It was textbook. But hey. I wasn’t Brougham’s therapist. He’d hired me to help him get Winona back. What he did after that was on him. And in terms of winning her back, he’d accidentally done exactly what I would’ve wanted him to.

“You didn’t blow it,” I murmured.

Brougham’s eyes lit up. “I didn’t?”

“No.” I whipped the notebook out from underneath him and scrawled a title on the next page.

STAGE ONE: DISNEYLAND.

Brougham’s brow furrowed as he watched me write, and he played with the rim of his glasses. “You want me to go back there?”

“With Winona.”

“I’m sorry, you must have missed the part where I said she dumped me.”

But I was too busy deep breathing to react to his petulant tone. This wasn’t Brougham anymore. He wasn’t sitting beside me, acting like everything I said was the stupidest thing he’d heard in his life. This was just someone dropping a letter into the locker. I had the background information. This person in front of me was lost, and they needed me.

“You keep it casual,” I said, writing notes down as I went. “Since you haven’t been talking since the breakup, you have a clean slate. Reach out with a text that’s friendly, but not intense. You want the tone of it to let her know you have no hard feelings, but nothing that’s gonna make her think you have ulterior motives, either. If you have an inside joke or something, use that. Like, ‘Oh my god, X happened and I knew you’d appreciate it.’”

“Her favorite Bachelor contestant got into the final two, last episode?”

Alexander Brougham: rich egomaniac, rude know-it-all, reality TV connoisseur. Interesting. “That’s actually perfect. Use that to get back in touch. Be pleasant.”

“You keep repeating that. Do you think I’d struggle with being pleasant?”

We sat within a long, long pause. “I’m sure you’ll be fine,” I said at last. Honestly, I was proud of my diplomacy. “Love makes people softer.”

“Am I hard?” he asked, with his trademark blank expression.

I went on like he hadn’t spoken. “As early as you can, segue into Disneyland. Say something like you’ve been wanting to go, then ask her if it would be weird to go with her as friends, and say she made it more fun or something. If she doesn’t absolutely hate you, you’d have a good shot at her being down, I think.”

“Tell her I want to be friends when I don’t?” Brougham asked, his dark eyebrows flying up into an arch of judgment and superiority. “That seems manipulative.”

“Well, no. Because right now, you are aiming for friendship. And it might stop there. But honestly, it’s never going to go from total silence to back in a healthy, revamped relationship. You need an in-between point.”