Things had been weird between them for the past few days—she’d seemed to want to steer clear of him, and he never wanted to push himself where he wasn’t wanted, so he’d avoided her, too. But today, she’d kept looking over at him—which he obviously only noticed because he kept looking over at her—and had actually walked over to talk to him during the power outage. And now she was in his car.

“Oh,” Anna said. “I didn’t think of that. There’s a bar on the top floor of my hotel, but I’m not sure if it’s open at this hour. And I know the news is out that I’m here in San Francisco, and I’m not sure if I want to deal with being recognized today.”

Why was she here in his car, then?

“Normally, I’d say we could go sit on my deck, but you probably—”

“Oh, that’s perfect,” she said.

He hadn’t expected that.

“I’m going to warn you now, my place is kind of a mess,” he said, “but I promise, I can make an excellent cocktail.”

One of those things was a lie. His apartment wasn’t a mess at all—he’d cleaned it all day Saturday, with nothing else to do after he’d woken up and talked to Theo and emailed Dawn. But women were always very impressed when you called an almost-immaculate apartment “a mess.” For the most part, he tried not to play games like that—he’d tried some of those tricks to get dates when he was in his early twenties, and it just made him feel like an asshole. And then he’d realized all he really needed to do was listen to them and ask them questions and give them compliments that weren’t about their boobs (okay, not just about their boobs). He didn’t know why more people didn’t try that.

But small white lies to make himself look slightly better to someone like Anna felt like an exception.

“Oh, that’s okay,” Anna said. “After living in a hotel, being in an actual home will be nice. And the cocktail will be even better.”

“It’s still windy outside, but we can sit out on my little deck and pretend we’re at a beer garden,” he said. He turned down his block. No parking. Of course. Didn’t the universe know that he had Anna Gardiner in his car and should get a parking spot right in front of his building?

She scanned the street along with him.

“Is that . . . Oh no, it’s a hydrant, damn. Sitting outside sounds nice, and I have many scarves with me. I come prepared for San Francisco weather. Oh, look!”

Ben swiveled his head to where she pointed and saw the car pulling out on a side street. He quickly turned left and made it to the spot before anyone else could approach it.

“Nice job,” he said. “You haven’t lost it.”

“Haven’t lost what?” she said, in what he hoped was a mock-offended voice.

“The ability to sense an open parking spot. Come on, you’re not going to try to pretend you have to still look for parking now, are you? Doesn’t everywhere in L.A. have valet?”

She laughed, and he felt triumphant.

“Not everywhere, but okay, fine, this isn’t a skill I have to exercise that much anymore, that’s true.”

She wrapped her gray scarf around her neck and the bottom half of her face before they got out of the car, and she put the plain black sunglasses he’d gotten her at Target on, instead of her big flashy ones.

“You were right,” she said as they walked toward his building. “These are much better for purposes like this. No one looks at me twice.”

He wasn’t sure if that was a compliment on his strategy or a knock on his fashion sense.

“Next time you need to dress like a normal person, you know who to call,” he said, and she laughed.

“I’m this way,” he said when they got to his building. He gestured for her to go ahead of him and unlocked the front door. “Up here.”

He let her precede him up the stairs to his apartment.

Good God, why had he let this happen? She’d made it clear that she didn’t want a repeat of Palm Springs, and he understood that. But this was going to kill him.

“Make yourself at home,” he said as he opened the door of his apartment. That must have sounded ridiculous to someone who lived in what was probably an enormous gated house somewhere in L.A., and who was now walking into his spacious one-bedroom apartment. Everything about this was weird.

“What do you want to drink?” he asked.

“It’s cold outside.” She sat down on the couch. “Something that’ll warm me up.”

Well, that was vague and only slightly helpful. Thank God he did actually have excellent liquor on hand—all thanks to his brother, who’d told him he was ashamed to share bloodlines with Ben that time Ben had pulled a plastic jug of vodka out when Ben was twenty and Theo was a very-full-of-himself twenty-three. He’d given Ben expensive liquor for every birthday since. Now Ben could and did buy his own, but somehow the stuff Theo bought him was always far better.

He threw together Manhattans—one of the few cocktails he knew how to make—and poured the drinks into two glasses.

“Want to sit here or outside on the deck?”

Anna jumped up from the couch.

“The deck, definitely. At least, until I’m freezing and need to come back inside.”

She slid open the door to the deck, since both of his hands were full, and they both walked outside.

“The sun!” She looked up and then smiled at him. “Maybe it won’t be so cold out here after all.”

He set their drinks down on the small IKEA table he’d labored to put together.

“It’s the reason I live in the Mission—it’s too cold everywhere else in San Francisco. If the sun is going to come out, it comes out here first.”

She sat down and lifted her glass to him.

“To half days. I know I should be annoyed about this because it pushes the schedule back, but I feel like a kid who got let out of school early.”

He clinked her glass with his.

“Oh, this is good,” she said.

“One of my specialties,” he said. Then he laughed. “Another way to put that is that it’s one of the, like, three cocktails I know how to make.”

She laughed out loud, and something in the tone of her laughter dispelled the awkward feeling he’d had around her since Monday. He smiled.

He leaned back in his chair, and she did, too. They were side by side, looking out over the tiny garden next door, with the sun trying to break all the way through the clouds.

They didn’t talk much at first. They enjoyed the sun on their faces and the drinks in their hands and being there together.