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"Did she keep the secret, your Diablo secret?" Theo asks.

"Almost four hours. Personal best." I put the phone face-down. "She's really coming around."

Beck stretches, all easy male confidence, and folds his hands behind his head. "So," he says. "Same time tomorrow?"

And I feel the old reflex rise up, to say something careful, something small, keep a little of myself back just in case.

I don't.

"Tomorrow," I say. "My place. Lights on."

Then I laugh again, loud, and real, balls out, and this time, all three guys get to lie there and watch me do it.

EPILOGUE

BECK

There's one person alive I've never been able to predict, and right now, I'm watching her organize her own bookshelf at nine on a Tuesday. She’s humming, wearing my shirt with nothing under it, and I could not tell you what she's going to do next if you held a gun to my head.

And I have never been happier.

Her place. Not ours but hers. She was clear about that the day she signed the lease on a one-bedroom with real windows and a kitchen that isn't a hot plate.

"You three can visit," she said. "You cannot move in. A girl needs a door she gets to close."

So we orbit. Some nights, it's all three of us. Some nights, it's one. She runs the schedule, and not one of us has ever gotten a vote.

She did do one thing to me at the office, and that was point out our associate, Sloane Whitaker.

I spent three years calling that woman sharp and handing the real work to men half as good, and I never once saw what I was doing until Agnes said it to my face. Flat. "You've got the best strategic mind in your building answering to idiots because she's decorative. Fix it, or admit what you are." So I put Sloane on the Hartwell account, the one I'd have died before trusting to anybody but myself. She closed it in six weeks and made me look slow. She's running her own team now, gunning for partner, and God help the firm when she gets it.

Agnes takes full credit. She should. Well, aside from Sloane’s massive talent.

Agnes catches me watching her. "You're doing the face," she says.

"What face?"

"The one where the great Beck Cross realizes he'd sign the whole firm over to his old receptionist if she asked nicely." She slots the last book into place. "Relax, HouseMoney. I don't want your firm. I've got my own thing to build."

That's the part I love. She doesn't want the tower. Never did. I keep waiting to find the angle, the ask, the thing she's actually after. But there doesn’t seem to be one. There's just her, in her own place, with her own door, letting us in because she wants to.

Everybody gets the version of me they want. She's the only one who ever got the truth. She’s the only one I ever wanted to give it to.

ELIAS

Beck is a talker. Theo is a talker. Not me. I get by on as few words as a situation allows, and I'm not going to start spilling my guts now just because I finally have someone worth the trouble.

So. Facts.

Agnes laughs and it’s not a careful, stifled laugh. It’s the real one, the boisterous one I caught the first night she ever went live, on a camgirl site that rearranged my life. Now I hear that laugh because Theo said something stupid, or the cat she is not technically allowed to have knocked something off the counter. I don't comment when it happens. I stop whatever I'm doing and listen, every time, like it's the first time I've heard it.

She's building something. Her own site. Creators first, her rules, none of the machinery that skimmed a cut off every dollar she clawed together from CamALot. She didn't ask me for money. She asked me to look at the numbers because she knows I can smell a bad deal from across a room. I've spent most nights this month up until two with a woman who used to route my calls. We’re now arguing margins. Her sister, who is a lot, keeps interrupting, bringing up random things about goats and yoga. I don’t know what the hell she’s talking about but I follow Agnes’s lead and just humor her.

There’s nowhere else I’d rather be.

People assume the quiet guys like me don't feel much. It's the reverse. I feel all of it, all the time, at a volume I've spent my life keeping off my face. The alternative is showing the world exactly where to put the knife and I’m not down with that.

She saw it anyway. Saw the whole of me from behind a front desk before I ever said a word to her, and she didn't use it. She moved in close and stayed.