"Good," he said.
"You said that like you have a stake in it."
"Maybe I do." He turned toward her then, and before she registered that he was moving he had reached out and touched her jaw - light, unhurried, tilting her face up - and kissed her.
It was brief. Just a moment. His mouth, warm and certain, and then he drew back.
Sophia sat perfectly still with her hands around the coffee cup and no idea what her face was doing.
"That," he said, quietly, "is exactly the answer I was hoping for."
"What-"
"What's your name?" he asked, as if they were just now being introduced.
She was still three beats behind. "I - Sophia." She blinked. "Sophia Blackwood."
"Alexander Harrington." The smile. Always the smile. "Pleasure to meet you, Sophia Blackwood."
She sat with her coffee in both hands and felt dazed and irritated and something else entirely - something she was not going to look at directly tonight.
She drank the coffee instead.
Four days later she was back from London.
JFK to Heathrow, Heathrow back to JFK, twenty-two hours in the air spread across three days, and Sophia had spent most of the galley downtime between service rounds working very hard not to think about Alexander Harrington. She failed comprehensively, but the effort felt like something.
She walked into EnjoyLife at nine-fifteen on a Thursday to find Vivienne and Natalie already at their usual table with cocktail menus and the expressions of two women who had been here long enough to have opinions.
"She's alive," Vivienne said.
"Barely." Sophia dropped into the empty chair. "Tell me there are drinks coming."
"Chloe's getting them." Natalie slid a menu across. "She has a new bartender, apparently. She won't shut up about him."
"She said he has incredible hands," Vivienne added.
"She said that about the sous chef at Le Bernardin last month," Sophia said.
"The sous chef genuinely did have incredible hands," Natalie said. "In fairness."
EnjoyLife was Chloe's place, three years running now - a low-lit cocktail lounge on Hudson that had somehow achieved the exact thing most places failed at: intimate without being stifling, curated without being precious. The music was always right. The stools were comfortable enough for a third drink. It was the kind of room that felt like exhaling. Sophia had needed to exhale for approximately ninety-six hours.
"Speaking of people who won't do anything about their feelings," Natalie said, pointing her swizzle stick at Vivienne. "Daniel."
Vivienne's expression went immediately careful. "Nothing is happening with Daniel."
"You spent forty-five minutes reorganizing the server folders so he'd have to come ask you where things were."
"That was a "