"Am I helping?" he asks.
"You are a disaster," Catherine says, without looking up from her espresso.
"Catastrophically," Preston agrees from the lounge chair, though he is smiling in a way he is clearly trying to suppress.
"Wonderful," Alistair says, and helps himself to another cornetto.
A comfortable silence settles, broken only by the sound of Enzo's measuring tape and Alistair chewing. Then Alistair's phone buzzes. He looks at it. His face lights up with the specific, incandescent joy of a man who has just received very good news from somewhere far away.
"Ah excellent, he has found a breeding pair," Alistair announces to the room.
"Of what?" Preston asks.
"Does it matter?" Alistair says, already standing, folding the paper bag under his arm. He pats Jax on the shoulder — the pinned one, which makes Enzo inhale sharply through his nose — and straightens his Panama hat. "The point is, they need to be collected before Thursday, and the man who has them lives in New Jersey, which means I need to leave immediately before the tunnel traffic becomes a moral crisis."
He kisses Catherine on the top of her head. She flinches but doesn't pull away.
"The suits look magnificent," he declares, though he has spent approximately four minutes actually looking at them. "Enzo, your father would be proud. Or at the very least, relieved."
"He would be neither," Enzo says flatly. "He would be in therapy."
"Same thing, in this family," Alistair says cheerfully.
He strides toward the door, already typing a response to whomever it was had found the mysterious breeding pair. He pauses with one hand on the frame, turns back, and looks at Jax with an expression that is, briefly, entirely serious.
"You look like a man who belongs in that suit," Alistair says simply. "Even if Enzo hasn't finished it yet."
Then the door swings shut behind him, and the bird-of-paradise shirt disappears into the street.
The atelier is quiet for a moment.
"What," Enzo says, very carefully, "was that."
"That," Preston says, turning a page of the magazine he hasnot been reading, "was my father. He operates on a frequency the rest of us can't quite tune into."
Enzo stares at the door. Then he turns back to Jax, picks up his measuring tape, and resumes work with the energy of a man who has decided the only sane response to the York family is pure, focused professionalism.
Across the room, Luke holds up a velvet blazer. "Hey, Preston! Look at this one! It’s sparkly!"
Enzo’s head snaps up. He freezes.
Luke is wearing his 'off-duty' clothes. A soft hoodie, jeans, sneakers. He looks like sunshine.
Enzo abandons me mid-measurement. He glides across the room toward Luke like a heat-seeking missile in loafers.
He stops.
He stares.
He puts down his tape measure.
"Madonna," Enzo whispers. He says it the way other men sayI see God."Who is this angel and why has no one told me he was coming?"
Luke looks up from the sparkly blazer. "Oh! Hi. I'm Luke. I'm the Best Man?—"
"You," Enzo declares, pressing both hands to his own chest, "are going to destroy me. You are going to reach into my ribcage and you are going to crush my heart like a grape and I am going tothank youfor it."
Luke blinks. "...Do you want me to put the blazer back?"
