Daniel called on a Tuesday, voice bright and easy the way it always was.
"Come to dinner Sunday," he said, no preamble, as if he were continuing a conversation they'd started days ago rather than beginning a new one. "Six o'clock. Chloe's making something with too much garlic, Ava's making the dessert, I'm doing absolutely nothing and taking full credit anyway."
Adrian, sitting at his desk with a contract half-read in front of him, felt something in his chest go still.
"Ava's making the dessert," he repeated.
"That a problem?"
"No." He said it too fast. He heard himself say it too fast and couldn't stop it. "No, of course not. Sunday works."
"Good man." A pause on the line, brief, considering. "You've gone quiet on me."
"I'm reading a contract."
"Sure, you are." Daniel didn't push, though he never did, not really, which was one of the things Adrian valued most about him. "Six o'clock. Don't be late, and don't bring anything that costs more than the house."
Adrian set the phone down after Daniel hung up and sat very still for a moment, staring at the contract without reading a word of it.
It's dinner with Daniel, he told himself. That's all it is.
He didn't fully believe it. He hadn't fully believed a version of that sentence in weeks now, if he was honest with himself, which he tried, mostly successfully, not to be.
He almost didn't go.
He stood in front of his closet Sunday evening longer than a grown man had any business standing in front of a closet, hand hovering between a button-down and something plainer, something he might have worn before any of this had started meaning anything.
He picked the sweater. Told himself it was because it was comfortable, not because he remembered, with unreasonable clarity, that Ava had seen him in something like it before and hadn't looked away from him the way she usually did.
He caught himself in the mirror before he left actually caught himself, hand paused on the doorframe, looking at his own reflection like it might have an answer for him.
It didn't. He left anyway.
Daniel pulled him into a hug at the door, the easy, unthinking kind that came from years of friendship, no hesitation in it at all, and something in Adrian's shoulders loosened the second Daniel's arm came around him. This was familiar. This, at least, he understood.
"You look tired," Daniel said, pulling back, studying him with the particular scrutiny of an old friend who'd earned the right to worry out loud.
"I'm fine."
"You're always fine. It's very annoying." Daniel took the wine bottle from his hands and turned toward the kitchen, waving him further into the house. "Come in, sit down, stop looking like you're about to close a business deal."
Adrian followed him in, and that was when he saw her.
Ava stood in the kitchen doorway, and for one unguarded second, before either of them arranged their faces into something more sensible, their eyes simply met and held.
She looked different here. Not the composed, capable version of her he watched navigate his lobby, and not the quietly professional version who called him Mr. Blackwood in meetings. Just Ava, in a soft green sweater, hair slightly loose from whatever she'd been doing in the kitchen, one hand curled loosely around a dish towel as she'd forgotten she was holding it.
"Ava," he said, and heard something in his own voice he didn't entirely recognize. Softer than he meant it to be. "Good to see you outside work for once."
"You too." Her fingers twisted briefly in the hem of her sleeve before she seemed to catch herself and let go. "I mean, good to see you. Here. Outside work."
He almost smiled. He caught it before it fully arrived, but only barely.
Dinner unspooled easily, the way it always did at Daniel's table.
"So there we are," Daniel said, leaning forward, hands moving through the air the way they always did when a story really got going, "twenty-three years old, and this one" a fork pointed accusingly across the table" convinced the entire front desk staff he was fluent in French because he memorized four phrases off a cereal box."
"It was a very convincing four phrases," Adrian said, and felt his own mouth curve without deciding to let it.
He hadn't told this story in years. He'd forgotten how much he liked hearing Daniel tell it: the exaggerated gestures, the delighted pauses, the way Chloe laughed so hard she had to set her fork down, the way Ava's laugh rang out across the table, unguarded and bright in a way he rarely got to hear.
He felt himself relax by degrees as the meal went on. His shoulders, usually held with the careful discipline of a man who was watched all day, loosened without his permission. He leaned back in his chair. He let his sleeves stay pushed up instead of straightening them. He argued lightly with Daniel over the exact details of an old, well-worn story, enjoying the argument itself more than the outcome.
This, he thought, somewhere in the middle of it. This was what he was missing most nights, standing alone at his kitchen window with tea he didn't want. Not the food. Not even really the company, though he was grateful for it. Just this. Ease. A table where nobody needed anything from him.
He let himself have it, for one evening, without examining it too closely.
It happened during dessert.
Ava was laughing at something Daniel said, head tipped back slightly, one hand pressed lightly to her collarbone, and Adrian found his eyes drawn to her before he'd consciously decided to look.
He watched the way her laugh reached her eyes before it reached anything else. The way her shoulders relaxed when she forgot, for a moment, to be careful around him. The small furrow that appeared between her brows when Daniel's story took an unexpected turn, gone again the instant she understood the punchline.
He hadn't meant to watch this long. He realized it a half-second too late realized it exactly when her eyes swept back across the table and caught him mid-stare, unguarded, nothing between them but a few feet of table and a candle burning low.
He felt his expression close over fast, a door swinging shut before either of them could examine what had been standing behind it.
"Good story, right?" he said, reaching for his water glass, keeping his voice level, ordinary, the voice of a man who hadn't just been caught looking at his best friend's daughter like she was something worth looking at.
"Right," she said, a little unsteady. "Great story."
Daniel kept talking, oblivious, already three sentences into another old memory. Chloe's eyes flicked between the two of them, sharp and curious, though she said nothing.
Adrian made himself look down at his plate. Made himself focus on the food, on Daniel's voice, on anything that wasn't the warmth still sitting low in his chest from being caught.
It doesn't mean anything, he told himself, the same tired line he'd been repeating for weeks now, worn thin from overuse. She's twenty-two. She's Daniel's daughter. This is nothing.
He lasted almost four minutes before he looked up again.
She wasn't watching him that time. He told himself the small, unreasonable drop in his chest at that was nothing worth naming either.
He mostly believed it. Mostly.