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“Tomorrow,” she said. It wasn’t a question and her voice didn’t shake. She itemized that as a win.

“Tomorrow evening. I’ll come to the bakery.” He looked at her then, fully. “Everything, Lucy. I promise. I just couldn’t do it before today. He’s my best friend. I had one job left I could still do right.”

She wanted to ask what that meant. She wanted to ask it badly enough that the question got halfway up her throat before her pride caught it. Instead she handed him a plate with a slice of his own best friend’s wedding cake, lemon elderflower, the raspberry line bright in the crumb.

“You’re the best man,” she said. “Eat like one.”

The toasts came at eight. Ronan went first, read three index cards verbatim, including the card that said pause for laughter, and got the biggest laugh of the night. Devney rescued him with a kiss and the microphone passed down the table to Knox.

He stood. He took a folded page from his jacket, looked at it, and returned it to his pocket.

“For those who don’t know me, I’m Knox Knightly. I’ve known Gabriel Sterling for years, and I’ve been his best man for five months, which he describes as an honor, and I describe as a clerical role with a corsage.”

Laughter moved through the garden. Knox waited it out with a flat patience that only made it louder.

“Fifteen years ago, three men signed a document promising we would never do what Gabriel did today. The three of us wrote it. It had numbered clauses.” He paused. “I’d like to report that the document did not survive contact with the women in this garden.”

At the head table, Ronan raised his glass two inches. Devney pulled it back down.

“Eight months ago I stood across Fifth Avenue and watched my best friend hold a cardboard sign while strangers filmed him on their phones. I ran the numbers from the curb, because running numbers is what I do instead of feeling things, and the math said he’d lost everything. His dignity. His privacy. His sense of proportion.” Knox turned to Gabriel. “I’ve audited that math every day since, and tonight I’m filing the correction. You didn’t lose anything on that sidewalk. You set down something heavy and picked up something worth more. Those are different transactions, and it took me until this week to learn the difference.”

Lucy stood very still at the dessert table with a cake server in her hand.

“Gabriel, you taught me that the bravest thing a guarded man can do is stop being afraid. Tessa, you looked at a man holding a cardboard sign and recognized the only sound investment on the street. The rest of us run a long way behind you both. Speaking strictly for myself, I’m trying to close the gap.” He raised his glass. “To the Sterlings.”

The garden stood and drank. Gabriel pulled Knox into the hug of a man who had waited years for it, and over Gabriel’s shoulder, across two hundred guests and a dance floor and the best cake she’d ever made, Knox looked at Lucy.

She looked back. She didn’t smile, because smiling would have finished her. She raised the cake server one inch off the table and watched him receive it like a standing ovation.

He came for her at nine, when the band had slowed and the dance floor had thinned to couples.

“I don’t dance with clients,” Lucy said.

“The contract concluded at cake service. Check the schedule.”

“You wrote the schedule.”

“I write everything. It’s a known flaw.” He held out his hand, palm up, and there was nothing flat or guarded in his face at all anymore. “One song, Lucy. I’m not asking for more than that tonight. I haven’t earned more than that.”

She put her hand in his. It was a terrible idea, and she’d already filed it under things that were happening anyway.

He danced like a man following instructions, a half-beat behind the music, his hand flat at her back, counting under his breath. He stepped on her foot in the first few bars and apologized like he’d made a math error.

“Your rhythm is under review,” she said.

“That’s fair.”

“Your hand is fine where it is.”

“Noted.”

She let herself land against his shoulder for the length of the bridge, eight bars, no more, and felt him stop breathing and start again. Up close, he smelled like cedar and warm cotton, and his heart was going like a man running, and whatever lived in the space between them was so plainly still alive that it made the silence around it worse. He’d held her like this and stayed away for three days. Both of those were true. Tomorrow she’d find out why.

The song ended. They stepped apart on the beat like professionals.

“Tomorrow evening,” he said.

“Yes,” she said and walked back to her table before either of them said something that they couldn’t take back.