Page 20 of Danny

I stand in the courtyard with my coat pulled tight and my phone buzzing in my pocket — Mom, probably, with her nightly update, her little dispatches from the front line of her own body's war against itself that she somehow always makes funny because that's who she is, the woman who makes terrible things survivable by refusing to let them be the whole story.

I pull out my phone.

Mom: Dr. Patel says numbers are "cautiously encouraging." I told him cautiously encouraging is how I'd describe a first date with a man who shows up on time. We can do better than cautiously encouraging, Dr. Patel. Anyway. Love you bunny. How's the fancy club?

The fancy club is good. There's a man here who bought a book because I told him to and I think I'm in trouble Mom.

Mom: Good trouble or bad trouble?

I honestly don't know.

Mom: Those are the best kind, bunny. The ones you don't know yet. Call me tomorrow. I want juicy details.

I put my phone away and go back inside.

When I walk past table four on my way out — empty now, cleared, wiped down — I see something on the seat of the chair where Danny had been sitting.

A book. Persuasion. His copy. The new one with the crisp spine.

There's a receipt tucked inside as a bookmark. Chapter seven. He'd jumped ahead.

On the back of the receipt, in sharp, slanted handwriting:

You were right. It was worth the wait.

I stand there in the empty club holding a billionaire's paperback and a receipt, and I press both against my chest like an idiot and I smile so hard my face hurts.

Then I take the book home with me. Because he'd left it for me. Because that's his version of a love letter.

It's the most romantic thing anyone has ever done for me.

And it isn't even close.

Danny

Jagger figures it out at Sunday Whiskey because Jagger figures everything out and I hate him for it.

We're in the usual booth — Gerald the thousand-dollar plant standing guard, decanters on the wall, Caleb with his two-finger Redbreast looking like a man who could kill everyone in the room and has done the math on it. Elliot's got his sparkling water and a tablet propped against the salt shaker because he's running numbers on something and refuses to stop for a social event he considers structurally optional.

I'm on time. I've been on time every Sunday for four years. But tonight I'd almost been late because Anna's shift ended at five and I'd been on the main floor at four-fifty pretending to review table layouts. She'd walked past me on her way to the locker room and said "Goodnight, Mr. Sterling" in that voice — the one she uses in public, the professional one, the one that sounds like nothing and means everything — and I'd lost seven minutes standing there like an idiot willing my dick to go down.

Seven minutes. That's how long it takes me to recover from this woman saying my last name.

I don't tell anyone this, obviously.

Jagger still knows.

"You look different," he says, ten minutes into a conversation about the Gala venue logistics that I'm contributing to with the full attention of roughly thirty percent of my brain.

"I look the same."

"You look like a man who's had a good week and doesn't know what to do with the information." He tilts his glass toward me. "When's the last time you had a good week?"

"I have good weeks constantly."

"You have productive weeks. Efficient weeks. Weeks where everything runs to spec and you go to bed satisfied that the machine performed. Those aren't good weeks. Those are maintenance schedules." He takes a sip. "This is different. You're sitting differently."

"I'm sitting in a booth, Jagger. There's one way to sit in a booth."