“Kia showed up last night.”
“At your house?” Opal asked. “Why didn’t you call us?”
It hadn’t seemed fair to call her friends in the middle of the night after they’d already spent hours comforting her.
“Wedohave someone to sue.” Nina set her drink down and pulled out a tablet.
“We’re not suing Kia,” Sullivan said.
“What did she want?” Opal asked.
“She brought me a bottle of calvados and a Rice Krispies treat and asked me to marry her.”
Despite everything, it was fun to watch the sentence land. Nina and Opal looked at her, then at each other, then back at her.
“What?” her friends said in unison.
“Why did she propose marriage?” Nina asked, starting to look hungry. In Nina’s mind marriage meant divorce, and divorce was the expensive, Dior-scented water she swam in.
“Not that you aren’t a beautiful, talented woman who deserves love,” Opal added. “By the way, there’s a new guy working at my brother’s office. When this is all over—”
“No. No. No brother’s office.”
“But you can’t sue her,” Opal added. “You know how hard it is to get intoAmerican Fare, just to make it as a high-end chef. And as a Black woman! You can’t sue a young Black entrepreneur, even if you did kiss her—”
“I’m not suing Kia.” Sullivan slumped in her seat.
“So why did she want to marry you?” Nina asked.
“She came by to tell me how Mega Eats is going to run me out of business. I think she said they’ll crush me.”
“Romance is not dead,” Nina said.
“When did she come over?” Opal asked.
“After midnight.”
“In the storm?”
“She walked through the Bois.”
Sullivan could see the gold sparkling in Kia’s eyes. Kia wasn’t the culinary arts school ingenue anymore. She wasn’t awunderkind anymore. She was grown. She was a businesswoman. And even covered in mud, she was a force to be reckoned with. It wasn’t fair. They might have been friends if they’d reconnected in another way. Maybe there was an alternate reality where Sullivan messaged Kia.Congratulations on American Fare.Kia wrote back and somehow that tripped a fuse in the universe, the butterfly effect, and because of that, none of what happened had happened.
“Did you have hate sex?” Nina asked.
“No!”
“So Mega Eats is going to destroy you, and you should marry Kia because…?” Nina looked like her mind was racing through every possible scenario with the speed of a high-end laptop. She slapped her palm on the table. She’d arrived at the end of the calculation. “You’re a legacy landowner. If she marries you, she can buy the Bois.”
Nina’s enthusiasm was unnerving. The barista came by with complimentary tuiles because Nina lived in the high-rise above the coffee shop and probably spent more at Margino’s Coffee than any other customer.
“I like her.” Nina drew out the words, then punctuated the sentence by crunching a cookie in half. “That is smart. That’s even serving ruthless. She’ll do anything, with anyone to get what she wants. I’m feelingI do.”
“You think I should marry her because she’sruthless?”
Nina nodded as thoughruthlesswas high praise.
“And savvy. Decisive.”
