Adrien Moretti stood up from the corner table. The heavy wool of his suit jacket fell back into place against his shoulders. Around him, the Ferrante’s private dining room was suddenly too small, too bright, too loud with the collective, suspended breath of every waiter, busboy, and diner within twenty feet.

Elena stood just beyond the threshold of the room, her hand still raised from the car door.

She was smaller than he had expected from Dante’s descriptions—shorter, finer-boned, her dark hair pinned up with a carelessness that suggested she had pulled it back with one hand while holding a spatula in the other. Her red dress, the one her mother had given her before the world narrowed down to a bakery and three cribs, hung on her frame with a kind of desperate, elegant grace. Her coat was half-buttoned. A smudge of powdered sugar dusted the left lapel like winter frost.

She stopped walking when she saw him.

The girls did not run to her. They parted for her with the synchronized discipline of a royal guard, stepping aside to let their mother through the gap in the table settings.

"Adrien," she said.

Her voice wasn't the trembling, breathless panic of a woman caught in a lie. It was tired—the specific, bone-deep exhaustion of someone who had spent thirty-six hours straight on her feet and had just realized the floor was about to give way.

"You didn't have to wait," she said, her hand dropping to her side. "Dante told me you were punctual to the minute. I... the wedding cake for the Judge’s daughter. The meringue collapsed because of the humidity from the storm. I couldn't leave it. If it had gone out looking like that, they would have pulled my license by morning."

Adrien didn't answer immediately. He stepped past the corner of the table, his leather soles clicking against the checkerboard tiles. He stopped three feet from her. Close enough to smell the vanilla extract on her skin beneath the rain.

"Your daughters," he said, his voice level, "are very thorough investigators."

Elena’s eyes widened slightly. She looked past his shoulder toward the small table where the pink notebook still lay open beside the water glasses, its cover curling from Sophie’s thumbprint.

"Did they... did they give you the questions?"

"Every one," Adrien said. "We discussed cooking. We discussed my respiratory habits during sleep. We discussed your kitchen habits at two in the morning."

A strange, sharp color rose in Elena’s cheeks—not the blush of a girl on a first date, but the hot, defensive flush of a mother whose territory has been inspected without permission. "They shouldn't have been in here. I told them to wait in the sedan until I parked. I was five minutes away—"

"Twenty-six minutes," Adrien corrected. "According to Sophie’s scorekeeper."

Elena closed her eyes. Just for a second. The long, dark lashes hit her cheekbones, and for a heartbeat, Adrien saw the woman from the kitchen table—the one who sat alone with the cold coffee while the city slept around her.

"I am sorry," she whispered. "This was a mistake. Dante meant well, but I don't... I don't have time for this. I don't have time to sit in a room with a man who looks like he owns three blocks of the waterfront and wonder if he's going to audit my grocery receipts."

"I own four blocks," Adrien said quietly.

She snapped her eyes open.

"And I don't audit grocery receipts," he continued, taking another half-step closer. "I have people for that."

Before she could retreat, Lily tugged at the hem of Elena’s red dress.

"Mommy," the middle twin said with absolute gravity. "He said he likes us."

Elena looked down at her daughter, then slowly back up at Adrien. The coldness in her gaze had melted into something far more dangerous—uncertainty.

"He passed?" she asked, her voice dropping an octave.

"He didn't lie," Emma said from behind her mother’s left knee, her gray-green eyes fixed on Adrien’s belt buckle. "He said he doesn't know you yet. But he said he won't lie about who he is."

Adrien looked down at the smallest girl. He felt a cold prickle at the base of his neck—the old instinct, the one that had kept him alive through twenty years of harbor wars and family blood-lettings. A wise man did not let himself be anchored by three children in red dresses and a baker with sugar on her collar.

A wise man turned around, got into his town car, and went back to the office where things were clean, predictable, and lethal.

Instead, he reached out, took Elena’s cold, flour-dusted hand from the fold of her coat, and turned her toward the table.

"Sit down, Elena," he said. "The appetizer is cold, but the wine is still breathing."