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“I know.” They froze for a second. Had they just had a moment?

Sullivan whirled away as if to deny what she had just said.

“I try to do as much by hand as I can, but there’s a stand mixer up there.

” She pointed to a cupboard. “And in the pantry I’ve got a sous vide, blender, immersion blender, food processor, mandoline.

Wine fridge is over there. Help yourself.

” She paused as if a wearisome thought had crossed her mind.

“Opal and Nina think I should be drinking at the Tennis Skort.”

“Because you drink…” Kia opened the wine fridge and pulled out a bottle. “Two thousand fourteen Gevrey-Chambertin alone?”

“No, because they think I should meet someone.” Sullivan looked like she hadn’t meant to say it. She pressed her lips together, searching the ceiling. “I guess I have.” Sullivan turned away. “There’s the living room.”

The living room was comfortably cluttered.

A chenille blanket pooled at one end of the sofa.

Built-in bookshelves housed photographs and ephemera: driftwood, stones, pottery vases of dried herbs.

A record player sat on an ornate cabinet by the window, records in sleeves spilling out on the floor in front of it.

A surprisingly lacy bra draped over the back of the staircase banister.

And two life-sized abstract nudes framed a large fireplace.

“Chef, I would never have guessed,” Kia said.

“They’re by Janice Domingo.” Sullivan looked put upon. “She’s one of the best painters in Costa Rica.”

“I mean this.” Kia picked up the bra as Sullivan led her to the staircase. “You just throw your clothes off as you go upstairs.”

“I didn’t expect to have a roommate.”

Sullivan blushed, and Kia remembered how much she’d loved to make Sullivan blush or roll her eyes in exasperation.

Then she remembered that she’d just touched Sullivan’s bra.

She’d been dreaming about touching Sullivan’s body for years.

Kia felt heat spread across her own face as she tried to quash the thoughts.

“Give it back.” Sullivan snatched the bra. “Are you going to stand here all day and critique my undergarments or can I show you to your room?”

She was reading Kia’s lustful thoughts. And while Kia might have made Sullivan blush a tiny bit, her own face was flaming with…

it wasn’t quite embarrassment. Sullivan was teasing her.

If she didn’t know better, she’d say Sullivan was flirting with her, but her ability to read women was abysmal, so probably not.

“It’s hand-wash, and it was drying,” Sullivan added. “Air-drying is an excellent way to conserve electricity.”

Sullivan led Kia upstairs and showed her to a guest room furnished in somber burgundy curtains and a four-poster bed with dark gray bedding. A rolltop desk filled one corner.

“Very lord of the manor,” Kia said.

“It was my grandfather’s study.” Sullivan’s voice was flat. “He spent a lot of time trying to protect the Bois. Those are his drawings.” She pointed to botanical drawings displayed in gold frames.

“I’m sorry,” Kia said as she stepped closer to the artwork.

“If it hadn’t been you, it would have been someone else.”

Kia leaned in for a closer look at a photo of an old white man. She stood with her hands clasped behind her, careful not to bump into a vase resting on the desk. “What was your grandfather like?”

Sullivan walked over to the window, pushing up her sleeves as if she were getting ready to till the land with her grandfather.

Kia stared at Sullivan’s tattoos. What did they mean?

Who designed them? Kia wanted to trace the lines with her fingertips and then kiss her way up Sullivan’s inner arm until Sullivan shivered.

“He was an environmentalist,” Sullivan said without turning around. Then, as though the matter was closed, she said, “The bathroom is down the hall. Extra linens are in that closet. Make yourself comfortable. This evening let’s set some house rules.”

“I don’t think comfortable and house rules go together,” Kia said.

“I don’t think marriage and lawsuit do either, but here we are.”

Kia hoped they’d go straight to the kitchen to talk, but Sullivan had scheduled a visit to an organic pickle distributor in Washington.

Kia spent the day driving around Portland with Deja getting footage for her socials.

It just felt exhausting. That night, Kia set up her laptop at the kitchen island and waited for Sullivan to finish admiring Washingtonian pickles.

Kia replied to fans’ messages as she waited.

Messaging with people online used to be one of the best parts of her online life.

Now Deja and AI did most of it. She felt disconnected from the people she had once thought of as her flock.

After she’d sent as many messages as she could muster the energy for, she opened Google and continued her ongoing search for the 1968 Wind Searcher Pop-Up Pavilion.

There was one for sale in Iowa, but that was too far to go right now, and she shouldn’t buy something frivolous.

She was relieved when Sullivan finally came home.

“How were the pickles?”

“The farmer has found some brilliant ways to use nematodes to target soilborne larvae of cucumber beetles.”

“That is so not appetizing.”

“Neither are pesticides.”

Sullivan looked so serious, Kia wanted to snatch the beanie cap off her head and ruffle her hair, but that would go over about as well as showing up on Sullivan’s lawn with a marriage proposal.

“Ready to go over the house rules?” Kia asked. “I’ve just been chopping raw meat on the marble counters.”

Sullivan rolled her eyes.

“Set anything on fire?”

“Your heart.” It flew out of her mouth before she could stop herself. She made that kind of too-obviously flirtatious comment to lots of people. She was joking. It didn’t mean anything.

Sullivan let out an equally too-obvious sigh.

“Oh, Jackson. What have I gotten myself into?”

Sullivan took out a French press and ran some beans through the grinder. When she opened it and some grounds fell out, she muttered, “I did not fill you that much. You’re just doing it for attention.” She swept the grounds into her hand and tossed them into the sink.

Despite everything, Kia felt a real laugh bubbling up. She held it back, but that didn’t change the fact that Sullivan was adorable.

Kia took a sip. “Kenyan? From Muranga?”

“Southern Nyeri.”

“So right above Muranga.”

“I’m not giving you that one, Jackson. Muranga is not Nyeri.”

“Fine.”

“What are you working on?” Sullivan asked.

“My dream.”

Kia turned her laptop around so Sullivan could see the idyllic photograph of a couple watching the sunset from beneath a 1968 Wind Searcher Pop-Up Pavilion.

“That’s your dream? To have a little tent on top of your RV?”

“It’s not just a little tent. It’s got features and it matches the RV.”

Sullivan snorted.

“If you slept on the ground, you wouldn’t need all that.”

“If I had to sleep on the ground, I’d get a different job. Now stop hassling my dream. You wanted to talk about house rules. I already deep-fried a tursnicken on your stove, so that’s covered.”

Sullivan gave her a melodramatic sigh. “Before we discuss that culinary affront, how about a few vital statistics. Just in case someone asks me what sign you are or how many siblings you have.”

Kia listed her vitals. No siblings. Gay single father. Allergic to Goldschl?ger.

“That’s just weird,” Sullivan said.

“It’s my allergy. It’s not weird. Are you writing this down?”

“I’ll remember everything.”

“You will not.”

Sullivan rattled off everything Kia had said.

“You always memorized your recipes at school. Why not just keep them on your phone?”

“What if your battery dies and you have to make a dacquoise cake?”

“You charge your phone.”

“What if there’s no electricity?”

“You wait for the power to come back on.”

“If it doesn’t?” Sullivan asked as though she’d just made a winning argument.

“Like, ever? I’m not going to be making a dacquoise in the zombie apocalypse.”

“Quitter.”

Sullivan sounded so disapproving, Kia almost missed the affectionate way her lips quirked upward.

Kia woke her phone up so she could type Sullivan’s answers, because she could not memorize how to make a dacquoise cake in the apocalypse.

“Age and birthday?”

Sullivan’s birthday was coming up soon.

“You’re only six years older than me,” Kia blurted. “That’s nothing. When we were in school, I thought you were so… grown up.”

“You were a child when you started the program.”

“I was twenty .”

The difference between twenty and twenty-six had meant something. But now? They were both grown-up business owners. Kia had caught up. If Sullivan had thought of her as a kid before, maybe now she could think of Kia as a woman. Kia closed her eyes to press the thought out of her brain.

“So what’s your dream birthday?” Kia asked. “I might have to plan something for you. I mean, you are my wife and all.”

“I’d have a partner.” She didn’t add real , but the way her shoulders dropped implied it. “They’d take me camping.”

“Don’t you go camping all the time?”

The real issue was why someone would want to sleep outside with bears, snakes, and serial killers, but Kia didn’t bring that up.

“For my birthday, they’d plan the whole thing. I’d just wake up and they’d say, We’re going camping , and they’d have everything ready.”

This was obviously more personal to Sullivan than just getting eaten by bears on a trip someone else planned.

This was about being cherished. Kia guessed no one had cherished Sullivan like this.

It clearly made Sullivan sad. Despite Kia’s adamant aversions to getting eaten by bears and poisoned by tent-dwelling snakes, Kia knew there was no world in which she didn’t take Sullivan camping for her birthday.