I can’t wait for my date with Blake this Saturday afternoon, and yet, I’m yawning. Like, massively. I’ve been up since 6 a.m., sliding jewelry on and off my fingers and wrists and ears, modeling it all for our Instagram. I shoot most of the photos and videos myself on my iPhone. I take excellent care of my hands—weekly manicures, no picking at my cuticles, no matter how stressed I get—specifically so we don’t have to hire a hand model for these shots. Through a combination of trial and error and research on our competitors, I’ve nailed what our followers want to see. So I stack three of the same ring in different carat sizes on my hand for potential customers to compare, enormous rocks for users to ooh and ahh over, and show off our signature setting, the three-stone, round-cut ring I wore in the engagement announcement. This morning, I took hundreds of photos, narrowed them down to the best couple dozen, and started the tedious process of editing each image. Over the next few weeks, I’ll add captions and hashtags and roll them out one at a time.

I don’t usually work this early on Saturdays, but I’m feeling frantic. I got a letter from my landlord yesterday with bad news. When Brooklyn Jewels’s two-year lease expires in mid-November, our rent will go up by 20 percent. And since my apartment is in the same building, the rent on my studio will jump by 20 percent a month, too. We have until late October to decide whether or not to renew the leases. I always knew that we could’ve locked in our original rate—which is already exorbitant—for longer, but I hesitated to sign beyond a couple years. Thirty percent of small businesses fail in their first two years. I worried that if we committed ourselves to a brick-and-mortar storefront for longer than that, we’d inevitably fail.

So that explains why Blake catches me in full yawn, mouth wide open, eyes scrunched up at the East Seventy-Ninth Street entrance of Central Park. I’m lucky I had the good sense to clap a hand over my mouth so that his first glimpse of me is not a front-row view of my molars. I’ve remembered to take off the engagement ring.

“Sorry, am I boring you already?” he jokes.

God, he is cute. He’s dressed more casually today, in olive green chinos and a lightweight navy knit with the sleeves pushed up just so.

I punch him playfully on the arm. “No, I got up early. I’ve been working.”

“I feel that,” he says, nodding. “I remember those days.”

“You don’t need to work weekends anymore?”

He shrugs diplomatically. “Things are more or less stable these days, though, of course, it’s never easy. But I can usually clear a Saturday afternoon if I have a good enough reason.”