“There!” Max said, forty minutes and two glasses of wine later, when he slid the pie into her oven. “It should bake for … an hour? It takes that long for pies to bake? Damn, okay, good thing I’m not going anywhere for a while.”

She grinned at him.

“And good thing I ordered dinner while you were occupied with the pie. Food should be here any minute.”

He went over to the sink to wash his hands. That apron looked far too sexy on him, even though it looked like he’d stabbed someone in it.

“Oh thank God you’re the smart one in this relationship,” he said. He grabbed a sponge to clean up the counters. “I’m starving. Pie making is hard work, you know.”

Olivia sipped her wine and smiled at him. She couldn’t believe he’d done this, just to make her happy.

“It looked like it,” she said.

After the food came, they went into the living room to eat, and he looked around and smiled.

“You got new bookshelves! No more stacks of books on the floor.”

She put the food down on the coffee table.

“Yeah, I’d had them for a while, and I finally put them together last night. I knew I couldn’t prep for the pitch today any more than I had, and I needed to do something to get out all of that nervous energy.”

Max put the napkins and plates down on the table.

“How did the pitch go?”

Olivia put spring rolls onto both of their plates and sighed.

“I don’t know. I mean, it felt like it went well; I know we did a fantastic job. But that doesn’t seem to really matter—the one client that we got so far from a pitch was the one I thought hated us, and all of the other pitches have felt great and we haven’t gotten them. They say they like us, but they want people with more experience, or a bigger firm, and even though our rates are on the low end, that doesn’t matter.”

“Is that code for ‘they want to hire white men instead’?” Max asked.

She glanced up at him, surprised and pleased she didn’t have to spell that out.

“Sometimes, definitely. Probably most of the time, even. Which I should be used to by now in my career, but still feels crappy.”

“That’s because it’s fucked up,” Max said. He put his hand on her knee. “How much … Are you … I mean, do you need …” He stopped, and she laughed.