Wes gave him a smug smile that Max was sure his political opponents hated.

“See, I knew all you needed was a snack.”

Max would get furious at Wes’s treating him like a damn toddler, but he knew he deserved it. Plus . . . maybe he had needed a snack.

“That’s exactly right,” Wes continued. “In order to get her back, you need to tell her how you’re going to fix this, how the two of you can fix this together.” He looked at Max for a long moment. “Do you think you can? Fix this, I mean?”

Max closed his eyes.

“I don’t know. Maybe she’s decided there’s nothing I can do, maybe she wants nothing to do with me or politics or anyone who has ever had their name in the paper, but I’ve got to try. I’ve got to see if there’s a way around or through this for us.” He winced. “Why didn’t I realize that before? Am I that self-centered?” He looked at Wes. “Please don’t answer that.”

Wes patted him on the shoulder.

“It’s not important how long you took to get to the party, what’s important is that you got here at all. And if I can give you some advice . . .”

“ ‘If,’ he says, like there’s any way I could stop him from doing it,” Max said to his water glass.

Wes kept talking like he’d heard nothing.

“Take your time with this. She doesn’t like snap decisions; be thoughtful on this one, as much as it kills you.”

Max grinned.

“Speaking of, I think I forgot to tell you I almost proposed to her on the spur of the moment when we went to Hawaii. Scratch that—I would have proposed to her, but she stopped me.”

Wes turned to face Max, his mouth wide open.

“Yeah,” Max said. “So. You’re probably right about taking my time with this.”

A few minutes later, the buzzer rang.

“And there’s our food,” Wes said. “I’m warning you, I got a salad and I’m going to make you eat at least ten bites of it before you have any pizza.”

Max ignored that. He’d just remembered something Olivia said a long time ago. He might have an idea of how to do this.

But he still had to figure out what to say to make her realize how serious he was about her, about them. And the biggest question was, would she be willing to give this another try, despite everything?

God, he hoped so.

Chapter Twenty-One

In the two and a half weeks since she’d broken up with Max, Olivia had tried to be angry. It was always easier to get over something—or someone—when you were angry at them. Pure, righteous anger, that’s what she needed. She thought of that moment when he’d looked at her across the auditorium with that patented charming smile, to try to get her to talk publicly about her arrest, and she hoped she’d feel that wave of fury she did at the time. But instead, all she could feel was sorrow.

How had she let herself fall in love with Max in the first place? He’d been determined to date her from the very beginning, but she’d known they wouldn’t work—she should have listened to herself. And now she just missed him so damn much.

Just to get it over with, she’d sent Alexa and Jamila identical text messages on that Monday afterward: “Max and I broke up, I don’t want to talk about it.” Jamila had obeyed her command and hadn’t asked her a single question about it, and so had Alexa . . . for the first few days. After that, she’d somehow gotten Olivia to spill the whole story to her. She was fiercely on Olivia’s side, but also kept beating the whole “don’t give up on love” drum, which Olivia ignored.

She decided to go back to the New York version of Olivia, without all these damn ups and downs. Yes, fine, the ups had been incredible, but the downs weren’t worth it. Some combination of dating Max and moving back to California had made her emotions so heightened, and she was sick of it. She tried to put Max out of her mind, to go to the gym and work and home and the gym again and get up and do it all over again. And, for the love of God, to stop feeling her damn feelings.

She still thought about Max constantly, but keeping busy helped. Those first few nights she cried herself to sleep, but after a while she didn’t even have the energy to do that.

And then one night at the gym, as she flipped channels to find something to watch while she ran on the treadmill, she accidentally turned it to MSNBC. And there was Max. A surge of happiness went through her as she heard his voice. It felt like an automatic, instinctual reaction; apparently her body hadn’t caught up to her brain. She’d been so used to being happy when she saw him, it was hard to remember she was supposed to be sad now. She stared hungrily at the tiny screen. She stopped flipping, turned off the treadmill, and just stood there watching him. She’d missed him so much. When his segment ended and they cut to commercial, she realized tears were streaming down her face.

After that night, she watched the news every single night to see if she could get a glimpse of him. God bless cable TV bookers who were so susceptible to perfect hair and charming grins—he was on at least two weeknights out of five. He always had something smart to say, and seemed like he was always in a great mood . . . though was it just her imagination he’d lost weight? It probably was. Maybe he’d already found someone else. Someone who lived in DC and could be around all week with him and didn’t have a job that got in the way and who liked impulsive romantic gestures and would beam and wave at the press like she’d been doing it her whole life.