Page 12 of The Agent’s Curvy Seduction

She throws a piece of bread crust at me. I catch it out of the air without looking, which only makes her narrow her eyes further, like I've cheated somehow.

"Fine," she says. "What did twenty-five-year-old Hudson want? Before all this. Before you turned into a man who apparently thinks silence and competence are a personality."

Nobody's asked me that in longer than I want to admit. I turn it over for a second, surprised by how far back I have to reach.

"I wanted to build things," I say finally. "Actual things. Houses, furniture. My grandfather had a shop in his garage, built half the furniture in his house with his own hands. I used to think I'd do that. Work with wood instead of case files."

"So what happened?"

"The Bureau happened. I was good at the other thing. Good enough that it stopped feeling like a choice." I shrug, because it's the truth and it doesn't need dressing up. "I still think about it sometimes. There's a table saw in the shed I haven't touched in six years."

"You have a shed with a table saw and you've never once mentioned it." She looks genuinely offended. "What else are you hiding out there? A pottery wheel? A secret garden?"

"Just the saw. And some very expensive dust."

That gets a real laugh out of her, the kind that makes her shoulders drop, and something in my chest loosens at the sound of it.

"Your turn," I say. "What did twenty-year-old Willow want? Before."

She goes quiet for a second, but it's not the heavy kind of quiet. She's thinking, turning something private over before she decides to hand it to me.

"I wanted to open a bakery," she says. "A real one. Not big. Just mine. I used to draw the sign in the margins of my notebooks in college like an idiot. I had names picked out. Terrible names."

"Worse than what you're about to tell me?"

"Flour Power." She says it completely straight-faced. "I was very proud of that one at nineteen."

"That's genuinely horrifying."

"I had a whole logo sketched. A wheat stalk wearing sunglasses."

"Please tell me that's not real."

"It's extremely real and I stand by it." She's laughing again, and I find myself grinning back at her without meaning to, caught somewhere between amused and wrecked by how easy this is. "I wanted normal things, Hudson. A shop with a bell on the door. A dog. I wanted to date terrible men in my early twenties and have humiliating stories to tell about it later. I wanted Tommy to bring his awful girlfriends home so I could give him a hard time the way he gave me a hard time."

The way she says her brother's name doesn't crack the way it used to. There's still weight in it, but it's steadier now, like something she's learning to carry instead of something that keeps ambushing her.

"He used to steal the good chocolate chips before I could put them in the batter," she says. "Every single time. I'd measure them out and turn around for two seconds and half of them would be gone. He'd have this look on his face like he had no idea what I was talking about, chocolate literally on his teeth."

"Sounds like a menace."

"He was the best person I knew." She says it simply, without the tremor I'm braced for. "I used to think I'd bake at his wedding someday. Make something ridiculous and three-tiered and probably lopsided."

I don't offer her sympathy. I don't think she wants it, not in this particular moment, sitting across from me with flour still on her memory instead of on her hands. So instead I just say, "Flour Power would've made a hell of a wedding cake."

She kicks me under the table, but she's smiling when she does it.

"You're supposed to feel bad for me right now," she says.

"I feel plenty. I'm just not going to pretend the name was good."

"You're insufferable."

"You like it."

"Unfortunately." She exhales, and something in her posture settles, like she's set the weight down somewhere safe for the night instead of carrying it back to bed with her. "Twenty-year-old me would be extremely confused by all of this, you know. The cabin. The gun on the counter. You."

"What would she think of me?"