That trip to Germany with Adrian when we were promoting Pocketful of Posies. The hotel’s room service had been middling at best, but their mimosas came in giant goblets with fresh-squeezed orange juice and were stupid cheap, and we’d spend half the morning still buzzed from mimosas with breakfast.

“Uh. Pancakes need flipping,” Nathan says, shaking me from my reverie.

Crap. I smell them, and they’re about to burn. I fly over to the stove and flip them as fast as I can, and most of them are fine, but one of them is charred to inedibility.

“Sorry,” I say.

“No worries. I don’t mind them a little crispy.”

I snicker and tilt the burnt pancake so he can see it. “I think this may be a little bit beyond merely crispy, Nathan.”

His eyes widen. “Oh. Well, yeah. That one, maybe.”

I laugh, and plate the three that are edible, toss the ruined one in the trash, and ladle four more onto the griddle. “I’m good at this, I swear. I just got a little…distracted.”

He’s leaning against the doorway. “It’s all good.” He sets the champagne and orange juice down, lifts the coffee. “Mugs?”

I bring him mugs, and champagne flutes. Or, rather, I bring him mugs and start to bring him flutes and rethink it. Instead, I bring him regular wineglasses. “Might as well do it properly.”

He pours coffee, hands me a mug. “I’m in. I haven’t had a mimosa since my…” he trails off. “Well, in a long time.”

“Say what you were going to say. No point in dancing around it, right?”

“Since my honeymoon,” he says. He stares into his coffee. “Nine years ago.”

“Used to have them all the time. I had a big circle of close friends in college. Me and Adrian, my best friend Tess and her then-boyfriend, later husband, and now ex-husband, and two other couples. We’d go to brunch every weekend and get day drunk on mimosas.”

“I thought it was pancakes on the weekends.”

“That was Saturdays. Sundays were for brunching.”

“Oh.” He grins. “You did weekends right in college, it sounds like.”

I sigh. “Yeah, I guess I did. Haven’t had a weekend like that in…well, in a long, long time.”

I flip the pancakes, and this time they’re perfect golden brown, fluffy and dense.

“When did they stop? Those weekends, I mean.”

I sip the coffee while leaning on the counter beside the stove; he’s still leaning against the doorway. I don’t invite him in, and he doesn’t seem to mind. I don’t let myself examine this too closely.