She’d felt nothing the whole night. Through the drive in his Porsche, through his forty-minute monologue about his firm’s quarterly performance, through his hand on her thigh in the parking lot when he’d leaned in and told her she looked acceptable, which he’d apparently meant as a compliment.

Nothing.

And then she’d walked into this booth, into this chaos, into Jordan McKnight’s ridiculous life, and her heart had done more in ninety seconds than it had done all night.

"I have to go," Alexis said.

"Yeah," Chloe said. "You do."

Alexis met Chloe’s eyes.

And something passed between them. Not friendship. Not war. Something more complicated. Chloe knew. Alexis could see it in her face. Chloe knew exactly what was happening in Alexis’s chest, had probably known before Alexis did, and Chloe was watching her walk away from it with an expression Alexis couldn’t decode.

Understanding, maybe.

Or a warning.

Or both.

"It was nice meeting your friends," Alexis said. Her voice came back under control. Smooth. Aristocratic. The mask sliding into place the way it always did. "Kumiko, I’ll see you in class. Chloe."

"Alexis."

She turned to go.

"Hey."

Jordan’s voice again.

She stopped. She didn’t turn around. She couldn’t. If she turned around and looked at his stupid face and his stupid warm eyes one more time she was going to do something she’d regret.

"You deserve better than a merger," Jordan said. "For whatever it’s worth."

Alexis stood there for a moment.

Her back to the booth. Her face to the dining room. Harrison waiting by the hostess stand, phone already in his hand, checking emails, not looking at her, never really looking at her.

"It’s not worth much," she said. "But thanks."

She walked.

Every step felt heavier than the last. The dining room stretched out in front of her, table after table of normal people having normal dinners, and she moved through them like a ghost in couture, and behind her she could hear the booth come back to life, Kumiko’s voice rising in excited chatter, Lila saying something crude, Jordan laughing, that low genuine laugh that she’d only heard a handful of times and had memorized against her will.

They were happy back there.

She was walking toward Harrison Van Allen the Third and a lifetime of quarterly performance reports.

She reached the table. Harrison pulled out her chair without looking up from his phone.

"Who were they?" he asked.

"Nobody."

"You were gone eight minutes."

"They’re from campus. Freshman drama. It’s boring."

Harrison finally looked at her. His eyes did that thing they always did, that quick assessment, cataloging her the way he cataloged everything, checking that she still met specification.

"You look flushed," he said.

"It’s warm in here."

"You should drink water. Hydration affects skin quality."

Alexis picked up her water glass.

She drank.

Across the restaurant, through the gap in the sliding screen, she could see them. The booth. The chaos. Jordan reaching over to wipe sauce off Kumiko’s cheek with his thumb, casual, easy, and Kumiko turning bright red, and Chloe rolling her eyes with a fondness that had nothing to hide, and the goth girl stealing meat off Jordan’s plate, and the crimson-eyed one writing something in a notebook.

A family.

A weird, impossible, chaotic family that a month ago hadn’t existed.

Harrison started talking about a property his father was acquiring in Long Beach. Something about port access and container throughput. His voice was a pleasant drone, the audio equivalent of beige, and Alexis nodded at the right intervals and made the right sounds and thought about none of it.

She thought about a boy who’d told her she deserved better than a merger.

She thought about how he’d said it like he meant it.

She thought about how nobody in her entire eighteen years of engineered perfection had ever looked at her the way Jordan looked at those four girls, and how she’d told herself for weeks that she didn’t want that, didn’t need it, was above it, and how every single one of those lies had crumbled the moment she’d rounded the corner and seen him laughing in that booth.

Her phone buzzed.

She glanced down under the table.

A text from an unknown number she’d saved and deleted and saved again more times than she’d ever admit.

Jordan.

You okay?

She stared at it.

Harrison kept talking about container throughput.

Alexis typed three different responses. Deleted all three. Her thumb hovered over the screen.

I’m fine, she wrote.

She sent it before she could think better of it.

The reply came fast.

You’re doing the jaw thing again.

Alexis’s jaw unclenched.

She hadn’t even noticed she was doing it.

She looked up. Across the restaurant. Through the gap. Jordan wasn’t even looking at his phone. He was talking to Chloe, one arm slung along the back of the booth behind her, his attention entirely on the girl beside him.

But he’d known.

Somehow he’d known.

Stop watching me, she typed.

I’m not. I can just tell.

That’s worse.

Probably.

Alexis put her phone face-down on the table.

"Are you even listening?" Harrison asked.

"Container throughput," Alexis said. "Port access. Long Beach. It sounds very lucrative."

Harrison smiled, satisfied, and kept going.

And Alexis Van Der Berg sat across from the man her family had chosen, in a dress she’d worn to impress him, drinking water for her skin quality, and understood with a clarity that frightened her that she was going to spend the rest of this dinner, and possibly the rest of her life, thinking about the wrong boy.

Her phone buzzed one more time.

She turned it over.

For what it’s worth, Jordan had written, the offer stands. You don’t have to marry him. Whenever you figure that out.

Alexis read it four times.

Then she deleted the conversation, the way she always did, because keeping it felt like admitting something she wasn’t ready to admit.

But she didn’t delete his number.

She never deleted his number.

"Alexis?" Harrison said. "The waiter needs your order."

"The bulgogi," she said, without looking at the menu. "Medium."