Chapter 3

She arrived on a Friday.

I knew because Jade texted me at 7:43 in the morning with the energy of someone who had been awake since five and had been physically restraining themselves from sending the message sooner.

She's here. Landed at JFK last night. Marcus picked her up. Mom is already obsessed with her. Brunch Sunday at the house — you're coming. Non-negotiable. I need moral support and also someone to help me figure out if I actually like her or if I'm just being a good sister about it.

I read the message standing in my kitchen in my pajamas, coffee mug halfway to my mouth, and stayed very still for a moment.

Then I typed back: I'll be there. What time?

Renee, when I told her at the bakery an hour later, set down the tray she was holding and looked at me with the careful expression of someone deciding how honest to be.

"You're going to go meet the fiancée."

"I'm going to go to brunch at the Calloways'. Which I do regularly. Which is a completely normal thing that I do."

"Ava."

"Renee."

She picked the tray back up. "Just — keep your face neutral when you first see them together. That's the hard part. The first time you see them together."

I had not thought about that. I thought about it now, briefly and unpleasantly, and then put it somewhere I couldn't see it and went back to work.

The Calloway brownstone on the Upper East Side looked the same as it always did on a Sunday morning — warm light in the front windows, the smell of Patricia's coffee drifting out before the door was even fully open, Gerald's voice somewhere in the background reading something aloud to no one in particular.

What was different was the laughter.

I heard it from the front steps. A woman's laugh — easy and full, the kind that didn't perform itself, just happened. And beneath it, lower and briefer, Marcus.

Patricia opened the door and kissed both my cheeks and took the pastry box I'd brought and ushered me inside with the warm efficiency of a woman who considered feeding people an act of love, which she did.

They were in the living room.

Isabelle Ferreira was sitting on the couch with her legs tucked under her, holding a coffee mug in both hands, in the middle of a story that had Jade leaning forward with her elbows on her knees. She was exactly as I had assembled her in my head from Jade's descriptions — dark hair, sharp eyes, the particular composure of someone who argued cases for a living and had learned to own every room she entered. She was wearing a simple cream sweater and no makeup and she looked, effortlessly, like she belonged exactly where she was.

Marcus sat beside her. Close. His arm along the back of the couch, not quite around her shoulders but near enough. He was watching her tell the story with a half-smile I recognised — the private, unguarded version, the one that meant he was genuinely amused and had stopped thinking about how he looked.

I had catalogued that smile carefully over many years. Seeing it directed at someone else was a specific kind of education.

He looked up when I came in.

"Ava." He stood — he always stood, it was one of those instinctive courtesies so deeply embedded it had stopped being deliberate — and there was something briefly, carefully neutral in his expression. "Glad you could make it."

"Wouldn't miss it." I was very pleased with my voice.

Isabelle unfolded from the couch with a smile that reached all the way up. "You must be Ava. Jade talks about you constantly." She extended her hand and her grip was firm and warm. "I've been wanting to meet you."

"Likewise," I said. "Jade's mentioned you too."

"Good things, I hope."

"Exclusively."

She laughed — the same laugh I'd heard from the steps, genuine and unperformed — and gestured at the couch. "Sit. Marcus was just losing an argument about New York pizza and I need an ally."

I looked at Marcus. He raised one eyebrow in the mild, patient way of someone who had not been losing the argument and was content to let the record reflect that.

"What's the argument?" I asked, sitting in the armchair across from them.

"Whether the outer boroughs have better pizza than Manhattan," Isabelle said.

"Outer boroughs," I said immediately. "It's not close."

"Thank you." She pointed at Marcus with her coffee mug. "See?"

"Ava grew up in Brooklyn," Marcus said. "She's constitutionally incapable of a neutral opinion on this."

"There is no neutral opinion," I said. "There's the correct one and there's being wrong."

Jade laughed. Isabelle laughed. Even Marcus smiled — briefly, in my direction, something warm at the edges of it.

I made myself look away at a reasonable speed.

Brunch was two hours long and I spent the majority of it liking Isabelle Ferreira very much against my will.

She was funny in the dry, precise way of someone who had spent years in courtrooms and understood timing. She asked questions and actually listened to the answers. When I talked about the bakery she wanted details — not polite details, real ones, the business structure, the sourcing, how Renee and I had handled the first year when the numbers were terrifying. She had the focused interest of someone who respected work done well.

She touched Marcus's hand twice during the meal. Once when she was making a point and once for no reason — just reached across and rested her fingers over his for a moment, brief and unthinking, the gesture of someone so accustomed to a person's presence that contact had become reflexive.

Both times I was looking at something else.

After brunch, while Patricia and Gerald were in the kitchen and Jade had disappeared upstairs, I found myself briefly alone in the living room while Isabelle took a call in the hallway — work, from the tone, efficient and clipped. Marcus came in from the kitchen with two refilled coffee mugs and stopped when he saw it was just me.

He set one mug on the side table near me anyway and sat in the chair across from mine.

"She's wonderful," I said, before he could say anything.

He looked at me steadily. "She is."

"You seem happy."

Something in his expression shifted, just slightly — the kind of shift you only caught if you had spent years learning someone's face without meaning to. "I am."

I nodded. Held his gaze for exactly the right amount of time. Then I picked up the coffee mug he'd brought me and said, "Good. You deserve that, Marcus."

He watched me for a moment longer than the sentence required.

From the hallway, Isabelle's voice wrapped up the call. Marcus looked toward the door and the moment folded up and put itself away, quiet and unwitnessed.

I drank the coffee he had brought me without being asked and thought about what Renee had said.

Keep your face neutral when you first see them together.

I had. I was certain I had.

What I was less certain about — what I turned over on the subway ride back to Brooklyn, standing with one hand on the overhead rail, the city rushing past the dark windows — was the moment just before he'd looked away.

Whether I had imagined the shift in his expression.

Whether it had been nothing.

Whether nothing was still the word for it.