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“Perfect? So there will be books and Pawntès and lounging in my pajamas?”

“It’s going to be a surprise. But I can safely confess none of those things are involved, fond of them as we both may be.” He stood suddenly, his breakfast abandoned. “I need to talk to Bentley. I’ll be back later this afternoon.”

His excited energy, swirling about the apartment as he prepared to leave, was both endearing and contagious.

A week later, just after the first dusting of snow made fall’s relentless march toward winter known, and a day before Molly’s birthday, Bentley Burke knocked on her apartment door mere minutes after Aster left for work. When she let him in, he simply walked into the kitchen, poured himself a cup of coffee, and sat down at the table.

Baffled more than anything, Molly joined him and resumed nursing the remains of her own cup. She glanced at the clock. Aster’s friends clearly had each other’s work schedules memorized.

“I have no plans to kidnap you,” Bentley finally said, leaning back in his chair. “That’s more Eli’s style. I just wanted to drop this off.” From his pocket, Bentley produced a velvet jewelry box. It was the perfect size for a ring.

Molly’s brows lifted. “No cigarette today?” she asked, seeking a distraction from the conversation threatening to happen without her permission.

“You don’t like when I smoke in your home.” He said it like it was obvious.

“Neither does Eli. But that certainly hasn’t stopped you.”

“Well, I’m not interested in sleeping with you.”

“Not interested in sleeping—Eli?” Molly cycled through a number of potential responses, but eventually settled on, “And you think ruining his textiles with cigarette smoke is, what—flirting?”

“He’ll figure it out eventually,” Bentley explained away with a small shrug. “He’s not quite as oblivious as you are.” A pause. “Close though.”

“You. And Eli? Really?” She wasn’t sure if it made perfect sense or no sense at all. She didn’t know Bentley well enough to have an opinion one way or the other. Although, there was that time she witnessed him stocking Eli’s fridge and managing his bills.

“Inevitable,” he said.

That surprised her. “Oh?”

From his other pocket, Bentley fished out a pack of cards and began shuffling. He pulled a card and placed it down on the tabletop. Tarot cards, she realized.

He drew a deep breath. “Eli insists that heart-to-hearts are essential with you right now, so here we go.” Bentley pulled a second card and placed it down. “Reserved is a word people like to use for me. Or shy. Quiet.” He kept his focus on the cards he was slowly assembling into a pattern face up on her table. “Tough to make friends when you don’t really know how to talk to people. Eli though, he can talk to anybody. Everybody. And extensively. So when he sat down next to me in a statistics lecture—he was only there to wait for Aster—he did all the talking. And then I met Aster and ultimately got a friend group out of it. That was my second week at a university across the country from where I grew up. I knew no one. Eli didn’t even go there. He’s basically a professional loiterer. There was no real reason for us to have ever met.”

He paused. Ten cards sat on the table in front of him. “This is a Celtic Cross. I like to do it backward sometimes, just for fun. To see who it’s all about in the end, even though I already know.”

Molly nodded like she had any idea what he meant. This was the most she’d ever heard Bentley speak at once, and she felt solemnly compelled by the melancholy making itself known beneath his words.

“Eli is a lot of things, including very generous, which I’m sure is one of the reasons you two get along so well. One day, he tossed me this pack of cards with no more explanation than that they made him think of me. I had zero opinions about tarot before then. I never used to believe in any of this stuff.”

He flipped a final card and placed it within the spread. He smiled. From upside down, Molly read “The Emperor” across it.

“Seventy-eight cards in a deck if you’re including both major and minor arcana.” He tapped the Emperor. “This one shows up almost every”—tap—“single”—tap—“time. I made Aster ballpark the math once. It’s impossible to know because I don’t remember exactly how many times I’ve done a spread or pulled this card, but none of that really matters because the odds are downright impossible no matter what. Seventy-eight cards, and this one is inevitable almost every single time.”

Molly finally had to speak, had to ask the question curiosity propelled out of her. “And the emperor is Eli?” She gestured at the cards between them. “And this all means something . . . romantic?”

“It’s meant pretty much everything over the years. But as to why he’s the emperor, this card usually represents things like structure, order. Authority and boundaries. Discipline. Nothing I think any of us would use to describe Eli. It’s almost his comical antithesis. And yet . . .”

Molly waited, feeling perched on the brink of discovery.

“Reyes is a Spanish surname meaning king. And what is an emperor, really, if not just an extra special kind of king?”

Molly didn’t reply, stuck pondering. Technically emperors ruled multiple kingdoms, so there was a literal difference in definitions. But she suspected pedantry wasn’t the right response here.

To her silence, Bentley added, “It’s alright that you think it’s a tenuous connection.”

Molly opened and closed her mouth, searching for the right thing to say. “I—maybe it’s a tiny bit of a stretch. To me, at least. I’m more of a logic person.”

Bentley appeared unfazed by her skepticism, smiling to himself. “It’s a good thing, then, that belief is what matters here, not logic.”