Chapter 4— Luke

**JAPHETH POV**

I spent the rest of the afternoon rereading the same paragraph of the Hughes file four times without absorbing a word of it, because my brain had apparently decided that a supply contract dispute was less urgent than the fact that I was, in approximately six hours, going to sit across a table from the man my best friend was going to marry.

I told myself I wasn’t going to go. I told myself that for about as long as it took Edmund to text me the restaurant’s address, which meant not very long at all, because apparently my sister had gotten involved somewhere in the last four hours without my permission.

**KATE:** Peaches asked me where you’d be tonight. I may have mentioned dinner. Don’t be weird about this, Japheth.

**JAPHETH:** I hate you.

**KATE:** You love me. Wear the navy jacket.

The restaurant was the kind of place I used to take Dana to when I wanted to seem like I had my life together, low lighting, a maître d’ who used my last name like it meant something, a wine list longer than my patience. I was seated before I saw them, which meant I had a full ten seconds to watch Peaches laugh at something before she noticed me, her whole face open in a way it hadn’t been once since I’d walked back into her life.

It wasn’t a way I remembered seeing it aimed at me in years.

The man across from her looked up first. Slim, dark-haired, expensive glasses, a laugh already halfway out of his mouth from whatever she’d just said. He didn’t look like a threat. He looked like someone perfectly at ease being exactly where he was.

He also, I noticed, wasn’t holding her hand. Wasn’t touching her at all, actually, in any of the ways I’d spent the whole drive over bracing myself to watch.

“Japheth!” Peaches stood, and for one absurd second I thought she might actually hug me, before she caught herself and gestured at the man instead. “This is Luke.”

Luke stood, extended a hand, shook mine with a grip that had nothing to prove. “So you’re the infamous Japheth. Jaz talks about you constantly, and not always kindly, for the record.”

*Jaz.* No one called her that. I filed it away, unsure why it bothered me as much as it did.

“All bad, I assume,” I said, sitting.

“Mostly,” Luke said, grinning, “though I did hear you once cried over a dead goldfish you insisted on naming after her, which I found deeply moving.”

“That never happened.”

“It absolutely happened,” Peaches said, not looking up from her menu, fighting a smile.

I studied Luke across the table  the easy way he leaned back in his chair, the way his eyes kept flicking, not toward Peaches with any hunger I recognized, but toward the door, checking it every few minutes like he was waiting on someone else entirely.

“So,” I said, deciding I couldn’t sit through an entire dinner not knowing. “How long have you two been engaged?”

Luke choked on his water.

Peaches went very still, her hand moving instinctively to the ring on her finger  the same one I’d felt under my hand that morning, the one I’d assumed, in the space of half a second, told me everything I needed to know.

“I’m sorry,” Luke said, once he’d recovered, wiping his mouth with his napkin, looking between the two of us like we’d both just told an excellent joke he hadn’t been let in on. “Engaged? To Jasmine?”

“The note on her iPad,” I said, feeling something shift under me that I didn’t have a name for yet. “Dinner with Luke discuss the engagement. And the ring”

“Oh.” Luke’s face changed instantly, all the humor draining out of it, replaced by something careful. He glanced at Peaches, silently asking permission for something.

She gave the smallest nod.

“Japheth,” she said, and her voice had gone quiet in a way I didn’t recognize, nothing like the ice she’d been handing me all day. “This ring isn’t from Luke. It was Oli’s.”

The name meant nothing to me, and everything about her face told me it should have.

“Oli was my fiancé,” she said. “He died six months ago. Leukemia. Luke’s engagement is his own  I’ve been helping him plan it, which is apparently the sentence that set off your entire afternoon.” A ghost of something that might have been a smile, thin and sad, crossed her face. “I never take the ring off. It’s not because I’m engaged to anyone. It’s because it’s the only thing I have left of him.”

I looked at Peaches. She looked back at me, something unreadable moving behind her eyes, and for the first time since I’d walked into that office this morning, I had absolutely no idea what to say.

“I’m so sorry, Peaches. I had no idea.”

“Of course you didn’t.” No anger in it now, just tired. “Why would you? You’ve been building a whole life on the other side of the ocean.”

“You thought I knew and didn’t ask,” I said slowly, understanding arriving a beat too late, the way it always seemed to with us. “That’s why you’ve been like this all day. Not because of the ring. Because you thought I already knew he’d died and just  didn’t care enough to say anything.”

She didn’t answer. She didn’t have to. Her face was already doing it for her.

And that was when I understood exactly how badly I’d read the last twelve hours of my life not just about the ring, but about her, about what four years and one dead fiancé and one very patient roommate had actually done to the girl who used to hit me with sketchpads and cry over stolen drawings. She wasn’t cold. She’d just run out of people who bothered to ask before assuming the worst.

I was apparently one more name on that list. Starting this morning.

“I should go,” she said abruptly, standing, reaching for her coat before either of us could say anything else. “Early morning. Hughes won’t wait for either of us to figure this out.”

“Peaches”

“Don’t.” She said it gently, which somehow made it worse than if she’d snapped. “Not tonight, Japheth. I can’t do four years of this in one dinner.”

Luke watched her go, then turned back to me with an expression that had lost every trace of the easy humor from twenty minutes ago.

“For what it’s worth,” he said, once she was out of earshot, “she hasn’t laughed like that, the way she was laughing when you walked in  in six months. Not once. Not since Oli.”

“I don’t understand what you’re telling me.”

“I’m telling you,” Luke said, signaling for the check, “that you walked in tonight ready to hate whoever she was marrying, and instead you found out the truth is a lot more complicated than that  and a lot more dangerous for you, if you’re smart enough to notice it.”

“Dangerous how?”

Luke smiled, the first real one since Peaches had left the table, and didn’t answer right away. He just reached into his jacket, pulled out his phone, and slid it across the table toward me, screen lit, already open to something.

“Because in about four hours,” he said, “she’s going to get a call from a company in London. And based on the message she showed me an hour before you got here, I don’t think she’s planning on saying no.”

I looked down at the screen.

I stopped breathing.