She closed the door behind him and immediately swept him along to her kitchen, fixing him a drink and then herself one as well. She parked John next to Sebastian and Via, where she knew he’d be in safekeeping, and then went to answer the door, where Fin, Tyler and Kylie all waited, laughing. Richie stood on the landing with them as well.

She greeted them all with hugs and kisses and closed the door behind them.

“This has got to be some sort of New York City record,” Mary said to Richie as they walked into the kitchen together. “One hundred percent attendance at a party in the first hour?”

Mary looked around for John, wanting to check and see if he was still nervous, and not finding him where she’d left him. She craned her neck and found him in the living room, sitting on an ottoman, but hunched forward over the coffee table, where he and Matty were chatting over a puzzle that Matty had just started. Matty loved jigsaw puzzles more than anything and Mary always kept a few for him at her house. Apparently he’d been able to rope a grown-up into helping him. Matty’s signature move.

“Don’t worry about him,” Richie said over Mary’s shoulder. “John generally finds the kids’ table pretty fast at a party.”

“Really?” Mary laughed.

“Oh, yeah. You should see him at his family’s Thanksgiving celebration. He spends an hour or two coloring with a billion of his little cousins. Does a requisite half an hour playing hide-and-seek. Eats dinner, does a few dishes and waves at the grown-ups on his way out.”

Mary looked back at John, a little mystified at this new information. “Why?”

Richie shrugged. “Family is really important to John, but small talk is not his thing.”

“You two have been friends for a long time?”

Richie’s hand toggled back and forth in the air. “A few years.”

“Really?” Mary said in surprise. “It seems like you’ve known each other your whole lives.”

Richie grinned. “That’s just John. Once he decides to get to know somebody, he really gets to know them. When I first got assigned to be his officemate, I thought, Great, of course they pair me with this buzzkill. But not three months later, I realized he’d become one of my closest friends.”

One of her neighbors caught Mary’s attention and the party unfolded from there. She loved the energy of a party. She loved watching the web of her life become more intricate and stronger as the people in it spoke and laughed and got to know one another.

A few hours later, a group of them sat in Mary’s living room, Mary perched on the arm of the chair where Fin was sitting.