Maddie looked at the menu and laughed.

“Okay, but I don’t need to know much more than ‘burrata, bread, tomatoes’ to know that I want that. It’s like a deconstructed pizza!”

They ordered the squid, and the burrata, and a bunch of other things. Once they were halfway into a bottle of champagne, they found humor in everything around them. Or maybe he just got that way around Maddie these days.

“Don’t forget, Alexa assigned us the job to figure out the signature cocktail for the wedding,” Maddie said. “Who did you hire to be the bartender again?”

Theo laughed.

“One of the many bartenders my brother knows. I’ll ask her what she thinks, and hopefully we’ll get some taste tests out of this.”

They were halfway through their appetizers when Maddie looked across the room, jumped, and turned her whole body around to face the back of the restaurant.

“It’s Alexa!” Why she whispered in that loud hiss to him, he had no idea; the place was so noisy no one could hear anyone past their own table. “She’s over at the bar! What should we do? If I get up and go to the bathroom, it might draw her attention to me. But what if she’s waiting for a table? How can we get out of here without her seeing us?”

Theo turned from Maddie to look over at the bar at the entrance of the restaurant. What was Alexa doing here? She hadn’t said anything about going to San Francisco tonight. Well, maybe Drew had surprised her.

Wait. He saw a black woman at the bar, wearing a red floral dress like one Alexa would wear, but . . .

“That’s not Alexa,” he said to Maddie. “Not all short black women look alike, Madeleine.”

She glared at him and shook her head.

“I know that, asshole, but I also know how to recognize my best friend of more than twenty years.”

He kept eating the burrata and grilled bread appetizer.

“If you say so, but also, I promise you, Alexa does not have a tattoo on her forearm, and that woman does.” He narrowed his eyes. “Well, that’s either a tattoo or a big scar—I can’t quite tell from here, but either way, unless Alexa has some great makeup that she’s been using every day on her arm, that’s not her.”

Maddie turned back around and peered at the bar from behind the champagne bottle.

“Oh.” She sat up straight and took a gulp of champagne. “You’re right. That isn’t Alexa.”

He took another bite of the gooey cheese. It had suddenly stopped tasting as good.

She scooped up the rest of the burrata and put it on her plate.

“You have to admit, she looks a lot like Alexa. Same height, same hair, same skin color, and she has a dress just that color. Can you blame me for freaking out?”

He dropped his fork.

“Yeah, actually, I can. You were about three seconds from hiding under the table for the rest of dinner. What would you have done if that had actually been Alexa? Run to the bathroom and just stayed there all night? Would it be so bad if Alexa saw us here together?”

Come to think of it, why had one of her conditions from the beginning been that they never go out anywhere? Was this not about Alexa, but about something else altogether? Was she embarrassed to be with him?

She put down the piece of cheese-covered bread she’d been about to put in her mouth.

“Yes, of course it would be so bad if Alexa saw us here together. Come on now, we talked about this months ago. You know Alexa almost as well as I do; you know how she’d react. Maybe you want to deal with her acting like we’re meant for each other and then the fallout when we tell her that isn’t the case, but I sure as hell don’t.”

Right.When we tell her that isn’t the case. He guessed that answered the question of how Maddie felt about him. And about them.

How the hell had he gotten this involved with and—fine, he’d admit it to himself at least—attached to Maddie?

“Like you said, you know her better than I do,” he said when he finally looked up at her. “It just sort of makes me feel like I’m your dirty little secret, that’s all.”

He regretted that as soon as he’d said it. He didn’t need her pity compliments. And he definitely didn’t want her to know he’d gotten way too serious about all this.

He made himself laugh like he meant it and reached for his glass of champagne.

“On the other hand . . . being someone’s dirty little secret is kind of fun.”

Maddie didn’t trust that smile. She could tell he was pissed; he was looking everywhere in the restaurant instead of at her.

“Grilled squid with citrus and flageolet beans,” a waiter said, as he laid a plate down in the middle of the table. Theo mouthed “GRILLED” at her, and she looked down at her lap so she wouldn’t laugh.

When the waiter walked away, Theo shook his head.

“I don’t understand why they couldn’t tell us from the beginning that this squid was grilled.”

He was smiling, but she didn’t think he’d recovered that quickly from the hurt she’d seen in his eyes. But just like he always did, he’d jumped to the worst possible reason for her reaction to Not Alexa. That didn’t really put her in the mood to reassure him.

She wasn’t lying to him, but she wasn’t quite telling the truth, either, about why she didn’t want to tell Alexa, or anyone else, about them. But she didn’t know if she could explain it in words Theo would understand. Or if she even wanted to.

If she told Alexa, or her mom, or anyone else—it would change everything. This whole thing with him this summer had been so perfect. Even keeping the secret had turned out to be surprisingly fun. It felt like their own private thing, where they didn’t have to take each other as dates to things, or introduce each other to family and friends, or go out to dinner and drinks and parties and all that nonsense. It was just the two of them, without all the pretense that had gone into every other relationship she’d ever had. Just Maddie and Theo, being comfortable together. Sitting on the couch, making each other laugh, eating food they regretted later, talking about things that mattered to them. If she told people, it would ruin all of that. It would turn what they had, what they’d been doing, into something else, something she didn’t want. It would ruin everything.

She took a bite of the squid.

“No matter what the menu said about the squid, this is fantastic, and you know it.”

He picked up his fork.

“I haven’t even tried it yet. Give a man a second to take a bite!”

He made a face at her as he put the piece of squid in his mouth, and she relaxed a little. Maybe everything would be okay, and they’d go back to normal.

“Fine, now you’re right. This is amazing.”

She speared the tentacles with her fork and dangled them in the air. They both giggled like they were five years old.

The waitress came by and brought two more of their complicated-sounding but delicious-looking dishes to their table. They spent the rest of dinner speculating on which one of the waitresses was Ben’s ex, and loudly giggling whenever one of the prime suspects approached their table.

On the drive back across the bridge, Theo started talking about his big rally the following week and stopped himself.

“Sorry, I’ve been boring your ears off about this for months. I’ll stop now. I bet you’re glad that after next week you’ll never have to listen to me talking about this rally again.”

He’d never bored her when he talked about the rally. She didn’t know if he’d changed from the pedantic mansplainer she always thought he was, or if he was never that person in the first place. He just seemed passionate, or caring, or worried, or frustrated, or excited, sometimes at the same time.

“It’s okay, you can keep talking about it. I don’t mind. You’ve certainly listened to me talk for hours.” She pulled out her phone and checked her calendar. “Wait, speaking of—it’s next Thursday, right? What time?”

He glanced over at her with a questioning look on his face.

“Two in the afternoon. Why?”

Oh good, she didn’t have any clients scheduled yet that afternoon.

“Like you said, you’ve been talking about this rally all summer; now I feel like I’ll be missing something if I don’t come. Alexa’s always trying to get me to come to more events you guys do anyway, and I haven’t been to anything since Black History Month. And I’m a great woo girl. I cheer very loudly.”

The lights were bright on the bridge, bright enough for her to see the genuine smile on his face.

“You? A woo girl? I can’t picture that.”

She put a look of mock outrage on her face.

“Hey, I can woo with the best of them!”

He laughed.

“Yeah,” he said. “Come to the rally. Cheer us on and be a woo girl. I can’t wait to see this.”

She put her hand on top of his and squeezed.

Chapter Fifteen