was watching me with the particular attention of someone running an assessment. Not unkind. Just thorough. “My ex-boyfriend works for you,” I said.

“I’m not aware who that is.”

“Then you can probably guess why this is a strange evening.”

Something shifted at the corner of his mouth. Not a smile, exactly. The suggestion of one, filed away before it fully formed. “I’ve had a stranger.”

I picked up the menu because it gave my hands something to do, and I stared at the appetizers without reading them, and I thought, you’re going to get through this dinner, you’re going to be polite and finish your food and call your mother on the way home and have a very long conversation about appropriate revenge on sons of her friends.

The restaurant door opened.

I didn’t look up. There was no reason to look up.

Except the sound of that laugh cut straight through the room, that specific, carrying laugh I’d heard across a hundred work events and Sunday mornings, and my body knew it before my brain confirmed it.

I looked up.

Ryan.

He was with four people from the office, loosening his jacket, already scanning for a table with the comfortable ownership of someone who frequented this place. His eyes swept the room the way they always did, checking who was watching, cataloguing.

They landed on me.

I watched his expression move through surprise to confusion to something sharper and less readable. His gaze shifted to the man across from me.

I saw the exact moment he understood who he was looking at.

His jaw didn’t drop. Ryan was too composed for that. But his shoulders did something, a barely-there pull, like a string had gone taut somewhere behind his sternum.

I had maybe three seconds before he walked over. I could feel it coming the way you feel the weather.

Without thinking, without deciding, I reached across the table and put my hand over Adrian Cole’s.

He went very still.

His eyes dropped to my hand, then came back up to my face. I held his gaze and hoped he was as good at reading situations as Ryan had always complained he was.

Ryan reached the table.

“Lena.” His voice was all controlled by surprise and careful warmth, the voice he used when he wanted to seem like the reasonable one. “I didn’t know you came here.”

I didn’t answer. I didn’t have to.

Because Adrian Cole, CEO of Cole Industries, a man I had met approximately eight minutes ago, turned to look at Ryan with the calm, complete authority of someone who had never once in his life been caught off guard, and said:

“She’s with me.”

Two words. Delivered the way you’d state a fact to someone who hadn’t asked correctly.

Ryan’s eyes moved from me to Adrian, and something crossed his face that I’d never seen there before. A rearranging. “Mr. Cole.” His voice shifted registers entirely, the easy warmth replaced with something careful and upright. “I didn’t realise. Sorry to interrupt.”

Adrian looked at him with the mild, impersonal attention of a man who had already moved on from the conversation. “Blake.”

He knew the name. Of course he did. Whether he’d connected it to me yet I couldn’t tell, his face gave me nothing, but it didn’t matter. Ryan had heard his name in that voice, in that context, with my hand visible on the table between us, and the colour in his face said everything the rest of him was working hard to hide.

Ryan said something about not wanting to interrupt, smiled the smile he used on people he needed to impress, and walked away. I watched him go back to his table and sit down with his back slightly too straight.

The silence at our table lasted exactly long enough to be significant.

Adrian looked down at my hand, still resting over his, and then back up at my face, and said nothing.

I pulled my hand back. Folded both in my lap. “Thank you,” I said, quietly.

“Don’t mention it.” He reached for his water glass, unhurried, like the last sixty seconds had been unremarkable. “Someone you know?”

“My ex.” The word sat flat on the table between us. “We broke up three days ago.”

A pause. Nothing dramatic, just a beat of recalibration. “And he works in finance.”

“He works for you, actually.” I watched his face. “Ryan Blake. He’s in your acquisitions team.”

Something moved behind his eyes. Brief, contained. “I see.”

“You didn’t know.”

“I know the name. I didn’t know the connection to you.” He set down the glass. “Patricia didn’t mention it.”

“No,” I said. “She really didn’t.”

We looked at each other across the table, two people inside a coincidence that was becoming less comfortable the longer we sat in it, and I felt the specific absurdity of the evening settle over me fully. Ryan was twenty feet away. He was watching, I could feel it without looking, that particular weight of someone’s attention on the side of your face.

Something was assembling itself in my head. A thought I hadn’t decided to have yet.

“Mr. Cole,” I said.

“Adrian.”

“Adrian.” I kept my voice low and even. “I know this is a strange thing to say to someone I met nine minutes ago, but I think we might be able to help each other.”

He didn’t lean forward. Didn’t react with anything I could name. Just looked at me with that thorough, unhurried attention and said, “Go on.”

I glanced once toward Ryan’s table. He was pretending to look at the menu and failing.

I looked back at Adrian Cole and said, “What if we made this look real?”