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“Mmm-hmm. So’s COINTELPRO, but here we are. Because we’re the same person, I know you’re not ready, because you’re falling in love, but you haven’t decided yet whether or not you’re going to let yourself fall all the way.”

“I can’t be,” she argued, though she knew he was right. “It’s ridiculous. We were together for a week. People don’t actually fall in love on the first date.”

Cole laughed. “Of course they do. People do it every day. There’s not a correct way to fall in love. Some people never do, some people do with multiple people at once, and some people fall in love once in their lives, in the blink of an eye, and all those things are equally valid. It’s not, like, logical. Also it happened to me, so I guarantee it’s possible.”

Maybe she only thought she was falling in love because he was.

The idea that she could, truly, have fallen halfway in love basically instantaneously was taking some adjusting of her worldview but, surprisingly, less than the idea that Cole Fraser actually loved her as much as she loved him. Maybe it was because she’d always known she was capable of deep love and had never known she was capable of being loved.

She sighed. “Okay, know-it-all. When will I be ready?”

He shrugged. “When you know what you want. With your life. With your job, your family, your heart.”

“How the hell am I supposed to know that?” She couldn’t even be trusted to know when to call a girl. She didn’t even know who she was.

“You could always stay in Advent!” Cole singsonged. “We would love to keep you!”

How quickly he had become part of the “we” of this community.

“What would I do here?”

He shrugged, seemingly unconcerned. “Work with Elijah?”

“He practices estate law, and I don’t,” Tara pointed out. “I’m pretty sure they don’t have a lot of need for a criminal defense attorney in the wilderness.”

“So take a year off. Learn to knit. Take cooking classes. Volunteer at the library.”

Had he met her? There was no way she could be happy doing nothing. Holly might have made her rethink how much of her identity she derived from her profession, but she wasn’t ready to become a lady of leisure.

“I hate snow, and I love the South,” she reminded him. “I love living and working in, and fighting for, the South, Cole.”

Cole sighed. “Tara Sloane, as much as both of us hate to talk about the ramifications of this reality, we are rich. You know that, right?”

Tara nodded in resignation.

“So you have, like, so many options that only rich people have,” he continued. “You can live in Advent in the summer, and Atlanta or Birmingham or Savannah or, hell, Asheville, with all the other white Southern gays, in the winter, for instance. It’s actually a very short flight.”

“I’m not becoming a snowbird,” Tara scoffed.

He waved this off. He never let her have any of her excuses. “So split your weeks or something. You can decide that some options don’t work for you, for a variety of reasons, but you can’t say you don’t have any options, Tar.”

“How will I know which one is right?” she cried, pulling on her hair.

Cole cocked an eyebrow at her, stealing her own move. “Why do you need to?”

What did he mean, why did she need to? “All my life, I’ve tried to do the next right thing. You know this.”

He stared pointedly.

“What?!” she demanded.

“I mean, babe, how has that worked out for you so far?” A mean but fair point. “Maybe you should try doing the next wrong thing. Or even, the next thing.”

February brought one answer about the next right—or maybe the next wrong—thing.

Lucy, her assistant, called her right before Valentine’s Day in a panic. “Boss, you gotta get back here pronto.”

What kind of twenty-four-year-old said “pronto”? Lucy was a treasure.