Chapter 1
Fridays in Dorchester had their own particular scent — warm air spilling out of the subway exit at 6:47 in the evening, tangled with the grease drifting from the Vietnamese place on the corner. It smelled like the cheap kind of freedom.
Nina Surell came up the station stairs with her shoulders knotted tight and her bag pulling at her as if it were packed with bricks instead of a laptop and three financial reports she’d gone over so many times the numbers followed her behind her eyelids whenever she blinked.
Her building had no elevator. Third floor. Every Friday, she made that climb, swearing to herself it would be the last. And every Friday, she was wrong.
She unlocked the door, shoved it open with her hip, and let everything slide off her shoulder onto the floor by the entrance. No one was there to notice, and she’d abandoned the fiction of being tidy somewhere around two years ago.
After her shower, she twisted her hair up and reached for the pajamas Sariah had given her for her last birthday. Short satin, a deep wine color, with a card that said: For the woman who’s been sleeping in an old t-shirt since 2019. Enough.
They made no real sense for a woman whose Friday plans involved reality show reruns and a couch. But they were beautiful, and putting them on always felt like giving herself something she’d never have the courage to buy for herself.
She collapsed onto the couch and picked up her phone with that very particular end-of-week energy. Opened the camera, found an angle the lamp flattered, took a picture. Nothing memorable — just her, hair up, satin pajamas, bare feet on the cushion, wearing the expression of a woman who had technically survived the week.
The sort of photo you send your best friend with something dumb written under it just to make her snort.
She typed without thinking: I’m waiting for you at my place tonight.
Because that was their running bit. Sariah was forever threatening to turn up at her door with wine and fresh gossip, and Nina was forever saying she was waiting, and neither of them ever actually went anywhere because they had between them the social energy of two aging house cats.
Her thumb hit send. She dropped the phone on her chest and closed her eyes.
Three minutes later, the phone rang.
“I saw the pajamas.” Sariah announced, already laughing. “You look incredible. I have a freakish talent for gifts. Put that in writing.”
“Did you call just to congratulate yourself?” Nina said, smiling with her eyes still shut.
“I called because I’m bored. And you’re my only friend who answers on the first ring, which says depressing things about both of us. Hey, send me the photo again. I want a proper look. You sent it in our chat, right?”
Nina’s smile locked in place.
She opened her eyes slowly with the kind of manufactured calm that shows up when your brain hasn’t caught up to the catastrophe yet, but your body has already started picking out funeral clothes.
She picked up the phone, opened the app, and the floor underneath her quietly ceased to exist.
The photo wasn’t in her thread with Sariah.
It was in her thread with Alex Mancini.
Her boss. The heir to the Mancini family. The man who at four that afternoon had messaged asking for the weekly consolidated report, and whose name, thanks to that one exchange, now sat exactly one line above Sariah’s in her list.
“Nina?” Sariah’s voice came through. “Did you pass out?”
Nina’s voice came out flat, the tone that precedes earthquakes. “I sent the photo to the wrong person.”
A beat of silence. “To who?”
“Alex Mancini.”
The shriek of laughter that followed was the purest sound of delighted horror Nina had ever heard come out of a human being.
“Sariah, I’m being serious. I sent my boss a photo of me in short pajamas with a caption that says I’m waiting for him tonight.”
Sariah kept laughing, gloriously unbothered.
“This isn’t funny. I’m going to get fired from a job I need to pay rent I can already barely pay.”
“Babe,” Sariah wheezed, fighting for breath, “you just sent a photo and a come-hither invitation to the heir of a mafia family. This is not a firing. This is a screenplay.”
“I’m deleting it.”
“He already read it.” Sariah’s voice went flat. “Two blue check marks.”
Nina looked at the screen. He had opened it. Alex Mancini — the man she spent office hours carefully not making eye contact with because every time she did, her train of thought jumped its tracks — had just viewed a photograph of her in satin pajamas on her couch. Paired with a message that, stripped of all context, said she was waiting for him.
She started typing an explanation. Deleted it. Started another. Deleted that one too.
Sorry, that was meant for someone else.
And he’d assume she was sending photos to some other man.
Wrong person.
Too clinical. There was no elegant exit from this room.
“Nina, breathe.” Sariah’s voice was finally composed enough to be useful. “Worst case scenario, he ignores it and you both pretend it never happened. Best case, he shows up at your door.”
“That is not the best case, Sariah. That’s the nightmare.”
“For who?”
Nina hung up on her. Not out of anger — out of the inability to keep listening to someone who was right.
For ten minutes, she stayed on the couch, staring at the ceiling, trying to talk her nervous system down off the ledge. Maybe he’d laugh it off. Maybe he’d let it die quietly. Alex Mancini was a busy man — a man who ran a chain of restaurants that everyone in Boston knew wasn’t only a chain of restaurants — and he wasn’t going to waste an evening on some accountant who couldn’t keep her contact list straight.
Then came the knock at the door.
Not timid. Firm. Evenly spaced. The rhythm of someone who isn’t accustomed to waiting.
Nina froze. She looked at the door as if it might tell her who was on the other side, though her body already knew. Her pulse had gone from zero to full sprint, and it had nothing to do with fear and everything to do with the kind of trouble she seemed incapable of sidestepping.
She got up. Walked over. Opened it.
May you like
Alex Mancini was standing in the hallway of her walk-up in Dorchester, one shoulder against the door frame like the building had been built around him. Dark suit. Hands in his pockets. Hair just disheveled enough to look intentional. And that smile — the lazy half smile that never meant anything good, and that for reasons she refused to examine, pulled something tight beneath her ribs.
“You called for me,” he said, voice low and impossibly steady. “So here I am.”
