Jamie glances away, rubbing his eyes beneath his glasses. I want to shove Grace, as lovingly as possible, back to the other end of the store and demand Jamie keep talking now. But instead I face our interrupter, who’s reminded me why we’re here.

“Actually,” I tell Grace, slipping my phone from my pocket and opening the camera. “If you don’t mind taking a photo, we’ll be exactly that.”

Jamie dutifully wraps his arm around my waist for the picture, but the moment our photo is taken, his hand drops. Silently, we help tidy up and break down our stations—despite Grace’s protests—then trundle outside with our damp canvases, braced against the wind.

Still quiet, Jamie pulls out his phone and orders a cab.

My nerves are shredded. I stare up at the sky and search for constellations, trying desperately to distract myself.

Will he ever finish saying what he started to when Grace interrupted us? Maybe he’s regretting opening his mouth. Maybe all Grace’s talk of heart chakras and deepening erotic energy warped his thoughts and now he realizes—

“Bea.” Jamie wraps his hand around mine.

I glance up at him. “Yes?”

Please let this be it. Please let him put me out of my misery and tell me what he was about to say, so I stop hoping like a fool for something that isn’t supposed to be.

“Before,” he says. “When Grace interrupted us, what I was going to say was . . . That is, I don’t want to make this awkward, or perhaps, more so than I already am—”

“Jamie. Remember, it’s just me.”

“Just you?” A beat of silence hangs between us. Jamie steps closer and carefully extracts his hand from mine, then cups my cheek. “There’s no such thing. And I could have sworn I’ve been so painfully obvious that I feel that way.”

“Feel what way?”

His fingertips trace my jaw, slip through the wisps of hair that tangle toward my face in the wind. “Like I’d take a cocktail to the chest, a half-dozen glasses of champagne to the pants, a hundred thousand times if that’s what it took to end up here. Like I’d never trade our meet-disaster for anything because it set everything into motion.”

Searching my eyes, he says, “Because if we’d just made small talk with not a spill in sight, then parted quiet ways, we’d have stayed exactly on our solitary paths. Our friends might not have interfered. And if they hadn’t interfered, I wouldn’t have ended up almost kissing you in a closet, staring at you over a chessboard and a cup of coffee, agreeing to the wildest and best month of my life.”

I stare at Jamie as my heart turns into a firework grand finale, a sparkling cascade of thundering booms. “What are you saying?”