He shrugs, a slight lift of those broad shoulders, and it’s a sloppy-looking, uncharacteristic gesture on him. Unexpected. “It’s business.”

He must be speaking of the work he does, but somehow, it seems “It’s business” is also what he means by Avery, by their engagement. Their breakup, however amicable it was.

“I apologize for calling you a shopgirl,” he says, a change of subject abrupt enough that it takes me a second to realize what he’s said. “I obviously think you’re very talented.”

It’s so surprising that I make a quiet snort of disbelief. If nothing else has been confirmed by this extremely wrenching conversation, at least it’s fair to say that I’ve got a pretty good instinct when it comes to Reid Sutherland, and no part of our interactions today or a year ago have indicated that he thinks I have any talent at all.

“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.