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She should have said no, should have pointed out that it was two in the morning and teaching ganache technique to a man who measured his life in basis points was the least productive use of her time. Instead she took the bowl from his hands, poured warm cream over tempered chocolate, and handed him the spatula.

“Wrist, not elbow. You’re folding air in, not stirring it out. Start at the center and pull toward you in a single motion.”

He tried. The first fold was too stiff and too controlled, the gesture of someone who approached everything as a problem to solve. She reached over and adjusted his grip on the spatula, her fingers closing briefly over his. His hand stopped moving under hers.

“Lighter,” she said. “You’re not signing a contract. You’re persuading the chocolate to cooperate.”

“I don’t persuade. I negotiate.”

“Then negotiate.”

He tried again, and this time the fold was smoother, the chocolate ribboning into the cream with something approaching grace. Knox watched the mixture with the concentration of a student encountering a discipline that didn’t respond to logic, and Lucy watched Knox, and the two of them stood at the counter with her hand near his and the bowl between them and a silence that had stopped being empty.

“You should go,” she said again. Softer this time.

“I should,” he said. He stood. He came closer, close enough that she could feel the warmth off his forearm.

He didn’t kiss her. He stood there, and she sat on the counter, and the kitchen held them both in its warm, flour-dusted quiet, and the not-kissing was louder than anything either of them had said all night.

“Goodnight, Lucy.” He walked to the door.

“Goodnight, Knox.”

He paused at the door. “The ganache. The salt was the right call.”

“I know.”

“And Lucy.”

“What?”

“Your parents’ restaurant wasn’t a line item. I don’t know who did that to them, but no spreadsheet is worth a family’s life. Anyone who thinks otherwise doesn’t understand what numbers are supposed to protect.”

He said it quietly, without emphasis, as he said everything that mattered. Then he let himself out. She heard the lock click, the door close, his footsteps fading on the sidewalk. Then nothing.

Lucy pressed her fingertips to her lips. They tasted like chocolate and salt. She powered down the equipment one piece at a time: the ovens, then the hood, then the warmer, killed the overhead lights, and climbed the narrow stairs to her apartment.

Upstairs, she did not sleep. She lay in the dark and listened to the building tick and thought about the warmth that had come off his forearm, and at some point the thinking got loud enough that she gave up on the bed. She went back down. The kitchen was still warm. She pulled out the madeleine pan she almost never used, the one shaped like little shells, and made a batch from scratch, brown butter and lemon zest. She told herself it was about using the leftover egg whites. She ate one standing at the counter at three in the morning and did not believe herself.

Chapter 9

KNOX

Knox arrived at Oath Capital at seven fifteen, which was late for him by forty-five minutes and which Gabriel noticed immediately.

“Rough night?”

“I went for a walk.”

“You don’t walk.” Gabriel set a coffee on Knox’s desk. It was from the Italian place around the corner, not Ronan’s machine, which meant Gabriel had either taken pity on Knox’s taste buds or was softening him up for a conversation Knox didn’t want to have. “Where did you walk?”

“Park Slope.”

Gabriel’s eyebrows rose. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to. The geography spoke for itself.

Knox opened his laptop. The screen was still on the term sheet he’d been pretending to read yesterday when Lucy stormed his office. Twenty-one hours later, the numbers still refused to resolve. He closed the file and opened the next one.

“She told me about her parents,” Knox said. He hadn’t planned to say it.