SEDUCING MY BESTFRIEND'S BROTHER

Chapter 13

November arrived the way it always did in New York — without apology.

One morning the air was crisp and manageable and the trees along Court Street still held their color, and the next morning you stepped outside and the wind had a different quality to it entirely, something serious and committed, and the city had shifted into its winter register without asking anyone's permission.

I had always loved November in Brooklyn.

I loved the way the light changed — lower and more golden, arriving at angles that made ordinary streets look considered, like someone had adjusted the contrast on the whole borough. I loved the way the bakery felt in November, warmer by comparison to outside, the smell of spiced things carrying further in cold air, the way customers came in slightly windswept and left looking restored. November was good for business. It was good for baking. It was good for the particular kind of interior life that required darkness and warmth in equal measure.

It was less good for waiting.

And I was, I had come to understand in the two weeks since the Halloween dinner, waiting. Not passively — I was not a passive person and waiting was not something I did naturally or well. But waiting nonetheless. Waiting for Marcus to do something with what I had given him. Waiting for the situation to declare itself. Waiting for the next thing, whatever it was, to arrive.

It was, objectively, the least comfortable position I had occupied in recent memory.

Renee noticed on the first Wednesday of November.

We were doing the books — the actual paper ledger Renee insisted on keeping alongside the digital records, a habit she'd inherited from her grandmother and refused to abandon on the grounds that computers were only as reliable as the people who used them, which was fair. We were at the small desk in the back office, Renee with her reading glasses on, me with a coffee going cold beside me, and I had been looking at the same column of numbers for four minutes without processing any of them.

"You're stuck," Renee said, without looking up from the ledger.

"I'm thinking."

"You're stuck and calling it thinking." She turned a page. "What's happening?"

"Nothing. That's the problem." I set down my pen. "He pulled back after Monday. The Halloween dinner he stayed close to Isabelle all night. He hasn't been to the bakery. He hasn't texted." I looked at the wall. "I told him the truth and he said okay and then he went quiet."

"That sounds like a man making a decision."

"I know what it sounds like." I picked the pen back up. "I just don't know yet what decision."

Renee took her glasses off and looked at me properly. "Ava. What do you actually want to happen here?"

I had asked myself this question every morning for two weeks. I had given myself honest answers, less comfortable answers, the full range. "I want him to feel what I feel. I want him to be honest about it. I want —" I stopped. "I want him to stop pretending that the thing between us doesn't exist."

"And Isabelle?"

The name landed the way it always landed. With weight.

"I don't want to hurt Isabelle," I said, and meant it completely. "I have never wanted that. But I also —" I stopped again. "I can't make myself not feel this, Renee. I have tried. Four years is a very thorough attempt."

She was quiet for a moment. Then: "The West Village location permit came through this morning."

I looked at her. "What?"

"The permit." She put her glasses back on and turned another page. "The one we've been waiting three months for. It came through this morning. I've been waiting to tell you at the right moment." She glanced up over her glasses. "You should be excited about that."

I stared at her. And then, slowly, something shifted — the tight coiled thing in my chest loosening slightly around the edges.

"We got the permit," I said.

"We got the permit."

I looked at the ledger, at the numbers that had been blurring for the past four minutes, and saw them clearly now — what they meant, what the West Village location meant, what we had been building toward for a year and were now going to actually build.

"Renee."

"I know."

"We got the permit."

"I know." She was smiling now, the rare full version. "So maybe spend some of this week's emotional energy on that, because we have approximately nine hundred decisions to make before January."

I laughed — genuinely, the kind that came from somewhere uncomplicated — and reached across the desk and hugged her, which she accepted with the slightly stiff grace of someone who found spontaneous physical affection moderately startling but had learned over seven years to receive it without complaint.

The permit changed the shape of the month.

There was suddenly an enormous amount to do — contractors to meet, suppliers to contact, a layout to finalise, a timeline to build from scratch. Renee and I spent three evenings that week at the West Village space, a narrow storefront on a quiet block off Bleecker Street with good bones and terrible lighting fixtures and a back room that could, with work, become a proper events space.

I loved it immediately.

The work was the kind I was built for — physical and logistical and creative all at once, requiring the part of my brain that ran best when it had a concrete problem and a deadline and the latitude to solve it in its own way. I came home from the West Village site those evenings tired in the good way, the productive way, the way that made sleep feel earned.

It didn't stop me thinking about Marcus.

But it gave the thinking company, which made it more manageable.

He texted on a Friday.

I was at the Cobble Hill bakery, midmorning, going over the contractor quotes for the West Village buildout, when my phone lit up on the counter.

Marcus: I owe you a proper response. Can we talk?

I looked at the message for a moment. Set it face down. Picked it back up.

Ava: Yes. When?

Marcus: This weekend. Saturday, if you're free. I can come to Cobble Hill.

Ava: I'm at the bakery Saturday morning until noon. After that I'm free.

A pause. Then:

Marcus: I'll come to the bakery. Eleven.

I set the phone down and went back to the contractor quotes and read the same line four times before accepting that concentration was going to be a limited resource for the rest of the morning.

Renee came out of the kitchen an hour later, looked at my face, and said, "What happened?"

"He texted. He's coming Saturday. He says he owes me a proper response."

She set down the tray she was carrying. "How do you feel about that?"

I thought about it honestly. The honest answer was layered — anticipation and anxiety and something underneath both that was quieter and more serious, the feeling of a person who had made a decision and set something in motion and was now watching it arrive.

"Like someone who threw a stone into water," I said, "and is standing at the edge watching the rings move out."

Renee picked the tray back up. "Just remember," she said, heading back to the kitchen, "that stones don't come back out of water."

"I know," I said.

"And the water changes."

"I know, Renee."

She disappeared into the kitchen.

I looked at my phone. At the message sitting on the screen, plain and loaded and pointing toward Saturday like a compass finding north.

Outside the November wind moved along Court Street, stripping the last leaves from the trees, the city settling into the serious part of the season.

I thought about stones and water.

About things that didn't come back.

About standing at the edge anyway and throwing.

Then I picked up the contractor quote and made myself read it properly, because the West Village location wasn't going to build itself and Saturday was still two days away and I had spent four years being the kind of woman who kept working even when everything else was uncertain.

I was not going to stop now.