Olivia held in her laughter.

“Where’d you get the rolling pin?” she asked. “I don’t have one.”

He gestured to the bag on the other end of the counter.

“Yes, I realize that now. I bought it, along with a pie pan.” He smiled sheepishly at her. “Also, um. I’m sorry about the mess. I promise I’ll clean all of . . . that up once I’m done with this part. And I swear, I absolutely did not kill anyone in your house this afternoon!”

Olivia walked around him and saw the bowl of cut-up strawberries and rhubarb next to the sink . . . and the bright red spatter everywhere around it.

Now she laughed so hard tears streamed from her eyes. After a few seconds, Max joined her.

“It does indeed look like you committed a murder in this kitchen,” she said as she gasped for air.

Max smashed the dough again with the rolling pin. Olivia thought she saw tentative movement.

“I knew conceptually that strawberries had lots of red juice, but I didn’t quite understand what that meant in practice until today.” He rolled again. “Oh, look, it’s moving! Thank God.”

Olivia opened the fridge and poured herself a glass of wine. This felt like the kind of thing where she should stand back and watch instead of offering to help out.

Plus, no one had ever made her a pie before. She didn’t even care how it turned out; she wanted to enjoy this.

“There!” Max said, forty minutes and two glasses of wine later, when he slid the pie into her oven. “It should bake for . . . an hour? It takes that long for pies to bake? Damn, okay, good thing I’m not going anywhere for a while.”

She grinned at him.

“And good thing I ordered dinner while you were occupied with the pie. Food should be here any minute.”

He went over to the sink to wash his hands. That apron looked far too sexy on him, even though it looked like he’d stabbed someone in it.

“Oh thank God you’re the smart one in this relationship,” he said. He grabbed a sponge to clean up the counters. “I’m starving. Pie making is hard work, you know.”

Olivia sipped her wine and smiled at him. She couldn’t believe he’d done this, just to make her happy.

“It looked like it,” she said.

After the food came, they went into the living room to eat, and he looked around and smiled.

“You got new bookshelves! No more stacks of books on the floor.”

She put the food down on the coffee table.

“Yeah, I’d had them for a while, and I finally put them together last night. I knew I couldn’t prep for the pitch today any more than I had, and I needed to do something to get out all of that nervous energy.”

Max put the napkins and plates down on the table.

“How did the pitch go?”

Olivia put spring rolls onto both of their plates and sighed.

“I don’t know. I mean, it felt like it went well; I know we did a fantastic job. But that doesn’t seem to really matter—the one client that we got so far from a pitch was the one I thought hated us, and all of the other pitches have felt great and we haven’t gotten them. They say they like us, but they want people with more experience, or a bigger firm, and even though our rates are on the low end, that doesn’t matter.”

“Is that code for ‘they want to hire white men instead’?” Max asked.

She glanced up at him, surprised and pleased she didn’t have to spell that out.

“Sometimes, definitely. Probably most of the time, even. Which I should be used to by now in my career, but still feels crappy.”

“That’s because it’s fucked up,” Max said. He put his hand on her knee. “How much . . . Are you . . . I mean, do you need . . .” He stopped, and she laughed.

“If you’re trying to ask if I’m okay financially, I am, really. Ellie thinks I’m irrational for stressing this much—she says we both knew it would be slow going in the beginning, but we started with a few anchor clients and we have money coming in and we both saved up a lot before we started this.” But she’d feel like such a failure if she had to dig even deeper into her savings. “And she’s right, but I guess I didn’t quite realize how uncertain it would all feel. Like all of it could disappear in an instant. I thought I’d feel more comfortable once we got our first new client, but it was for such a small case it didn’t make me feel much better. If only we could get a case from a bigger company—all we need is to get our foot in the door. I know we’d do a great job; we’re both excellent lawyers. We’ll see what happens with the pitch from today, but . . .” She shrugged. “I’m not feeling that optimistic.”

Max dished noodles on her plate and handed it to her.

“Here. Your favorite spicy noodles will help—the spice high will make you feel like a superhero.”

One of the things she liked so much about Max was that he didn’t try to give her a pep talk unless she asked for one, and he didn’t try to reassure her that everything would be fine. He just handed her spicy noodles. Which was exactly what she needed.

“Thanks,” she said. Which felt inadequate, for the noodles and the pie and the sympathy, but she knew he understood.

He picked up a spring roll and turned to her.

“So. I wanted to talk to you about something.”