SEDUCING MY BESTFRIEND'S BROTHER

Chapter 5

He came back on Thursday.

I had told myself, in the intervening two days, that he probably wouldn't. That Thursday had been one of those casually spoken words that people said without full intention, a social reflex rather than a commitment. People said let's catch up soon and we should do dinner sometime and come back Thursday and meant approximately nothing by any of it. This was normal. This was how language worked in the context of low-stakes social interaction.

By Wednesday evening I had made three test batches of the brown butter pecan tart.

Renee, who had eaten a slice of each without comment, finally said, on the third batch, "They were perfect the first time."

"The caramelisation on the second one was uneven."

"Ava. They were all perfect."

"The salt balance on the third is better."

She put down her fork and looked at me. "He said he was coming back Thursday."

"He said he'd try the tart."

"Right." She pushed the plate away. "I'm going home. Try to sleep."

I slept fine. This was a lie I told myself so convincingly that I almost believed it.

He arrived at 9:40, later than Tuesday, which meant the morning rush had fully cleared and the bakery held only two customers — a regular named Dorothy who came every Thursday for a blueberry scone and stayed for forty minutes reading her k****e, and a college student with headphones who had been nursing an Americano at the corner table since eight-thirty.

Marcus came in without the coat this time. Dark sweater, dark jeans, the kind of effortlessly put-together that suggested he'd stopped thinking about it years ago and his instincts had simply taken over. He looked rested. He looked, as he always looked, like someone who had decided the world would wait for him and had been proven right often enough to stop questioning it.

He looked at me when he came through the door.

"You came back," I said, which was a stupid thing to say and I said it anyway.

"I said I would." He came to the counter, glanced at the case. "Is it ready?"

I plated the tart — third batch, better salt balance — and coffee, and this time I didn't wait to be asked. I came around the counter and sat across from him at the window table because the bakery was quiet and Dorothy was absorbed in her k****e and there was no reasonable professional justification for remaining behind the counter.

He tasted the tart.

I watched his face with the focused attention of someone who had made the thing and also, less professionally, the attention of someone cataloguing an expression they wanted to keep.

"Well?" I said.

"Give me a moment." He took another bite, deliberate, the way he did everything. Set the fork down. Looked at me. "What's in it that's different from Tuesday's?"

"You had Tuesday's."

"You left one on the counter when you went to the back. I tried a piece." A slight lift at the corner of his mouth. "Don't be offended. It was excellent. This one is better."

I was unreasonably pleased. "Brown butter ratio. And I adjusted the salt."

"The salt makes it." He picked up the fork again. "You should put it on the menu."

"It's been on the menu since this morning."

He shook his head, something warm moving through his expression. "You already knew it was good."

"I always know when something is good. I just like a second opinion."

"Do you usually care about second opinions?"

"Not usually," I said. "No."

He held my gaze for a moment, and the sentence sat between us doing something it probably shouldn't have been doing for a sentence about baked goods.

We talked for forty minutes.

This was longer than Tuesday, longer than was strictly necessary, and neither of us mentioned it. We talked about his new consulting firm, a boutique operation downtown that had been courting him since before he'd left London, three partners and a small team and the kind of work that suited the way his mind operated — complex, high-stakes, requiring the sort of focused patience that most people found exhausting and Marcus found, as far as I could tell, simply natural.

He asked about Renee and I told him about the year we'd almost lost the bakery — the bank loan that fell through, the two months of sleeping badly, the second lender who had come through at the last possible hour. He listened the way he listened, fully and without interruption, and when I finished he said, "That's when you added the second display case."

I stared at him. "How do you know about the second display case?"

"Jade mentioned it. She was worried about you." A pause. "I asked her how you were doing."

"When?"

"About three years ago." He said it simply, without apparent significance, and picked up his coffee.

I looked at him for a moment longer than I should have.

Three years ago, Marcus had been in London. He had been building his career and his life and, evidently, a relationship with Isabelle Ferreira that had ended in a December proposal. He had been doing all of that and had, at some point, asked his sister how I was doing.

I filed this away in the careful, organised part of myself that catalogued things I didn't yet know what to do with.

"And what did Jade tell you?" I asked, keeping my voice light.

"That you were fine. That you were always fine." Something briefly unreadable in his expression. "That you were the most self-sufficient person she had ever met, which she said with admiration and also slight exasperation."

I laughed, genuinely. "That sounds like Jade."

"It does." He smiled — the full one, briefly, the devastating one I had been collecting evidence of since I was twenty-three — and then it settled back into the quieter version. "She was right though. You always seemed — settled. Like you'd figured something out that most people were still looking for."

"I'm very good at seeming settled," I said.

He tilted his head. "Is that different from being settled?"

The question landed with a precision I hadn't entirely prepared for.

Outside the window, a yellow cab stopped at the light. Dorothy turned a page. The college student packed up his laptop and left, the bell above the door chiming his exit into the quiet morning.

"Sometimes," I said carefully. "Depending on the subject."

Marcus looked at me steadily. In the morning light his gray eyes were very clear, the kind of clear that made it difficult to hold his gaze and equally difficult to look away.

"What subjects?" he asked, quietly.

I became aware, in the particular way you became aware of things when it was too late to do anything sensible about them, that this conversation had traveled a significant distance from brown butter pecan tarts without either of us appearing to move.

I looked at the window. Looked back.

"The ones I've been careful about," I said.

He was quiet for a long moment. Then he nodded, very slightly, as if something had been confirmed rather than introduced.

He finished his coffee. He stood, put on his jacket, left a bill on the table that was more than the tart and coffee combined and deflected my objection with a look that didn't invite argument.

At the door he paused, hand on the frame, and turned back.

"Ava."

"Marcus."

He seemed to consider something, briefly. Then: "The tart should be the signature item. Front of the case, center position."

I crossed my arms. "It already is."

Something moved through his expression — warm and private and quickly contained. "Of course it is," he said.

And then he was gone.

I stood in the middle of my bakery in the thin Thursday morning light and pressed both palms flat on the counter and breathed.

Renee appeared from the kitchen. She had her apron on and a bowl of ganache in one hand and the expression of someone who had heard every word of the last forty minutes and was exercising heroic restraint.

"The ones you've been careful about," she said.

"Don't."

"I'm just —"

"Renee."

She stirred the ganache. "He asked about you. Three years ago. From London."

"I noticed."

"And you said —"

"I said the ones I've been careful about." I picked up the cloth from the counter and wiped down a surface that was already clean. "Which is not an invitation. Which is not a move. Which is just — honesty, slightly poorly managed."

"Mmhm." She carried the ganache back toward the kitchen, paused in the doorway. "He's coming back, you know."

"He has a fiancée, Renee."

"I know." She looked at me with the steady, clear-eyed expression of someone who loved me well enough to be honest. "I know he does, Ava. That's what I'm worried about."

She went back into the kitchen.

I folded the cloth. Set it down. Looked at the front of the display case, center position, where the brown butter pecan tart sat under the glass.

I thought about what I wanted. I thought about what was right.

I thought about the way he had said some things were easier to be far from on Tuesday and asked what subjects this morning and how the distance between those two sentences felt, suddenly, very small.

I was not a woman who did careless things.

But I was beginning, quietly and with full awareness of the cost, to wonder what it would feel like to stop being so careful.