The-School-Event

# Chapter Thirteen: The School Event

The invitation arrived on a Tuesday, tucked into Sadie's backpack and handed to Julian with the solemn ceremony of a state document: **Maple Street Academy Family Reading Night, Friday at 6pm, parents and guardians encouraged to attend.**

"I usually just go alone," Julian said, studying the paper like it might contain a hidden clause. "Renata works Fridays. It's — it's not usually a two-person job."

"Do you want it to be, this time?" Ivy asked, careful not to make it sound like more than it was, though some part of her had already started rearranging her schedule at the restaurant before he'd even answered.

"I think Sadie would like it," Julian said, which Ivy understood, by now, was as close as he came to admitting he wanted something for himself too.

Maple Street Academy turned out to be a converted brownstone in Brooklyn Heights, gymnasium repurposed for the evening into a maze of small tables covered in construction-paper book reports, parents and guardians clustered in clumps making the particular small talk of people who saw each other twice a year at exactly these kinds of events and had run out of things to discuss beyond the weather and the school's parking situation.

Sadie found them the moment they walked in, practically vibrating with excitement, and towed them both by the hand toward her table, where a diorama of *Charlotte's Web* sat proudly beside a stack of index cards covered in handwriting that alternated between careful and increasingly hurried, the visible evidence of a homework assignment finished with growing impatience.

"This is my book report," she announced. "Uncle Julian helped me with the pig. Ivy, this is Mrs. Alvarez, she's my teacher, she's really strict but she likes me best, don't tell the other kids."

"I heard that," said a woman approaching from behind them, warm and clearly amused, extending a hand first to Ivy and then to Julian. "Mr. Cade. Good to see you again. And you must be — " she glanced, not unkindly, between the three of them, sorting out a family configuration that clearly didn't fit any of the standard boxes on a school form, "— Mrs. Cade?"

Ivy felt the word land strangely, a title she hadn't fully worn out loud yet, technically true and somehow still surreal every time someone else said it.

"Ivy," she said, shaking the woman's hand. "It's nice to meet you. Sadie's told me a lot."

"All good things, I hope," Mrs. Alvarez said, though her eyes were already sliding, with obvious curiosity, toward the ring on Ivy's finger and the way Julian had, without either of them quite noticing, drifted close enough that his shoulder brushed hers.

"Mostly," Sadie said, deadpan, and Mrs. Alvarez laughed and moved on to the next table, leaving the three of them alone amid the construction-paper chaos.

The evening unfolded easily, more easily than Ivy had expected — Sadie leading them from table to table, narrating each classmate's project with the running commentary of a small, opinionated tour guide, Julian answering every question put to him by curious parents with a warmth Ivy hadn't fully seen from him outside the penthouse, something looser and more present than the careful stillness of the glass office.

"You're good at this," Ivy said quietly, at one point, watching him crouch down to examine a shoebox diorama with the same serious attention he probably gave a term sheet.

"I've had practice," Julian said. "Three years of these. You get better at it eventually. Or at least better at faking it convincingly."

"I don't think you're faking it."

Something flickered across his face — caught, briefly, the way he'd been caught by the photograph, by the question about noticing her more than he expected to — and he didn't argue the point.

It was near the end of the evening, while Sadie had disappeared to compare projects with a friend across the gym, that Ivy found herself standing beside Julian near the refreshment table, the low hum of parent conversation around them, close enough that his hand brushed hers reaching for the same stack of paper cups.

"Thank you for coming tonight," he said, quiet, the words landing with more weight than the sentence should have carried. "I mean that. I know this wasn't in the terms."

"I wanted to." Ivy meant it more than she'd expected to, standing in a school gymnasium surrounded by dioramas and half-eaten cookies, watching a man who negotiated hundred-million-dollar deals look more at ease here, in this small, unglamorous room, than she'd seen him anywhere else. "She's easy to want to be around. So are you, apparently, when you're not being terrifying in a glass office."

"I'm never terrifying."

"You were extremely terrifying the first day I met you."

"That was intentional," Julian admitted, something almost sheepish in it, an expression she'd never once seen on him. "I find it easier to negotiate when people are slightly afraid of me. It saves time."

"Was it working, with me?"

"No," he said, and something in his voice went quieter, more honest. "Not even a little. You sent back a plate of risotto in front of forty finance executives. I don't think you've been afraid of me for one single second since I met you."

Ivy laughed, surprised, and without fully deciding to, reached over and took his hand — not the careful, deliberate hand-holding of the wedding, meant for an audience, but something smaller and more unguarded, an instinct rather than a performance, her fingers threading through his because it felt, in that moment, like the most natural thing in the world.

Julian went very still.

Then, slowly, his hand tightened around hers, and neither of them said anything at all, standing together near a refreshment table covered in juice boxes and construction paper, while across the gym a phone camera flashed — a parent, snapping a group photo of the room for the school's newsletter, catching, without either of them noticing, two figures standing close together near the punch bowl, hands laced, looking, to anyone glancing at the picture later, entirely, unmistakably real.