Sophia Chen's text came at 2:17 PM on Friday, two words with the particular grammar of a woman who'd decided something and was framing it as spontaneous.
Come over tonight?
Then, nine minutes later, the follow-up she'd clearly been debating: Roommates are both gone for the weekend. I want to celebrate.
Ethan read it from the library where he was cross-referencing the logistics startup's customer acquisition model against the market consolidation pattern he remembered from a few years back. He set his phone face-down, let it sit for forty seconds, then picked it up.
Sure. Eight o'clock.
He knew what the invitation was. More precisely, he knew exactly how the old Ethan would have read it: as warmth, as desire, as evidence that things between them were good and getting better. He would h
