Dinner is simple but lovely—salmon, brown rice, steamed broccoli—expertly cooked and plated in the way that only a mom can. Michelle tells a story from this week’s Pilates class; Lauren talks about a new restaurant that opened up in town; Blake and Reid trade mostly good-natured barbs about the Red Sox versus the Yankees. I can’t remember the last time I had a family dinner without intense discussions about our businesses. This is a refreshing change of pace.

“Now, how did you two say you met?” Reid asks.

Blake squeezes my thigh under the table and smiles at me. “Well, I was at a local bar. Dorrian’s—you remember it? I’ve taken you out there before.”

Reid cocks his head, a flash of recognition spreading across his features. “That place with the . . . ?”

“Ha, it was right before you met Lauren. We met a few girls there, remember?” Blake says, waiting for his brother to catch on.

Reid does. He laughs. Lauren rolls her eyes.

“Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard that story before,” she interjects.

“So the night I met Eliza, I had had a stressful day at work and just wanted to blow off a little steam with a drink at Dorrian’s,” Blake says. It occurs to me that I’ve never heard this story from his perspective before. I had no idea that he’d had a difficult day before meeting me that night. “And Eliza here was holding some sort of . . . casting call? Audition?”

“I needed to find a date to bring to my friend’s wedding,” I explain. “The search got a little out of hand, thanks to my best friend Carmen. She never quite does anything halfway.”

“Sure. Audition, let’s call it,” Blake says, nodding. “We struck up a conversation at the bar, and I couldn’t make it to the wedding because I was here for the weekend.”

“But you liked him anyway!” Michelle says triumphantly, raising her glass in my direction.

“Of course!” I say, chuckling. “He’s easy to like.”

Blake’s family smiles at me.

“Tell me some stories about Blake as a kid?” I ask. “I’d love to hear them.”

They jump at the opportunity. Even though I see Blake as a pretty smooth guy, it’s clear that his family sees him in a totally different light. Here, at home, he’s the kid brother, the butt of every joke. Reid tells a story about how Blake would study for his fourth-grade science test with stacks and stacks of color-coded flash cards (“Always was a little nerd,” he says fondly) and Lauren recalls how sweet and welcoming Blake was the first time they met four years ago. Michelle excuses herself from the table to grab a family photo album. There are maybe ten or fifteen pounds of Kodak photos slid into laminated sheets clipped into a three-ring binder.