“Obviously?”

“Yes,” he says. “Everything was . . . well, Avery was very pleased with all of it.”

“But you weren’t.” As soon as it’s out of my mouth, I regret it. What am I doing? Baiting a very messy hook, fishing for compliments from a guy I mostly need to forget me five minutes after he leaves here? I need him to never think about my talent again, given what he knows about how I’ve used it.

“I was . . .” He moves his cup again, another quarter-turn. “I was affected by it. I looked down at your letters and—they felt like numbers to me. Something I could read. They felt like a sign.”

I know how that feels. The first time I saw—well, really saw, really paid attention to—a hand-drawn letter, it was on an old sign in this city. And that’s how it’d felt to me—something I could read, sure. But also something that was full of possibility. Look at all the ways this letter says something. It gives me a strange, secret pleasure to hear Reid say this about some of my own letters.

But I can’t and shouldn’t take what he’s said—that my work affected him—as a compliment. What I do—it’s petty, secretive, immature. I’m not meant to be writing signs for people. I’m meant to be writing plans for them, plans they’ve already made for themselves.

I have to stop this. I have to find a way to break the habit for good. Get back on track, get unblocked. Make my deadline, the one that could take my still-in-startup-mode small business to the next level.

“I won’t do it again,” I say, more to myself than to him, but immediately I wish I’d made this declaration privately. Stand-in-front-of-the-mirror-in-my-bathroom privately. I sound as if I’m begging for his silence with this promise, and the way his mouth flattens even further tells me he doesn’t appreciate the shakedown.

“I assure you, I have no interest in talking to anyone about this ever again.”

That’s his promise back, I guess—his version of I’ll never tell, and it should make me happy, or at least relieved. Instead I feel like I’ve done whatever the Masterpiece Theatre version of a drug deal is. I guess it would still be a drug deal, but an old-timey one.

When Reid moves, as though to stand, I get a strange sense of panic at leaving it this way, with this clandestine promise between us, and so I speak—the first question I can think of.

“Why now?”

Left Quirk is the only response he gives me before straightening in his chair again. He turns the cup one-quarter and looks at me.

“I mean, why come to me now, if you saw this then? Before the . . . before the wedding, I mean.”

“It wasn’t the most urgent thing on my to-do list,” he says dryly, but somehow he has managed to telegraph directly into my brain every single way I probably screwed up his life—his relationship, surely his living situation, his job, possibly his friendships. “And I suppose I’m running out of time.”