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My arm aches where his fingers were. I don’t reach for it.

“You okay?”

I turn.

The blond guy is looking at me now — actually looking at me — and his expression has changed from the controlled nothing he had pointed at Evan to something less strategic. More direct. Blue eyes, which I register and then don’t do anything with.

“Fine.” The word comes out steadier than I feel.

“Your arm⁠—”

“Is fine.”

He holds my gaze for a moment. He doesn’t push it, which I note.

“Thank you.” I make myself say it. “For the intervention.”

“He wasn’t letting go.”

“No,” I agree. “He wasn’t.”

A pause. Not uncomfortable, exactly. The quality of silence between two people who have just shared something they didn’t plan to share and are both figuring out what to do with that.

I should find my friends. Margo and June are still somewhere in the living room, and Wren’s situation looked like it needed addressing twenty minutes ago, and I want to go home with a thoroughness that has upgraded from preference to physical need.

“I’m Beau.” He offers it like it’s nothing.

Something clicks into place.

Not loudly. Just the soft, internal click of a thing settling into context — the pieces I had separately, assembling themselves in the space of about two seconds.

Beau.

Beau Sorensen.

Margaret’s Beau.

I look at him. I take him in properly for the first time, which I have been actively avoiding doing, for reasons that made a lot more sense thirty seconds ago. The dirty blond hair. The blue eyes. The build, which Margaret once described as he takes after his father, who was very large, which you’d know if you followed hockey, which I know you don’t.

I have worked in his grandmother’s bookshop for two years.

I have heard about him approximately four hundred times.

I have also, just now, watched him back down a Division 1 athlete in his own living room using only a flat voice and a willingness to hold his ground, and I am choosing not to have a reaction to that.

“Sloane.” I give him only that.

Something crosses his face. Quick — a half-second recalibration, the look of a person who has just placed a name they’ve heard before and is now matching it to a face.

“Margaret’s Sloane,” he says.

“Is that how she describes me?”

“More or less.” The edge of his mouth moves. Not quite a smile. The shape of one. “She mentioned you.”

“She mentions you too.” I let it land dry. “Constantly.”

“Yeah.” He exhales. “I know.”