I don’t bother telling her that Jack and I have been together for maybe five minutes and are nowhere near happily ever after yet. Or that Harley and Nick fretted about their feelings for each other for months before finally having the guts to give it a shot. I let her sit for a minute, tending to other customers until I see her emerge from her shell.

“So,” I say, as if our conversation never halted. “You wouldn’t have come here if you didn’t want to talk. There are at least twenty bars between your place and here. Clearly you wanted to vent, and clearly, I’m going to listen. So have at it.”

“I hate my job.” She drinks some more wine, but this time, in a reasonable measure. “I don’t know why I keep hanging in there, thinking things will get better. They’re not going to get better.” As she says the words out loud, it’s like they finally sink in, and her face comes close to crumpling. But she pulls it together before completely breaking down.

Seeing how on the verge of losing it she is, I skip the pity and go straight to problem-solving. “Okay. If you could be doing anything in the world right now, if money and bills and all that shit weren’t an issue, what would you want to do?”

“I’m not sure. But possibly something in the restaurant industry.” She doesn’t look at me when she says this, as if she’s admitting some kind of dirty secret.

“I think that’d be awesome for you.” Because duh, the girl can cook her ass off.

“But it’d be super irresponsible of me to leave a steady job, with benefits and retirement, and attempt to break into a field I have zero experience in. Especially one that’s as unstable as the restaurant business.” This time she does look at me, her big brown eyes almost pleading. “Right? That’d be super irresponsible?”

I gesture to our surroundings. “You’re not exactly asking the right person if you want to hear that it would be stupid to quit your job, Gem.”

She takes another large gulp from her wineglass. “Yeah, well, my quitting definitely wouldn’t come along with a brownstone room at a shoebox price.”