Chapter Two: The Morning After Everything

Natasha's POV

The apartment smelled like coffee when I let myself in, which was somehow worse than if it had smelled like anything else.

Noel sat at the kitchen island in one of Ethan's t-shirts, spooning yogurt into a bowl like she'd slept the sleep of the righteous. She didn't look up when the door clicked shut behind me.

"You're up early," she said. "Or did you not sleep."

"I'm here for my things." My voice came out steadier than I felt, which I counted as a small, private victory.

"Boxes are already by the door." She said it like she was doing me a favor. Maybe, in whatever version of fairness Noel operated on, she was. "I packed them myself. Didn't want you lingering."

I looked — three boxes, taped shut, my handwriting nowhere on them. She'd packed my whole life into cardboard before I'd even asked her to.

"That's efficient of you," I said. "Considering you were busy last night."

Noel finally looked up. No flush of shame crossed her face. Just mild interest, like I'd said something in a language she was fluent in but rarely bothered using. "You want me to apologize."

"I want you to explain to me what I ever did to you."

She set the spoon down. For one second — one — something moved behind her eyes that wasn't cruelty. It looked almost like exhaustion.

"You always had everything, Tasha." Her voice dropped the performance, just for a breath. "Mom's soft eyes when she looked at you. The friends who stayed. The fiancé who — for three years — actually believed you were the good one." She picked the spoon back up, and whatever had cracked open sealed itself shut again. "I didn't take Ethan from you. I just took my turn at having something first."

"That's not how turns work, Noel. That's not how any of this works."

"It worked out fine for me," she said, and went back to her yogurt.

I didn't answer her. I picked up the first box, and then the second, and left the third for a trip I wasn't sure I'd make. Some things weren't worth the second elevator ride.

I went to work anyway.

That was the part nobody warned you about grief — that the world kept expecting invoices and floral orders and confirmed guest counts regardless of whose bed your fiancé had been in the night before. I'd built Bloom & Co.'s events division from nothing but a laptop and a stubborn refusal to be told no by rich people who assumed a soft voice meant a small spine. Three years in, clients requested me by name. They just never remembered what I looked like afterward — which, I'd learned, was its own kind of professional advantage. People underestimated the woman who showed up quiet and plainly dressed, right up until she produced a wedding for four hundred guests without a single vendor missing a cue.

I was twenty-two, unglamorous in the way that made people trust me faster than they trusted Noel, and entirely unused to being looked at twice. It worked in my favor more often than it didn't. Nobody suspects competence from a woman they've already decided to overlook.

My phone rang before I'd made it to my desk.

"Natasha, sweetheart." My mother's voice, thinner than it used to be. "Don't fuss, I'm only calling to say the doctor moved my appointment—"

"Which doctor, Mom?"

"It's nothing urgent." It was not nothing. I'd seen the last billing statement, the number circled twice in her careful handwriting, the balance in my own account shrinking by exactly that amount every month since. I didn't say any of that out loud. She had enough weighing on her without carrying my math too.

"I'll call the office," I said instead. "Don't worry about the cost."

I hung up before she could ask how, because I genuinely didn't know yet.

My boss, Diane, was waiting at my desk when I got there, practically vibrating.

"Don't take your coat off," she said. "I'm giving you the Stone-Harrington wedding."

I blinked. Stone-Harrington was the wedding — the one every planner in the city had been circling for a month, whispered about in the break room like a lottery ticket nobody expected to actually win. "Diane, that's the biggest contract of the season."

"Which is why I'm giving it to you and not Priya, who'd have a breakdown by Thursday." She dropped a folder on my desk, already halfway back to her office. "Client's difficult. Groom's team, not much time — six days, if you can believe it — but the budget has no ceiling, and if we land this, we're not chasing corporate clients for the next two years. Read the file. Call me in an hour."

I sat down, opened my coffee, and flipped the folder open on autopilot — the way you do a hundred small tasks after your entire life falls apart, because your hands haven't gotten the memo that the rest of you is in pieces.

Client: Ace Stone — Stone Industries.

The name meant nothing to me. I'd never once heard it, in the way you never hear the names of people who exist several tax brackets above the version of the city you actually live in.

I turned the page for the contact photo, mostly out of habit, mostly not looking.

And then I was looking. Hard. My coffee cup stopped halfway to my mouth.

Dark hair. A jaw that didn't apologize for anything. Eyes I'd stared into three weeks ago at a distance of two inches, in a room I hadn't asked the name of, on a night I'd been trying very hard to forget.

My stranger.

I read the line beneath the photo twice, certain I'd misread it the first time.

Wedding date: six days.

He was getting married. In six days.

And I was the one being paid to build it.