Cameron told her about a development project his father was overseeing near Hudson Yards. She asked questions. He was good at talking about his work - he had the rare ability to explain finance and real estate in a way that didn't make the listener feel excluded from a club they'd been born outside of, and she'd always found him easy to listen to for that reason.

"My father's been asking about you," he said, when the appetizer plates were cleared.

Sienna set down her fork. "About me specifically?"

"About how you're doing. School. Whether you've thought about what comes next." A pause. "He's always liked you."

Robert Davenport had always been kind to her in the simple, matter-of-fact way that some people managed - like her presence in his son's life was something he'd accounted for and found good. She'd grown up assuming this was just Cameron's warmth reflected outward, a family trait. She'd never looked at it too closely.

"Tell him I said hi," she said.

Cameron nodded. He looked like he was going to say something else. He decided against it and reached for his wine. Then the man arrived.

He pulled out the empty chair at their table and sat down without preamble, without asking, with the ease of someone who had never once in his life wondered whether he was welcome somewhere. He'd come from nowhere she could trace - she hadn't seen him approach from any direction, which meant either that he was very good at moving through a room or that she'd been less attentive than she thought. Both possibilities seemed equally plausible.

Dark jeans. A black shirt with the collar open at the throat. A charcoal jacket that had clearly cost a significant amount of money and somehow looked like he'd thrown it on in a hallway two minutes ago, the sleeves pushed to the forearm. His hair was dark, past his collar, pushed loosely behind one ear with what appeared to be genuine carelessness rather than calculated dishevelment. He produced a cigarette and then put it away - the Summit had a strict no-smoking policy that he seemed to regard as advisory rather than mandatory.

Then he turned and looked at her.

She became aware, in a specific and immediate way, that she had stopped breathing.

He was somewhere near thirty, with a jaw that was clean and sharply defined, and a mouth with a slight tension to it, and eyes so dark they had a depth she couldn't measure. He looked at her the way she'd seen structural engineers look at load-bearing plans: precise, assessing, determining something. He held her gaze for a long, unblinking moment that lasted approximately three times longer than was socially standard and didn't appear to notice, or notice and not care. She had the sudden, vertiginous feeling of being very clearly seen by someone who was very good at looking.

"Who is this?" he said. To Cameron. Without looking at Cameron.

"Sienna Ashford." Cameron's voice had that careful lightness he used when he was managing something. "We grew up together. Same block. She's - we're old friends." He cleared his throat. "Sienna, this is Ethan Sterling."

She knew the name. Sterling Group appeared in the financial press the way weather appeared - constantly and without asking permission. Real estate, development, acquisitions that reshaped lower Manhattan's skyline and the upper West Side's residential market simultaneously. Ethan Sterling had taken the company from his father at twenty-six and proceeded to become the kind of person whose decisions affected entire neighborhoods. The financial papers called him visionary. The more cynical publications used a different word. Up close, none of that was what she was thinking about.

"Still in school?" he said.

"Yes."

"What year?"

"Junior."

"First time at a place like this?"

She looked at him. The question was blunt, and his tone was entirely neutral - not condescending, not teasing, just direct in the way that people who never had to perform politeness tended to be. She could have deflected. She decided not to. "You can probably tell."

The corner of his mouth moved. The architectural suggestion of a smile, not the full thing. "Observation, not judgment." He picked up Cameron's abandoned menu, glanced at it with the brief attention of someone who didn't need to look at prices, set it down. "What are you studying?"

"Business management. Marketing concentration."

He looked at her steadily, and the quality of his attention was something she could feel physically - specific, real, as if most people got a fraction of whatever he was currently directing at her. "You're studying marketing and working two jobs."

She hadn't mentioned the jobs. She looked at him. "How do you-"

"Your hands." He glanced at them briefly. Not unkindly. "Service work."

She looked at her hands. The dry knuckles from the commercial dishwasher at the diner. The faint callus at the base of her right fingers. "Yes," she said.

"Why two?"

Nobody asked her that directly. People either already understood or found the subject too uncomfortable to approach. "Someone has to," she said.

He held her gaze for another beat. Something shifted in his expression - a recalibration, barely visible. "Are you good at it? The marketing."

"I'm working on being good at it."

"That's a better answer than yes." He pushed back from the table. Stood in a single clean motion. "Cameron." A brief nod of acknowledgment. He buttoned the bottom button of his jacket. Then he looked at her one more time - full and direct, with those dark eyes that had depth she couldn't see the bottom of - and reached down and took one of the untouched bread rolls from the basket between them, because apparently he could do that. "Enjoy your dinner."

A pause, calculated precisely.

"Sweetheart."

He said it with complete, unhurried confidence - not a question, not a performance, just a word delivered from twelve inches away with the slightest curve of his mouth - and then he was gone. Moving through the room with the natural authority of someone who never had to navigate around other people because rooms arranged themselves around him.

Sienna held very still. She watched him move until he disappeared around the corner toward the elevator bank.

Three full seconds of silence.

"Don't," Cameron said.

She picked up her water glass. "Don't what?"

"The look on your face."

She took a measured sip. "What look?"