Like the one he was telling now in the back of the car while Harris and I smiled shyly at each other. I thought it was sweet that Harris could smile shyly because he was forty-two, graying right around his temples, and a total fox in the most gorgeous custom suit I had ever seen. My heart actually started pounding when he stepped out of the car, took my hand, and introduced himself.

“And the craziest part about the entire thing,” Martin was saying, “is that after she confessed that she was pregnant with her lover’s baby, after he killed himself on their kitchen floor, her husband still wants her back.”

Harris smiled at me and said, “No!” I could tell he’d hired Martin ten percent because he was brilliant and ninety percent because he was the most damn entertaining person in the world.

“Yes! Can you believe it?”

Harris squeezed my elbow and said, “I can’t. Can you, Amelia?”

I grinned at him. Was he flirting with me? I liked it. I liked him. Right away. Martin had been right. “Why would he do that?” I asked.

“He wanted to keep his family together.”

It was the first time in an hour I had thought of Parker and the family—albeit the unconventional one—that we had almost had. It still stung. But it stung a little less as Harris took my hand and helped me out of the car in front of the Paris Theater. The producer of this advance screening was the firm’s client, and I was happy to be there to support him. I readjusted the fitted black dress I was wearing and was glad I had gone with the stiletto boots, because Harris was tall. Tall tall.

Inside the theater, we were handed Moscow mules and cute, retro boxes of popcorn. I put my hand inside the crook of Harris’s arm when he offered it to me. “I think you’re really going to like this film,” he whispered in my ear. Now I was positive he was flirting with me. Was this really so shocking? Was I that out of practice?

The movie wasn’t really my kind of thing. A sort of action-adventure film with a lot of boat racing and some stolen diamonds and some sex scenes that were, quite frankly, a little raunchy and very uncomfortable, especially while you were sitting beside a boy you kind of liked. Okay, yeah. I knew Harris wasn’t a boy. But when you’re in the movies and you can’t concentrate because you’re wondering if he might try to put his arm around you or hold your hand, he’s a boy and you’re a girl. In a lot of ways, life never moves beyond seventh grade.

I must not have understood the movie, because afterward Harris and Martin absolutely fell all over their producer client, plying him with compliments. Martin deemed it “a sure box-office hit” and Harris agreed that “fans are going to go crazy.”

But when we were in the privacy of the car again, Harris exhaled long and slow and said, “Well, we better start working on a strategy.”