SEDUCING MY BESTFRIEND'S BROTHER

Chapter 7

The first thing I changed was the Thursday routine.

Not dramatically. I didn't reinvent myself overnight or arrive at the bakery in something that would have made Renee raise both eyebrows and ask questions I wasn't ready to answer. That was not the kind of woman I was and it was not the kind of move I was making. What I did was smaller and, I had decided, more effective.

I stopped making it easy for Marcus to categorise me.

The Thursday before, I had been behind the counter in my standard bakery uniform — dark jeans, white button-down under my apron, hair pulled back because hair near food was a professional liability. Practical. Efficient. The visual equivalent of a sentence that ended with a period.

This Thursday I wore a deep green wrap dress under my apron, kept my hair down, and put on the small gold earrings that Jade had given me two birthdays ago and that I usually saved for evenings. I looked, Renee said when she arrived at six, like myself but turned up slightly.

"Like a radio finding a clearer signal," she said, head tilted.

"That's either a compliment or very strange."

"Both." She poured her coffee. "He's going to notice."

"That's the intention."

She said nothing further. This was, I was learning, Renee's version of support — not enthusiasm, not warnings, just the steady acknowledgment that I had made my choice and she was going to stand close enough to catch me if required.

He came in at nine fifty-two.

I was at the counter when the bell chimed, writing the day's specials on the small chalkboard we kept near the register. I heard the door, heard his footsteps on the hardwood — a sound I had apparently memorised without any conscious instruction to do so — and finished the word I was writing before I looked up.

He was already looking at me.

Not in the way that required analysis — not the brief, polite glance of someone clocking the room. He was standing just inside the door and his eyes were on me with an attention that lasted a full second longer than casual before he moved to the counter.

"Morning," he said.

"Morning." I set the chalk down. "The usual?"

"Please."

I turned to the case. I was aware, with the particular awareness of someone who had decided to pay attention, of the quality of his stillness behind me — the way he leaned against the counter, unhurried, while I plated the tart and poured the coffee. When I turned back his gaze moved up from somewhere it had no professional business being, smooth and unhurried, and settled on my face.

If he was embarrassed about it he didn't show it.

"New dress," he said.

"I own other clothes, Marcus."

"I know." A slight pause. "It suits you."

I set his plate and mug on the counter and met his eyes directly. "Thank you."

Neither of us elaborated. He took his plate to the window table. I went back to the chalkboard.

The signal, I noted, had been received.

That week I said yes to things I would previously have found reasons to decline.

Patricia Calloway called Tuesday to invite me to a small dinner party she was hosting Friday — just family, she said, and Isabelle, and a couple of Gerald's colleagues. The old Ava would have pled a prior commitment. The prior commitment would have been fabricated. I would have spent Friday evening at the bakery developing something new and telling myself I was being sensible.

"I'd love to come," I said.

Patricia was delighted. She always was when I said yes to things, which was its own kind of information about how often I had been saying no.

I arrived at the Upper East Side brownstone at seven with wine and a box of the new honey black pepper chocolate tarts, which Patricia received with the enthusiasm she gave to all homemade things arriving at her door. The house was warm and full of the good noise of a Friday evening — Gerald holding court near the fireplace with his colleagues, Jade in the kitchen stealing appetisers, Isabelle at the kitchen island with a glass of white wine talking to Patricia with the ease of a woman who had decided this was her family now and had proceeded accordingly.

Marcus was in the living room.

He saw me come in. He was mid-conversation with one of Gerald's colleagues — a tall man in his sixties who was saying something about the market — and he didn't stop the conversation but his eyes tracked me across the room with an attention he didn't bother to conceal, which was new.

I smiled at him briefly, the way you smiled at someone you were simply glad to see, and went to find Jade.

Dinner was ten people around the Calloway dining table, which meant the seating was less predictable than a family dinner. Patricia had arranged it herself, place cards in her neat looping handwriting, and I found mine between Gerald's colleague — a pleasant man named Arthur who had strong opinions about the Hudson Valley — and, across the table, Marcus.

Isabelle was three seats down, between Jade and Arthur's wife.

I unfolded my napkin and told myself this was coincidence. Patricia had no agenda beyond feeding people well and making sure conversations flowed. There was no significance to the seating.

This was probably true.

What was also true was that across ten people and two candelabras and a very good roast chicken, Marcus and I talked more directly than we had talked at any previous family dinner. Not exclusively — the table conversation moved the way it always did, fluid and overlapping — but there were moments, four or five of them, where a comment from one side of the table met a response from the other and the rest of the dinner receded slightly.

He disagreed with me about something — a restaurant that had recently opened in the West Village, which he had tried and found overrated and which I had tried and found quietly excellent — and the disagreement had the particular quality of two people who were actually interested in each other's reasoning rather than just waiting for their turn to speak. He made a point. I countered it. He listened to the counter, considered it genuinely, and revised his position by about thirty percent, which he acknowledged without apparent discomfort.

I found this almost more attractive than anything else that had happened all evening.

Isabelle, from three seats down, watched the exchange with an expression I caught only briefly — something small and careful moving behind her composed features before her attention returned to Jade.

After dinner, while the table was being cleared, I helped Patricia carry dishes to the kitchen. On my second trip I passed Marcus in the hallway.

He was alone, coming from the direction of the study with his phone in his hand, and we almost collided at the turn — close enough that I put a hand out instinctively and it landed on his forearm.

We both stopped.

His arm was warm beneath my hand. I was aware of this with a precision that was frankly inconvenient.

"Sorry," I said, removing my hand.

"Don't be." His voice was quiet. He glanced toward the kitchen, toward the dining room, then back at me. "The tarts were exceptional, by the way. The black pepper."

"You tried them."

"I had three." Something briefly warm in his expression. "The sting at the end. That was intentional?"

I looked at him. "Everything is intentional, Marcus."

The hallway was narrow and dim and the noise of the party was a comfortable distance away. He held my gaze for a moment that stretched past the point where it was about tarts.

Then Gerald's voice called from the dining room and the moment released and Marcus stepped back.

"Goodnight, Ava," he said, his voice even.

"Goodnight," I said.

I carried the dishes to the kitchen, set them in the sink, and stood for a moment with my hands under the cold tap.

Patricia came in behind me, touched my shoulder briefly and warmly, and handed me a dish towel.

I dried my hands.

In the dining room I could hear Jade laughing, and Isabelle's voice joining hers, and the ordinary music of people at the end of a good evening.

I thought about the tarts. The sting at the end.

Everything is intentional.

I hadn't planned to say it quite that clearly.

But then, that was the point.