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The room goes watery. I blink it back, because I am not crying at the Founder's Table on my first official Sunday.

"What am I supposed to carry around now?" I manage.

Danny reaches into his jacket and hands me a paperback. His copy. The one I took home from a chair three weeks ago — the crisp spine broken in now, the corners going soft, and when I open it the receipt is still inside, marking the letter chapter, eight words in handwriting nobody else would recognize.

You were right. It was worth the wait.

"Trade," he says.

"In betting news," Jagger announces, "the pool on Danny publicly claiming her has been settled. The winner called it to the day."

Everyone looks at Theo. Across the room, the human refrigerator inclines his head one inch.

"Theo won his own boss's love-life pool," I say.

"Theo monitors situations," says Caleb, with what I'm almost sure is pride.

"Eleven hundred dollars," Jagger says mournfully. "He's putting it toward a fishing boat. He told Evie. In a full sentence. We're all still recovering."

Lola appears — off the clock, wine-colored dress, holding a glass, which in four years of staff legend has happened exactly never. She looks at the case, at the brass plate, at Danny's hand around mine on the table where every member in the room can see it.

"Take care of him," she says, just to me.

"I'm working on it."

Later, near midnight, Danny pulls me out of the booth and across the floor and we stand in front of the wall — the crystal, the light, the wrecked little paperback with my name in brass underneath it.

"There's room on the plate," he says, "for the name to be redone. Eventually. If it changed."

I turn and stare at him. "Danny Sterling. Was that a—"

"I’m just saying, it can be changed.”

"It was not—"

"I plan ahead. You know this about me." But his ears are red, and his hand is in his pocket where, there is either a box or he’s very happy to see me.

I take his hand out of his pocket — empty, for now — and lace my fingers through his.

He kisses me, deeply. Matteo looks up and Jagger whistles from the booth, and behind the bar a ruined copy of Persuasion stands in the light between the crystal, in a club with no sign on the door, in a building where, what feels like a lifetime ago, a girl with thirty-seven dollars and a hole in her sweater spilled a drink on the most terrifying man in Manhattan.

Best thing I ever ruined.

THE END