Page 85 of Shades of Grey & Gold

“He makes my coffee right,” I blurt, which is not the thing I meant to say.

She looks at me like I grew a second head.

“I know that sounds small,” I backtrack. “But Patrick never once—”

“Oh, I know.” She makes a mocking face at his name.

“And Cal pushed me toward law school. He put the pamphlets there before he said anything about it. He was just—” I stop, my face heating as I pause on the memory of finding the pamphlets while straddling him on my desk. “He was waiting for me to find them myself. He wasn’t going to push; he was just making sure the door was open.”

Becca is quiet for a moment.

“So… He’s smart,” she whispers. “Funny. Kind, when he thinks no one’s watching.” She ticks these off on her fingers, watching my face. “He makes your coffee right. He got you a reading chair. He waited forty-five years to basically—what? Give you the world?”

“He didn’t wait, exactly. He had a whole—”

“He waited,” she says firmly. “The other stuff was just time passing. He waited, Max, he bought the penthouse by the river and waited.”

I look out the window at the city. It’s cold outside, snowy; it’s bright and the street is full of people moving through their own lives and for once I don’t feel like I’m watching everyone else’s life from a window I can’t open.

“Yeah,” I agree. “He waited.”

And the realization is striking. Because I hadn’t considered it that way. He had a million other things going on. But he did wait. He waited to find me. And now that we are here in this together, it feels like we are both on the same page—and that page is refusing to let go of each other again.

Sunday dinner is Becca’s Christmas gift to herself, she announces, which means she has decided she is coming and nobody was allowed to veto her decision.

“All I want is a traditional mafia dinner one time—” She puts her hand up before Cal can respond or correct her. “Or whatever, Sunday dinner, or whatever you call it.”

Cal looks at me after she says it. I look at him.

“The more the merrier,” he responds without hesitation, which makes something warm bloom in my chest because I know it’s true and I know he means it when it comes to Becca.

The Renzetti house at Christmas is a force.

Carmela has been baking cookies for three days preparing for Christmas tomorrow, but Christmas Eve falls on a Sunday, so dinner at her house tonight it is.

There is a tree in the corner of the living room that is either professionally decorated—or Sophia was very serious about aesthetics—and there are candles everywhere. The smell of the house is garlic and pine and something baking that I can’t identify.

Becca whispers to me as we walk through the foyer that the scent alone may make her stay forever.

She walks into the kitchen and immediately starts complimenting everything with the enthusiasm of someone raised by a mother who baked everything from scratch and takes cooking very personally. Carmela is won over within sixty seconds. I clock this and laugh, shaking my head at how Becca fits seamlessly in the penthouse with me and Cal, but also fits in here, too.

Nico arrives late. Which surprises no one.

He comes through the back door with snow on his jacket that he is trying, and failing, to wipe off. He immediately stands up straighter when he notices a new person standing at the kitchen island helping Sophia separate egg whites with the confidence of someone who’s done it a hundred times.

He stops when he does a double take of Becca.

I watch him look at her. It’s a brief thing, barely a second. Then his face rearranges into something easy, unbothered, and he keeps moving. And I probably imagined it.

He says something to Becca to introduce himself—easy, casual, the Nico Renzetti charm that he turns on with automatic precision—and she turns to look at him.

She looks him up and down, makes eye contact with me, and I see the gears turning in her mind. She says something back that I can’t hear, and his easy smile goes a little uncertain, which is the least Nico thing I have ever witnessed.

Cal appears at my shoulder.

“What are you looking at?” he whispers it into my ear, his breath tickling the skin there.

“Nothing,” I whisper back, which is exactly what he says to me in identical circumstances, and I watch his face as he follows my eyeline and sees what I was looking at and stands as straight as Nico did moments ago.