Chapter Text
It happens on a Friday night.
Friday nights mean dinner with Emily.
It’s become a recurring ritual in this newly-formed friendship. Andy can’t call it a tradition yet. They are, after all, only nine months into whatever this is. Every time Andy says the “F” word within Emily’s vicinity, Emily still looks like she’s trying to hold off an aneurysm.
At first, the dinners were invitations.
Andy asked Emily out to dinner once, and because Emily is Emily, she immediately turned reciprocation into a silent competition. Andy was more than happy to keep up.
After the seventh dinner, the invitations stopped.
The dinners didn’t.
Texting on a Friday afternoon used to mean confirming plans.
Now, texting means something has come up.
Meeting’s running late. Will make it up to you tomorrow.
Still at the office. Rain check?
But sometimes, it’s:
Bronwyn’s come down with the flu.
Roark had a minor accident during football practice.
Or:
Lily’s demanding a girl’s night out.
Once it was:
So I’m stuck in an elevator.
No texts two hours before dinner, however, means Andy clocking out at five on the dot. It means taking a cab directly to a townhome in the West Village. It means using her copy of the key to let herself in before greeting Myrna with her usual variation of, "Thank you so much for watching over them tonight."
No texts means dropping onto the couch between Bronwyn and Roark and asking about quiz bowls and soccer practices.
It means Roark absentmindedly throwing his legs across her lap while watching television and Andy retaliating by tickling the soles of his feet until he’s yelling through laughter, “Andy, stop it! Fine, I won’t do it again!”
Which they both know is a lie.
It means the front door opens.
It means Emily walking in with windswept auburn hair and the sound of New York trailing in behind her.
It means Emily looking up, seeing Andy, and pausing.
Always pausing.
Like she still isn’t expecting to find Andy here. Like, somehow, nine months later, she still can’t quite believe Andy is in her living room with Roark’s feet in her lap and Bronwyn already trying to shove her brother aside to make room for herself.
Emily always recovers quickly enough that no one notices.
No one except Andy.
No texts means dinner begins before they even leave the townhouse.
It begins with Emily standing in front of the mirror fastening an earring while Andy leans against a wall pretending not to stare.
“You’re wearing that coat?” Emily asks.
Andy frowns down at her gabardine trench. “What’s wrong with my coat?”
Emily looks up from her earring instead of replying, eyes sweeping over Andy once. Then she disappears back into her closet without explanation. A Saint Laurent wool coat comes flying out of the closet entrance a second later and nearly hits Andy directly in the face.
“Wear that.”
Andy catches it awkwardly. “You know we’re not supposed to throw coats at people anymore, right?”
Emily walks back out adjusting the cuffs of her blouse. “I didn't throw it at you. I released it in your general direction. What happened after that is between you and your instincts.”
Andy grins helplessly while slipping it on. It smells faintly like Chanel No. 19.
No texts means Emily ushering Andy toward the door with one hand pressed lightly against the small of her back. The touch lasts barely a second.
No texts means dinner begins in the backseat of the town car.
It begins with Emily removing her heels the moment the privacy divider rolls up.
Andy watches this happen once, twice, three Fridays in a row before finally blurting out, “You take your shoes off in the car?”
Emily flexes her stockinged feet with visible relief. “I’m not performing femininity for you, Andrea. My feet hurt.”
Somehow that statement feels more intimate than if Emily had confessed a secret.
Because dinner isn’t just food and wine and shallow conversations over warm, low lights.
Dinner is:
“Hang on, you alphabetize your spices?”
“It’s efficient.”
“Efficient—Em, you own three different salts alone.”
“And every one of them serves a purpose.”
“Name one.”
Emily points at her without hesitation. “Finishing salt.”
Andy laughs so hard the waiter startles beside their table.
Dinner is learning to navigate each other’s lives after all the years they missed.
It’s Emily casually revealing she still keeps a handwritten paper planner because “digital calendars encourage laziness.”
It’s Andy admitting she stress-cleans her apartment at two in the morning before major deadlines.
Dinner is Emily discovering Andy has no defense against sad animals in any format.
It’s:
“Andy, that was a poster for a shelter fundraiser.”
“The dog was looking out a window.”
“It was a photograph.”
“A photograph of a dog longing for his forever home, Em. What’s not clicking?”
“You’re banned from stepping foot into shelters.”
“You can’t just decide that!”
“It’s for the animals’ sake.”
Dinner is Emily sending Andy photos from department stores with captions like, Hideous. Thoughts?
And Andy responding, Burn it.
Dinner is Andy forwarding bizarre article headlines at one in the morning solely because she knows it’ll make Emily sigh dramatically over her reading comprehension.
Andy no longer laughs too loudly on purpose to fill silence.
Emily no longer pretends she isn’t tired.
Sometimes they sit in complete silence between courses without discomfort touching either of them at all.
Maybe Friday night dinners didn’t start with Andy’s invitation.
Maybe it started nine months ago with:
Did you know that I called you?
Their conversation drifts the way it always seems to now. Effortlessly bouncing between topics with the ease of two people who have long since stopped needing to pretend around one another.
Work comes first, naturally. It always does.
Andy tells Emily about the catastrophe currently unfolding in Runway’s digital department. Someone uploaded the wrong draft of a campaign article and accidentally referred to a luxury handbag as “surprisingly affordable.”
“Affordable,” Emily repeats flatly.
“I know.”
“Have they started planning the funeral?”
“She's still alive. Though the department head was called in, and apparently whatever Miranda said to him made three other people cry secondhand.”
Emily hums, then leans back slightly in her chair. “We once had a man refer to one of our tote bags as ‘practical.’”
“That sounds… normal?”
“That man no longer has a job.”
“Oh.”
“We don’t do ‘practical.’ We do ‘everyday luxury with emotional intelligence.’”
Andy squints at her. “You just made that up.”
“It’s in a deck. Six slides in.”
The restaurant lamps hang low over the tables, warming polished silver and the deep red of Emily’s wine. That same light gathers over her in pieces. First in her eyes, catching there briefly before she lowers them. It slips through the auburn fall of her hair, draws a line over her cheekbones and the elegant set of her jaw. It softens at her mouth where her lipstick has miraculously lasted despite dinner.
There’s always something unreasonably elegant about the way Emily exists in spaces like this. Like she was designed specifically for fancy restaurants and expensive lighting.
Their appetizers disappear gradually. Emily steals two bites of Andy’s truffle fries without asking. Andy retaliates by stealing half the burrata off Emily’s plate while maintaining direct eye contact.
Emily cocks an eyebrow. “That costs thirty-two dollars.”
“Tonight, that’s a you problem,” Andy says, completely unapologetic.
“You’re lucky my children are fond of you.”
Somewhere between the main course arriving and Emily describing, with great restraint and very little mercy, a design review so misguided it had briefly made her miss Miranda’s standards, the conversation veers into celebrity memoirs.
“I’m telling you,” Andy says, cutting into her salmon, “the moment a celebrity calls the book ‘raw and unfiltered’ in the introduction, I start preparing for heavy filtration.”
Emily lifts her glass. “Perhaps they mean emotionally raw.”
“They usually mean no one talked them out of comparing fame to exile.”
“That does sound painful.”
“Emily.”
“What? I’m being sympathetic.”
“You’re being British. There’s a difference between sincerity and a ghostwriter being held hostage by brand management.”
Emily takes a slow sip of wine, fully unconvinced. “You say that as though journalists don’t have their own little tricks.”
“We do. We call them structure.”
“You call them structure when you do it. When anyone else does it, you call it narrative manipulation.”
“That’s because we do it better.”
“And yet,” Emily says, setting her wine down, “you cried over that excerpt from the actor who wrote about his childhood dog.”
Andy pauses with her fork halfway to her mouth. “That was different.”
“It was a Labrador named Biscuit.”
“Exactly,” Andy says, wounded by the fact that Emily apparently needs this explained. “No one names a dog Biscuit by accident. That’s a setup.”
“I think I’m beginning to understand your critical method. ‘Protect all fictional and nonfictional dogs at any cost.’”
Andy points her fork at Emily, then seems to realize this is doing very little for her dignity and lowers it again. “It’s a valid lens.”
“It’s a biased lens.”
“It’s a never-failed-me-before lens.”
“You told me once you refused to finish an article because the profile subject mentioned an elderly rescue spaniel.”
“Yeah, a spaniel with cataracts, Em.”
“That was mentioned in passing.”
Andy leans forward, frustration building into something almost scholarly. “There’s no such thing as a spaniel mentioned in passing.”
Emily laughs then. Though short, it sounds bright and unguarded. It still feels like winning something whenever Andy draws that laugh out of Emily. Some rare, ridiculous prize Emily never means to hand over and Andy is always embarrassingly proud to have earned.
Andy recovers just in time to grin. “That’s at least three points for me.”
Emily’s face rearranges itself into neutrality far too late to be convincing. “Don’t make this insufferable.”
“I’m already making a mental note.”
Emily asks, equal parts disgusted and mortified, “You… keep score?”
“Oh, constantly.” Andy leans back, delighted. “You laughed so hard at my joke last month you snorted champagne through your nose.”
Emily stops.
The restaurant carries on around them.
Andy beams.
“You promised never to mention that again.”
“Doesn’t make it any less true.”
“That is vile.”
“Oh, stop. You adore me.”
Emily's expression goes unreadable and Andy feels the back of her neck warm before she's worked out why.
Then Emily says, devoid of any incriminating inflection, “Unfortunately.”
The waiter clears their plates. Dessert menus appear and are immediately ignored. Andy’s halfway through telling Emily about the disaster currently unfolding between Runway’s marketing and creative departments when she notices it.
The shift.
The shift is small enough to miss. The set of Emily's shoulders changes, and her fingers, which had been slowly circling the rim of her wine glass, go still. The change is subtle, but Andy has spent the past nine months learning Emily Charlton in patterns and pieces.
This is apprehension.
It makes Andy curious. It makes her want to smile reassuringly, reach across the table, lay a hand over Emily’s, and say, “Hey. It’s okay. You can tell me anything.”
But Andy doesn’t do that because she has also learned that emotional vulnerability with Emily is a choreography. It’s a careful, delicate dance of advancing and retreating at exactly the right moments. Push too hard and Emily folds back into herself like nothing ever happened at all.
So Andy pivots gracefully toward safer ground.
“Somebody in Creative used the wrong font for the landing page,” Andy says lightly, continuing her story as though she hasn’t noticed anything at all, “and somehow it’s devolved into this ridiculous three-department civil war.”
Emily nods at the appropriate moments, hums softly into her wine glass, but she’s elsewhere entirely. Andy can practically see it. Emily’s thoughts moving several steps ahead of the conversation while the rest of her struggles to catch up.
Their wine glasses are refilled.
Emily wraps long, elegant fingers around the stem of hers but doesn’t drink. Instead, she taps one painted fingernail against the crystal once. Then twice. A quiet metallic tick tick beneath the low murmur of the restaurant.
Emily looks up, and whatever she was about to say doesn't quite make it out.
Andy buys her time by taking a slow sip of wine, already preparing another anecdote she can throw onto the table if Emily decides she isn’t ready after all.
But Emily keeps looking at her like she’s searching for something in Andy’s face.
Andy doesn’t know what she’s looking for, but she doesn’t hide anything from her. Doesn’t think she ever really could.
Hide a feeling for once.
“Andy.”
“Mm?”
“You’ll tell me if you’re planning on seeing anyone, yes?”
Emily phrases it like a question, but it settles with the weight of a statement. It sounds like the question itself is only a formality. Or maybe a rehearsal. A way to force the words out sideways instead of directly.
Andy feels something small and sharp tighten minutely beneath her ribs.
Still, she smiles easily enough. “Yeah, of course.”
It’s not as though they’ve never talked about relationships before. They’ve spent entire dinners exchanging stories about disastrous first dates, difficult divorces, regrettable exes, and awkward kisses in parking garages.
But this feels different.
This is the first time they’ve spoken about the future tense of it all.
About other people who haven’t happened yet.
Emily leans back in her chair, cradling her wine glass loosely in one hand. She swirls the wine once, watching the dark red curve against the crystal instead of looking at Andy.
Andy leans forward. “Hey,” she says softly, “What’s this about?”
Emily’s hesitation is unsettling in a way Andy can’t fully explain. Emily is decisive by nature. Even her uncertainty usually arrives sharp-edged and controlled. This fumbling pause between words feels unfamiliar enough to make Andy uneasy.
Emily still hasn’t said anything else, but Andy is still a journalist at the end of the day. Patterns, implications, and context clues.
You’ll tell me if you’re planning on seeing anyone, yes?
The answer is already sitting there between them.
For the first time in nine months Andy realizes maybe there’s something she doesn’t want to hear from Emily.
Because she always wants to hear everything from Emily.
Except, apparently, this.
“I met someone.”
Andy blinks.
Once.
Twice.
Her fingers tighten fractionally around the stem of her wine glass. She swallows. Pulls in a breath that feels strangely shallow in her lungs.
“That’s great, Em,” she means to say immediately. Brightly, effortlessly. “Tell me everything.”
Instead, what comes out is small and terribly honest.
“Oh.”
Emily is looking at her again with that same searching expression, and Andy’s close to asking what exactly she’s trying to find there if only to get her to stop. Wants to ask badly enough that it nearly climbs out of her throat.
She doesn’t do that.
Andy doesn’t hide things from Emily. Wanting her to stop means there’s something there that Andy doesn’t want Emily to see.
Andy doesn’t know what that is.
Someone.
Specific. Singular. Important enough to make Emily nervous.
For the first time since learning the steps to this dance between them, Andy realizes she has absolutely no idea what comes next.
So Andy improvises.
She falls neatly into the role she knows best. A supportive friend. Best friend, even if Emily would sooner walk directly into oncoming traffic than admit to such a thing aloud.
This is what friends do, isn’t it? They gush over new romantic prospects. They tease each other over chemistry and grand sweeping gestures of romance on New York sidewalks under streetlamps and rain.
Except Andy is entering unfamiliar territory here, and for perhaps the second—third, fourth?—time in her life, she isn’t entirely confident she knows how to perform her role correctly.
With Lily, before the engagement, the marriage, and children, this would’ve been easy.
With Alice and her endless carousel of disastrous exes, effortless.
None of those conversations had ever felt this momentous. None of them had required Andy to consciously arrange her face into something casual.
Emily is different.
Emily and Andy aren’t friends in the way Andy and Lily are friends. Not in the way she and Alice once were before distance and time stretched itself between New York and London.
Andy has a key to Emily’s townhouse.
Emily has one to Andy’s apartment.
Lily lives in Newark and neither of them have ever needed copies of each other’s keys despite twenty-two years of friendship under their belts.
And Alice—
Well.
Andy thinks they simply ran out of time before they could ever become this.
Andy knows Bronwyn’s extracurricular schedule by heart. She knows what time Roark’s practices end and which nights he pretends not to be tired before inevitably passing out halfway through a movie.
Andy adores Lily’s daughter, but she doesn’t know what cereal she prefers on Sunday mornings or what movies she marathons on Netflix when she can’t sleep.
Andy doesn’t even know if Alice is married now. Or still drifting through dimly lit bars looking for the one between cigarettes and expensive cocktails.
Emily is not just a friend. It’s terrifying in its simplicity because somehow, somewhere along the way, Emily became something larger than the word itself.
“Friend” is safe. Easy and technically accurate.
Insufficient.
It’s like calling the Eiffel Tower just a tower. True, but not nearly enough.
And naming it as anything else would mean acknowledging it.
Acknowledging it would make it real.
Andy swallows hard against the lump in her throat and forces herself to grin. She hopes it looks excited instead of strained.
“Well,” she says lightly, leaning her chin into her hand, “don’t just leave it there. Tell me more. Who is this someone?” She even wiggles her eyebrows for effect.
A performance.
From the outside, it probably looks convincing. Probably. She’s never thought of herself as a good actress.
If Emily notices, she gives no indication. Her expression remains carefully blank in that graceful way Andy has always envied.
Emily sets her wine glass down carefully.
“Her name is Céline.”
Andy internally screams.
“Like Dion?”
Her.
Emily gives her a flat look. “Don’t be daft.”
“Sorry. Right. Continue.”
Her?
Andy’s thoughts spiral so fast she can barely catch them.
How has this never come up before?
How had Emily sat through entire conversations about Andy dating women without saying anything? Through stories about old girlfriends and heartbreak and that surprisingly healthy six-month relationship Andy still occasionally thinks about?
Emily flips her hair behind one shoulder with practiced indifference, mirroring Andy’s own desperate attempt at casualness.
Like this is ordinary.
Like Andy’s entire understanding of Emily hasn’t abruptly tilted sideways.
“She works…” Emily begins slowly.
Andy waits.
“…for…”
Another pause.
“…a magazine.”
Each word is delivered with painstaking care, like Emily has rehearsed this exact sentence repeatedly in her head. Testing different versions. Different tones. Different reactions.
Emily stops speaking entirely and leaves the statement sitting there between them.
“She works for a magazine,” Andy repeats slowly.
Suddenly, Andy understands why Emily’s being vague tonight when she usually values bluntness over delicacy every single time. Tonight, Emily is letting Andy connect the dots herself.
Andy’s eyes widen. Her jaw drops. She leans back so abruptly her chair nearly scrapes the floor. “Wait—you mean the Céline from Harper’s Bazaar?”
Several nearby diners glance over. Andy genuinely doesn’t care.
“Keep your voice down,” Emily hisses through gritted teeth.
Andy closes her eyes briefly and inhales.
Right.
Okay.
Not only has Emily met someone.
That someone is a woman.
And not only is that someone a woman, she’s also Céline Austin, features editor of Harper’s Bazaar. One of Runway’s direct competitors and the absolute worst possible person Emily Charlton could theoretically become romantically linked to in the public eye.
Andy’s journalist brain immediately begins latching on to worst possible case scenarios. The attempted acquisition scandal may have faded from headlines months ago, buried beneath celebrity faux pas, and fashion week coverage, and Miranda’s promotion, but this—
This has the potential to resurrect everything. The media would devour it.
“Céline Austin,” Andy repeats carefully. “That Céline Austin.”
“If I’d known this would send you into cardiac arrest, I’d have said something sooner.”
Andy’s heart leaps directly into her throat. “Wait, how long have you known her? Have you been dating this whole time?” She tries not to make it sound accusatory. She really does.
Emily raises a hand, expression sharp enough to cut glass. Calm down before I toss you into the East River myself, her face says.
Really, they should continue this conversation at home. Away from curious glances and overheard crumbs of conversation. Somewhere private, where Andy can fully react without getting shushed every thirty seconds.
Though, admittedly, even in private Emily would still shush her.
Andy clasps her hands together on the table to stop herself from gesturing wildly. “How did you even—how—” She exhales sharply. “How?”
Award-winning journalist, Andy Sachs.
Emily narrows her eyes as though evaluating whether Andy is emotionally equipped for the rest of this conversation.
Andy isn’t sure she is.
“I’m not dating her,” Emily says at last.
Relief surges through Andy so quickly it nearly makes her dizzy.
“Not exactly.”
The relief evaporates immediately.
Andy wets suddenly dry lips. “What does that mean?”
Emily lifts one shoulder. “I told you. I only just met her.”
“But you’re thinking about it. Dating.”
It isn’t really a question. Emily hears that. She doesn’t respond.
Andy hates herself a little for noticing the silence feels loaded and carefully edited.
“After Frank,” Emily finally says. Her thumb traces once along the base of the glass, a grounding motion more than a gesture.
“After the divorce,” she continues, voice lower now. “After Benji. After Runway—” Emily cuts herself off so abruptly it feels like a physical thing. Her gaze flicks upward toward Andy and away again just as quickly.
“After everything,” Emily continues, shifting slightly in her seat, “I decided I was done. Not… done-done. Just—” A pause, as if she’s trying to find a version of the truth that fits neatly.
“I made peace with dedicating my life to my children.”
She says “made peace” like it’s something finalized. Signed off. There’s a thinness to it like she chose the phrase because anything more honest would’ve required admitting how deliberate the resignation really was.
Frank lingers at the edges of the conversation without ever being named in full. Something more complicated and more exhausting than grief or anger. A marriage she doesn’t romanticize, doesn’t soften in hindsight. Just a decision she regrets in the simplest sense of the word except for the two consequences she would never undo.
Bronwyn and Roark sit in the middle of that contradiction, unchanged and irreproachable.
Benji is different. A name attached to strategy. A ghost of convenience that left behind nothing solid enough to grieve, only enough to notice.
And Runway—
Andy doesn’t let herself linger there long enough to name what it cost Emily, but she doesn’t have to. The memory is already there between them anyway. One of those shared histories that never fully stops echoing, even when unspoken.
Emily sets her glass down. She looks, briefly, like someone who has been holding everything together for a very long time. Then she smooths herself back into place before the image could become permanent.
Emily’s gaze doesn’t stay on her for long. She looks away, folding her arms loosely.
With a dawning unease that has nothing to do with Céline anymore, Andy realizes that this isn’t a woman just casually weighing a date. This is a woman who had already built a life that didn’t require wanting this, and is only now remembering she might still be allowed to.
Because Emily is beautiful.
Not just physically, though god knows she is that too.
Emily is brilliant and incisive and wickedly funny when she allows herself to be.
Emily is gentle in ways most people never get close enough to see.
Emily is the kind of mother who kneels on Bronwyn’s bedroom floor at six in the morning, expertly pinning the hem of a last-minute costume alteration because no one else in Manhattan understands proportions correctly.
Emily is the kind of mother who stays up past midnight to help Roark rebuild a papier-mâché volcano after the first one exploded too early across the kitchen, paint on their cheeks and glue on their fingertips.
Emily in pajamas on Saturday mornings. No makeup. Tea cooling in her hands while she reads something half-finished on her phone and pretends she isn’t still mentally in a meeting room across town.
Emily falling asleep once against Andy’s shoulder, trusting her enough not to immediately correct it when she woke.
Andy has catalogued every single one of those moments greedily. She held onto each one and returned to them.
Emily doesn’t give that version of herself easily. She never has. She peels herself apart in layers.
Andy has somehow, impossibly, been allowed past every single one.
Why wouldn’t someone like Céline Austin want to date her?
The thought arrives fully formed and is immediately buried.
Later.
She’ll dissect this later.
Emily is still watching her, tense beneath all that immaculate composure like she’s waiting.
She’s waiting for recognition, Andy realizes now. For Andy to understand what she has actually said without needing it translated into anything safer.
The fact that Emily has, in her own vulnerable way, just peeled another layer and trusts Andy enough not to turn her away.
This is just another step in their dance. A new rhythm Emily has introduced and entrusted her with.
One Andy will learn eventually.
“Em,” Andy says quietly, reaching across the table to squeeze her arm briefly, “I’m happy for you. Really.”
Emily’s shoulder relaxes, but the rest of her doesn’t follow as easily. As if “I’m happy for you” was generous, even good, but still somehow not the answer Emily had expected.
“I just—” Andy lets out a small, unsteady laugh. “I think I started overthinking the entire last year of our lives in the span of two minutes.”
“No,” Emily interrupts. “I know how this appears. Which is precisely why I refrained from mentioning it sooner.”
Andy nods once, slowly. “You met her two weeks ago?”
“Yes.”
“And she made a move.”
Emily’s expression tightens immediately. “Don’t make it sound like we’re sixteen.”
Despite everything, Andy laughs and nudges her arm. “Come on. You don’t say ‘I met someone’ unless something happened.”
Emily shifts in her seat. “I suppose,” she admits reluctantly, “she did make her interest rather obvious.”
Andy keeps her hand where it is for one second too long before drawing it back to her side. “And you’re considering it,” she says softly.
“Yes,” Emily says after a pause. “I’m considering.”
There’s that searching look again. This time Andy breaks eye contact first because for the first time since all of this began, silence no longer feels safe.
She lifts her wine glass to her face like a shield.
“You deserve good things, Em,” Andy says quietly. “All the good things, actually. And if this feels like one of them,” Andy forces a smile, “then you should go for it.”
Emily’s mouth parts slightly, as if she has an objection ready, but she doesn’t give it to Andy.
“And if it goes badly,” Andy continues, a little too quickly now, “you can always come tell me in exhaustive detail how terrible of a date Céline Austin turned out to be.”
Emily’s face changes before she can mask it. Andy notes the quick pinch at the corners of her mouth and the faintest pull between her brows.
It looks something like resignation.
It looks like acceptance of a path already moving forward.
“Well,” Emily says at last, “that’s that then.”
Dessert arrives sometime later. Neither of them stay long enough to properly finish it.
Normally, Andy would end up in the car beside her. Back to Emily’s townhouse. Back to familiar streets. Back to a familiar quiet. Another hour on the couch that somehow always becomes two, until sleep becomes inevitable and the guest room becomes hers without anyone ever formally deciding it.
Normally.
Nothing has felt normal since:
I met someone.
Especially not after:
Her name is Céline.
Emily slides into the car first. Andy lingers outside beside the open door.
“I actually have an early morning tomorrow,” Andy says, arranging a smile onto her face so carefully her cheeks ache with it. “Rain check on the sleepover?”
Emily makes a sound of mild offense. “How many times must I tell you not to call it that?”
Andy laughs softly. “Fine. Rain check on staying over.”
“Better.” Emily gestures impatiently. “Now close the door already. You’re letting the heat out.”
This time Andy’s smile comes easier. “Good night, Em. I’ll call you.”
“Don’t.”
“Text me when you get home safe.”
“Shan’t.”
Emily reaches for the door herself when Andy doesn’t close it quickly enough. Andy grins at the tinted window after it shuts.
Mouths, I’ll call you.
The town car disappears around the corner.
Only then does Andy’s posture collapse. She presses two fingers to her eyes and lets out a breath.
She mutters into the empty sidewalk, “What the hell was that, Sachs?”