A German chocolate cake arrives first, followed by a pumpkin spice pound cake and a vanilla cake with raspberry filling. We disagree on every cake.

“Good thing it’s not you two getting married,” the waiter jokes.

My favorite is the chocolate. I can’t resist digging my fork into the molten, gooey center and returning to the plate until every morsel is gone. Overall, planning a wedding has been more stressful and less dreamy than I had anticipated, but this dessert is exactly as perfect as I had hoped it would be—a true highlight.

“So has Carmen told you what we’re up to lately?” Raj asks, once the waiter retreats with our empty plates.

“Only a little! What’s going on?”

He stretches to run his hands through his hair. “You’re a genius for connecting us. The timing was amazing.”

“Don’t even worry about it.”

He explains that Carmen had originally wanted someone to build out the entire Skindemand app right away. But Raj pointed out that that would take a ridiculously long time for a team to build, forget just one person—and she didn’t really have the money to pay him properly for that anyway.

“So instead, I’m building her an MVP—minimum viable product—which is like the skin-and-bones version of the app that she can present to investors,” he says. “It’ll have everything she needs at this stage of the company, but it keeps the workload doable for a part-time engineer.”

“Which is all she can afford at the moment,” I fill in.

“But not for long,” he says smugly.

From what Carmen has told me, her presentation to Cecelia Sundquist went flawlessly, and she seemed to be leaning toward making an investment. Nothing is set in stone, of course, and Carmen is still scoping out plenty of other VC firms in case this doesn’t pan out. But she’s by far her first choice, and I have a hunch this could work.

“And honestly, building the MVP means I get to dive into the design more than the coding, which is the piece I love the most,” Raj continues.

He pulls out his phone to show me mock-ups of what he’s creating for Carmen. Each slide borrows Carmen’s sleek white, black, and yellow color scheme, but amplifies it to a level of polish that she wasn’t quite able to capture on her own in the presentation. The app looks real.

“I love that you two are working together,” I say.

“Worlds colliding, huh?” he says.

“In the best way possible.”

The next servings of cake arrive: a strawberry shortcake, a lemon, and a red velvet with buttercream frosting. Raj and I try bites of them all, which gets increasingly more difficult as we feel more and more stuffed.

Later, the waiter returns for feedback. “Do you have any sense of what the groom’s preference would be?” he asks.