SEDUCING MY BESTFRIEND'S BROTHER

Chapter 2

I did not sleep well.

This was not unusual, technically speaking. I had never been a particularly gifted sleeper — my mind ran long after the rest of me wanted to stop, cataloguing the day's inventory, revising conversations, noticing the things I hadn't had time to notice while they were happening. Renee called it my greatest professional asset and my worst personal liability, and she was right on both counts. The bakery existed in large part because of the way my brain refused to shut off at reasonable hours. Some of my best recipes had been written at two in the morning on whatever paper was nearest.

But this was not that kind of sleeplessness.

This was the kind where I lay in the dark and stared at the ceiling and replayed, with the involuntary precision of a mind that had decided this was urgent, the exact quality of light in the Calloways' dining room when Marcus had looked at his own hand and said, I'm engaged.

The ring. Gold band, simple, the kind chosen by someone who didn't need to make a statement because the gesture itself was statement enough. I had noticed, in the brief moment before my brain had the good sense to stop cataloguing, that it sat on his finger with the ease of something worn long enough to belong there. This was not new. He had not just gotten engaged on the plane home.

I had simply not known.

This was the part that kept me awake — not the fact of the engagement itself, which I had no right to have feelings about, but the realisation that there had been a whole geography of Marcus's life in London that I had never been shown. Of course there had. He had been gone six years. People built entire worlds in six years. He had built a career and a flat and, apparently, a future with someone, and none of that was surprising and none of it was wrong, and I had absolutely no standing to feel the particular hollow thing I was feeling at midnight in my own bedroom like a woman with the most irrational grievance in recorded history.

I was aware of how absurd it was. The awareness did not help.

Around one in the morning I gave up, went to the kitchen, and made tea.

Renee arrived at the bakery at six-thirty, which was her version of sleeping in. I had been there since five, which was not unusual, except that by the time she came through the back door I had already made three dozen croissants, two full trays of almond pastries, and had started — with the slightly manic energy of someone sublimating — on an experimental batch of saffron custard tarts that were not on this week's menu and had no immediate practical purpose.

She stopped in the doorway. Looked at the bench. Looked at me.

"How long have you been here?"

"Five-ish."

"And the saffron tarts are because —"

"I wanted to try something new."

Renee came in, hung up her coat, tied her apron, and poured herself a coffee with the focused silence of someone assembling their thoughts. Then she leaned against the counter and looked at me with the expression I privately called the Renee Assessment — calm, precise, missing nothing.

"How was dinner?"

I rolled the pastry dough I absolutely did not need to be rolling and said, "Fine. Nice. Patricia made the lamb."

"And Marcus?"

A beat.

"He's engaged," I said.

The kitchen was very quiet for a moment. Outside, somewhere on the street, a delivery truck reversed with its warning beep going.

"Oh, Ava."

"Don't." I kept my eyes on the dough. "I'm fine. It's fine. It's completely — it's not as though I had any claim. I've never had any claim. He doesn't even know —"

"He doesn't know," Renee confirmed, gently.

"Right." I pressed the heel of my hand into the dough. "So there's nothing to be sad about because there was never anything to lose."

Renee was quiet for a moment in the considered way she was quiet when she disagreed with something but had decided this was not the moment. "What's she like? The fiancée?"

"I haven't met her. He just — mentioned it. At the end of dinner." I paused, remembering. "He was looking at me when he said it."

"Looking at you how?"

I thought about the candle between us, the quality of his gaze — steady and direct and briefly, barely, something else beneath it that I may have entirely invented. "I don't know. Just — looking."

Renee wrapped both hands around her mug and said nothing, which was its own kind of commentary.

I shaped the pastry into rounds and tried to be a reasonable adult person about the situation. I was twenty-nine years old. I owned a successful business. I had excellent coping mechanisms and a genuinely good life and the fact that my best friend's brother had come home from London wearing a ring should not have the structural impact on my morning that it was currently having.

"I'm going to be fine," I said, more to the croissants than to Renee.

"I know you are," she said, meaning it, which I appreciated.

Jade called at ten.

"So?" Her voice landed like a small explosion into the relative quiet of the front of house, where I was rearranging the display case for the third time that morning in a way that was clearly about something other than optimal pastry placement. "Give me your honest thoughts. About Marcus."

I picked up a lemon tart and set it down in a slightly different position. "He seems well. London obviously suited him."

"Right? He looks older but like — in a good way. Distinguished. Mom kept touching his face at breakfast this morning, it was embarrassing." A laugh. Then, more carefully: "Did he mention — did he tell you about Isabelle?"

Isabelle.

So that was her name.

"He mentioned he was engaged," I said, in the tone of someone relaying a mildly interesting piece of trivia. "He didn't say her name."

"Isabelle Ferreira. She's still in London — she's a solicitor, absolutely terrifying in the best way, she's coming over next month to look at neighbourhoods with him." Jade's voice had the careful brightness of someone offering information they weren't entirely sure how it would land, which meant — I realised, with a small cold note of clarity — that Jade was not entirely oblivious. Maybe she never had been. "They've been together two years. He proposed in December."

December. Six months ago.

"She sounds wonderful," I said, and I meant it to be generous, and it mostly was.

"She really is. I think you'll like her." A pause. "Are you okay?"

"Of course. Why wouldn't I be?"

"No reason." Another pause, softer this time, carrying the weight of eleven years of friendship and everything that came with knowing someone that well. "I just — I know dinner was a lot. A lot of catching up, a lot of information."

"Jade." I set the lemon tart down and looked at it. "I'm fine. I promise."

She accepted this, the way she had accepted various versions of it over the years, gracious and not entirely convinced. We talked for another ten minutes about her flat and a work thing and the possibility of brunch next weekend, and when we hung up I stood behind my own counter in my own bakery in the life I had built carefully and deliberately and on my own terms, and I thought about the name.

Isabelle.

I thought about December. I thought about next month and looking at neighbourhoods and the quiet, settled weight of a gold band worn long enough to belong.

I thought, for a long and uncomfortable moment, about the kind of woman I was and the kind of woman I wanted to be.

And then, underneath all of that — quieter, smaller, and far more honest than I would have liked — I thought about the way Marcus had looked at me across the dinner table and not looked away.

It was nothing. It was almost certainly nothing.

I told myself this while I rearranged the display case for the fourth time.

The saffron tarts, when they came out of the oven an hour later, were the best thing I had made all month.

Some feelings, it turned out, made for excellent pastry.