"Stop doing the math."
Sienna Ashford looked up from the menu. Cameron Davenport was watching her with that expression he'd been perfecting since they were six years old - half fond, half exasperated - the one he used specifically when she was being stubborn about money in a way that he found both admirable and completely unnecessary.
"I'm not doing math," she said.
"You've been staring at the entrée section for four minutes without turning a page." He reached over and flipped it for her, landing somewhere different. "It's on me. I said that already. Order what you want."
She looked at him. Cameron Davenport was twenty-one, broad-shouldered, and possessed of the easy unconsidered handsomeness that came from good genetics and regular access to a gym with actual equipment. More importantly, he was the kind of person who offered to pay for dinner and meant it completely - not as a transaction, not as something he'd reference later, but because paying for things was simply part of how he moved through the world. Money was weather for Cameron. It was just the climate he'd always lived in.
His family had a townhouse on the Upper East Side and a vacation property in East Hampton. Sienna's mother paid rent on a fifth-floor walkup in Flatbush, Brooklyn, that had a bathroom you had to turn sideways to use, a kitchen window facing a brick wall, and a radiator that made its opinions known at two in the morning. The building had no elevator. Margaret Ashford had made this observation exactly once, on the first day they moved in, and then set about treating the five flights as a cardio regimen and never mentioned it again.
They'd grown up on the same block for five years before the Davenports moved uptown. In those five years, Cameron had shared his lunch with Sienna on days when her mother forgot to pack one, knocked exactly three times in his signature rhythm before coming through their front door, and developed a habit of waiting outside whatever building she was in when he needed to see her - patient, unhurried, there. It was a habit that had never fully gone away even after they grew up and lived in different boroughs and led entirely different lives.
She understood what the habit meant. She'd understood it for a while now. She just didn't know what to do with the understanding.
"I'll get the salmon," she said. Not the cheapest thing on the menu, but the cheapest thing that didn't look like she'd chosen it for being the cheapest thing.
Cameron gave her the look that said he saw through her and was choosing not to press it. "Good. And the appetizer." He flagged the server before she could protest.
She let it go. Choosing her battles with Cameron was a skill she'd developed over the full span of their friendship, and this was not a battle worth having at forty-two floors above Midtown Manhattan.
The Summit occupied the entire 42nd floor of a building on 57th Street whose lobby had been designed by someone who considered imported marble a starting point rather than an indulgence. The restaurant itself was low lighting, dark wood, white tablecloths, and the particular kind of quiet that required serious money to maintain - not truly silent, but operating in a register where nothing jarred, nothing scraped, everything proceeding at a smooth, unhurried tempo as if the city twenty stories below existed in a different universe, which, Sienna supposed, it functionally did.
The city spread below them through floor-to-ceiling windows. A grid of amber and white light extending in every direction until it dissolved at the dark edges of the outer boroughs, the black gap of the East River, the scattered lights of Queens beyond. When the maître d' first brought them to their table, Sienna had pressed her palm flat against the window glass. She hadn't been able to help it. The spontaneous gesture of someone who needed to confirm that the view was real and not, somehow, a very elaborate painting.
From the sidewalk on 57th Street, you walked past this building every day without thinking about it. You had no idea what was up here. No idea that while you were hurrying through the cold with your coffee and your subway MetroCard and your very specific set of financial anxieties, there were people forty-two floors above you ordering thirty-dollar appetizers and looking down at the city like it was a decorative feature.
She'd been to Manhattan hundreds of times in her life. She'd taken the subway under these streets since she was ten years old. But she had never been inside a room that felt quite like this.
She worked two jobs. The coffee chain on weekday mornings before her first class - four-thirty alarm, open at five, off at nine, sprint to campus - and the downtown diner four evenings a week, seven to midnight, on her feet the whole time with the particular brand of politeness that service work required when you were exhausted and the customers were difficult. On Saturdays she tutored two high school juniors in calculus and pre-calculus at forty dollars an hour, which she didn't count as a job so much as a transaction she'd negotiated out of desperation in October when the numbers stopped adding up.
Her mother, Margaret, worked the front desk at a medical office in Cobble Hill and picked up catering shifts whenever they became available. Together they were functional. Not comfortable, not easy, but okay, and Sienna had learned to treat okay with the respect it deserved.
She looked at the menu and told herself to be present. She was doing a reasonable job of it until she noticed the price of the halibut and started calculating what she could eat for a week on that amount, which was when Cameron told her to stop doing the math.
The appetizers arrived - something with burrata and heirloom tomatoes that she would remember for a long time afterward. Genuinely the best thing she'd eaten since the Christmas her mother had saved up for three months to take them both to a restaurant in the West Village for Sienna's twenty-first birthday. She ate it slowly, trying to pay attention to the specific flavor of something this good.