Priya-Notices

# Chapter Twenty: Priya Notices

The restaurant fell into its usual dinner-rush rhythm around Ivy while her mind stayed twenty blocks away, replaying Marion Halloway's brisk, proprietary walk through the bakery, the words *full asking, no contingencies* looping in a way that made it hard to focus on anything else, even the ticket rail filling up in front of her.

"You're somewhere else tonight," Priya said, sliding past her at the pass with a plate of branzino balanced on one arm. "You've plated the wrong garnish twice. That's not a you thing to do."

"Sorry. I'm distracted."

"Clearly." Priya set the plate down under the heat lamp and studied Ivy with the particular scrutiny of eleven years of friendship, the kind that saw through deflection faster than Ivy could construct it. "Talk to me. What's going on."

Ivy told her, in the fifteen-minute lull between the six-thirty and seven-thirty tables, about the storefront and the ghost menu board and Marion Halloway sweeping in with an offer Ivy couldn't hope to match, and about the way Julian's face had gone carefully calculating at the mention of the name, like he already suspected something Ivy hadn't caught up to yet.

"Well, that sucks," Priya said, when Ivy finished, sympathy plain on her face. "I'm sorry, Ivy. I know how long you've wanted that exact kind of space."

"It's fine. There'll be other spaces."

"Will there?" Priya raised an eyebrow. "Because you've been looking for three years, and that's the first one that made your face do the thing."

"What thing?"

"The thing you're doing right now, thinking about it. The soft thing." Priya went back to plating, unbothered, the way she delivered her most pointed observations. "You know, it's funny — that's the same thing your face does lately when you talk about Julian."

Ivy's hands stilled on the ticket rail. "That's not the same thing at all."

"Isn't it?" Priya glanced over, something knowing and gentle in her expression. "Ivy. I've known you eleven years. I watched you build a wall around your heart so thick after Daniel that I genuinely worried you'd forgotten how to want things, let alone people. And now you talk about a man you married for — whatever reason you still won't fully tell me — and your whole face changes. Softens. The same way it just did talking about a bakery you fell in love with in twenty minutes."

"It's not like that with Julian."

"Ivy." Priya set down her tongs, giving Ivy her full attention now, voice gentler than the kitchen noise around them usually allowed for. "You don't have to tell me the whole story. I've made peace with that, mostly, even if it still worries me some nights. But I need you to actually hear what I'm about to say, because I don't think you're letting yourself hear it from anyone else, including yourself." She held Ivy's gaze steadily. "You're allowed to just say you like him. Whatever contract exists underneath this, whatever complicated thing you two started with — you're allowed to admit, out loud, that somewhere along the way it turned into something real for you. You don't have to keep protecting yourself from that just because it started as something else."

Ivy opened her mouth to deny it — the reflexive denial that had carried her through weeks of exactly this kind of question, from Sadie, from Julian himself, from the quiet corners of her own mind late at night — and found, for the first time, that the words wouldn't come.

"It's complicated," she said instead, quieter than she meant to.

"I know it is." Priya's voice softened further. "I'm not asking you to uncomplicate it for me. I'm asking you to stop pretending, at least to yourself, that it isn't there. That's not the same thing as being reckless, Ivy. It's just being honest about what's actually happening to your own heart, instead of managing it like it's a liability you signed away in a contract."

The kitchen buzzed on around them — a ticket firing, Marco calling out a modification, the ordinary chaos of a Tuesday dinner service — and Ivy stood very still in the middle of it, Priya's words settling into a part of her chest she'd been carefully avoiding for weeks now.

"I like him," she said, finally, quiet, testing the shape of the words out loud for the first time. "More than I meant to. More than the contract accounts for, probably. I don't know what to do with that."

"You don't have to know what to do with it tonight," Priya said, gently, picking her tongs back up as the next ticket printed. "You just have to stop lying to yourself about whether it's there. That's the first part. The rest, you figure out as you go."

Ivy managed a small, unsteady laugh, wiping her hands on her apron, grateful — not for the first time — for a friend who'd never once let her hide from something that mattered, even when hiding would have been so much easier.

"When did you get so wise," she said.

"I've always been this wise," Priya said, deadpan, sliding another plate under the heat lamp. "You've just been too distracted by billionaires and bakeries to notice lately."

Ivy laughed again, real this time, and turned back to the ticket rail, the loss of the Corona storefront still sitting heavy in her chest, but something else sitting there too now, quieter and more dangerous and, for the first time in weeks, no longer something she was actively trying to talk herself out of feeling.

Her phone buzzed in her apron pocket near the end of service — a text from Julian, sent a little after ten p.m., short and characteristically direct.

*Found something on Marion Halloway. We should talk when you're home. It's not good news, but it might be useful news.*

Ivy stared at the message for a long moment, Priya's words still settling somewhere warm and unresolved in her chest, and typed back a single line before pocketing the phone and heading back into the fray of the last table's dessert order.

*On my way soon. Save me some of whatever you're eating for dinner — I'm starving and I trust your taste more than I probably should by now.*