“I . . . went along. She led, and I followed, because it took less effort. It’s how it was with us.”

I blink across the table at him, a smooth, small, Spencerian script unfurling in the space between us, probably the first spark of creativity I’ve had in weeks. it spells, but I don’t say anything. In the silence, we both sip our drinks, and since mine is basically a defibrillator in a cup, I’m the first to get back in the game.

“I didn’t intend it,” I say plainly, my voice an eraser over that script connection between us. “Sometimes it just happens, and I realize it later.” I feel a strange, unfamiliar temptation to tell him the whole thing. The letters, they work on me sometimes. When I’m stressed, when I’m tired, when I’m lonely. When I’m blocked . . . I can’t draw at all, or when I try—I end up saying too much.

But telling him all that, what good would it do? It’s nothing to him, and it’s detrimental to me. I don’t need him leaving here and spreading the word, not after everything I’ve worked for and am still working for. I thought maybe I’d fixed the problem when I stopped with the wedding work; I thought all the effort I’d put into my own business would give me a sense of ownership, a sense of control. Sure, it’d be other people’s plans, but the idea for the planners, the execution—it had been my idea, my vision.

But I’ve started to slip again, at such a critical time, and Reid doesn’t need to know it.

“I loved doing the job,” I say, back in that cheery register. “I really did. The play, the tribute to your first date—”

Trench-brow, back again. “What first date?”

“Your first date with Avery. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Shakespeare in the Park?”

“That wasn’t our first date. Our first date was coffee in the lobby of my office building.”

“Oh,” I say. Meanwhile, this coffee shop now feels like an inferno to me. I wish I had asked him to do whatever the opposite of going to a coffee shop is. An outdoor vending machine that dispenses sleeping pills? Literally anything but an echo of his first date with his ex-fiancée, whose life I have possibly ruined.

“Her father arranged it.”

“That’s . . . nice.”

It is not nice, not judging by the way trench-brow disappears, replaced with a single quirk of the left one. Do you really believe that? Left Quirk says.

“He is also my boss.”

“Oh, God,” I groan. “Did you get fired?”

“No, I am”—he blinks down toward his tea again—“valuable to him. And it was amicable.”

“Must be awkward.” Probably not more awkward than this meeting, but still.