(Sean's POV)
I hold the restaurant door for a woman my mother chose and feel the evening settle over me like a suit cut for someone else. Perfect fit. Nobody home.
Celeste Marlowe steps through. She thanks me. Her voice is warm — genuinely warm, not performing it — and something in the ease of it tells me this is not a trial for her. A blind date at her mother's friend's insistence is just an evening. I follow her inside. The maître d' appears. I give my name. We are led to a table by the window — velvet curtains, candlelight, the hush of money being spent quietly.
I pull out her chair. She sits. I sit across from her. The table is small enough that our knees could touch if we moved wrong. We do not move wrong.
She is beautiful. This is a fact the way the menu is a fact — present, obse
