“Typical,” I mutter, thinking what a hassle it must have been for Noah to be chauffeured down here in his town car’s heated seats.

But then, the driver comes around to open the back door, and out slides a blond woman in a floor-length rabbit fur coat. She’s toting four sweater-vested shih tzus and an extra-long selfie-stick. I’m waiting for Noah to get out after her, for this to be his type. Instead the driver closes the door, waves goodbye to the woman, and the next thing I notice is a commotion on the street corner.

It’s Noah Ross, arriving on foot from an unknown direction, staring into his phone—and getting fully entangled in four shih tzu leashes. He hops to get free of one leash then ensnares himself in two more. The woman with the dogs is getting really pissed. The dogs are yapping as she brandishes her selfie-stick at Noah and yanks her leashes so violently he almost bites it on the pavement.

Here I’d been so nervous to host a man currently getting tag-teamed by four specks of fur in argyle. I smile to myself and enjoy the show.

Until my buzzer rings.

Then I scramble to the phone in the hallway, pick it up, and jam my finger on the pound sign to unlock the downstairs door. After that comes the hardest part: the wait for him to walk up five flights of stairs.

I use the time to take a final look around my apartment. At the last moment, my gaze falls on the framed photograph of Ryan and me at the Nationals game on the night we got engaged. We’re grinning, cheek to cheek, and he’s holding up my hand to show the ring, which was too small to get over my knuckle so it sits jammed midway down my finger. I hate how I look in the picture: deer-in-the-headlights with mascara all the way down to my chin from crying. But Ryan had the photo enlarged, matted, and framed, so it hangs on the wall near the window. The look on my face is so intimate that suddenly I know I can’t bear for Noah Ross to see it. I snatch it off the wall just as my doorbell rings.

“Be right there!” I shout, frantically looking for a place to stash the frame. The lower shelf of my coffee table is an understated mausoleum of old magazines. I wedge the frame between some old Cosmos and New Yorkers then steel myself to let Noah in.

You can do this. BD believes in you.

“Hello!” I say, forcing brightness into my voice as I swing open my door.