“So, uh, things are good then? With the baby and everything? You seem good,” I said, nodding like an idiot.

“Yeah, I’m, like, sooo good. Amaaaazing really. Doctor says the baby’s suuuuper healthy, though Will and I both agreed we don’t want to know the sex. But I swear I’m carrying a boy. Probably a linebacker. Will wants a little girl,” she cooed, her hand circling her belly.

The sound of Will’s band saw coming from upstairs caused her to jump, nearly sending her off her chair. I grabbed her arm to steady her.

“Oh my god! Has he been upstairs all morning?” she asked, trying to hide the real question buried beneath. Have you been alone with him today? Since reconciling over the baby, Tracina had moved back in with Will, so I assumed she knew where he was all day.

“I have no idea,” I said, lying. I had seen him that morning. We had said our awkward hellos to each other when he walked by me in the dining room and bounded up the stairs, wearing his stiff leather construction belt, shiny new tools hanging off it.

“He brought some big spools of wire upstairs yesterday. But at least he’s saving the loud work until the breakfast and lunch crowds die down.”

Tracina slapped her hand on the table to brace herself, then, without another word, headed up the stairs.

If avoiding small talk with Tracina was a hobby, avoiding alone time with Will was becoming an art form. The last few words he’d spoken to me in six weeks, or the last few words I’d given him the opportunity to speak to me, were “We need to talk, Cassie.” It was a harsh whisper delivered in the corridor between his office and the staff washroom.

“There’s nothing to say,” I replied. Our eyes darted around, making sure Dell and Tracina weren’t nearby.

“You realize that right now, I can’t—”

“I realize more than you know, Will,” I said. We heard the trill of Tracina’s voice as she cashed out a customer.

“I’m sorry.” He couldn’t even look me in the eye as he said it, and the agonizing moment made it all the more clear that I couldn’t stay.

“Maybe we shouldn’t work together, Will. Actually, it’s probably best if I quit.”

“NO!” he said, a little too loudly, then, more quietly, “No. Don’t quit. Please. I need you. I mean, as an employee. Dell is … mature, and Tracina’s not going to be much help soon. If you leave, I’m sunk. Please.”

He clasped his hands into a fist beneath his chin, begging me. How could I leave this man in a bind, when his hiring me so many years ago had plucked me out of mine?

“Okay, but there have to be boundaries. We can’t be whispering in the halls like this,” I said.

Hands on hips, he waited a beat to contemplate the condition, then nodded at his shoes. The chemicals were still coursing through my system, ones awakened by the sex we’d had. We needed rules until they subsided.

Maybe Will wasn’t happy about the baby at first, maybe it had come as a complete surprise and he was as gutted about our truncated relationship as I was, but over the past six weeks, you’d never have known it. I watched him go from pinched attentiveness towards Tracina to textbook superpartner, never missing a doctor’s appointment, reading the books that only pregnant women seemed to dog-ear, and helping Tracina in and out of his truck, though she still hardly showed. This seemed to bring out a new sweetness in Tracina as well, even if it was in service of making her life easier and the lives of others a little harder.

Just before the end of my shift, I made a last-minute assist, helping Dell deliver food for a party of six. I was already cashed out, refilling my condiments and wiping down the counters. I had plans to go for a run and to have an early night, when Tracina came bounding back down the stairs, rubbing her neck. She did look pale, so when she told us she was leaving early, Dell wasn’t surprised.

“I’m just so sick. I feel like I’m going to throw up. Will told me to go home. Sorry, guys. It’s going to be like this for a little bit, I guess. Second trimester is supposed to get easier.”

There was no way Dell could handle dinner on her own. I pretended to stifle my exasperation, but truth be told I wanted to stay. I needed the money and I had nothing better to do. Plus, there was that awful, painful, marvelous chance I’d accidentally be alone with Will, something I longed for despite all my genuine attempts to avoid it. And sure enough, an hour later, after business died down and a few minutes into the post-dinner hammering, his plaintive voice called from upstairs.

“Can someone come up here, please? I need a hand. Cassie? You there?”

Instead of heading up, I waited for Dell to garnish the final platters for our last customers.

“Please! It won’t take long!”

“Are you hearing that man? Or is it just me hearing that man?” Dell muttered, handing me the hot turkey specials.

“I hear him.”

“Good, ’cause he’s not talking to me.”

“I’m coming!” I yelled over my shoulder, thinking to myself, No pun intended. I’d preserved an internal sense of humor even while nursing my wounds.

I dropped off the plates and headed towards the stairs. I had a flashback to the fake tumble Kit DeMarco had taken on the floor, the one that secured my spot next to Angela Rejean in the burlesque show six weeks earlier. I had had no idea they belonged to S.E.C.R.E.T. too. As I stood now looking up the stairs, more flashbacks played out in my mind’s eye: Will’s face contorted in ecstasy above me, the light from the street illuminating his features. I’ve wanted this since the day we met, he whispered, while I lay beneath him. I wanted you too, Will. I just didn’t know how much.

When does this stop? When do memories quit hurting so much?

If he were to say, We need to talk, Cassie, one more time, I would say, No, we don’t, Will. I would add, I told you we should not be alone, and I would say this while lifting my shirt over my head, tossing it into the corner along with all the unwanted memories stored in that room up there. Will would say, You’re right, Cassie, we shouldn’t be alone. Stepping towards him, I would place my hand on his bare chest, letting him reach behind me and undo my bra. This is such a bad idea, I would say, pressing my skin to his, kissing his mouth, pushing him back until the window ledge stopped us. There, with his thighs straddling mine, his hands on my body, unsure where to touch first, his fingers finally traveling up to entwine my hair, his hands pulling my head back, opening my neck to his hungry mouth, I’d say, See? We don’t need to talk. We need this. We need to make each other moan and sweat. We need to fuck each other again, well, and often. And then, I need to decide what I’m going to do, because I can’t be alone with you, because look what we’re doing to each other, because everything pointed to me and you and now there is no me and you.

And then the words would stop and we’d be just hands and mouths and breath and skin … and awful consequences.

As I took the steps up to the second floor, that delicious, piercing pain went through me again, the one that caused me to throb in places that had once been dormant but now came awake every time I was near him. At the top of the stairs, I stepped around a sawhorse and over an empty roll of cables. The hallway was lined with the detritus of recent renovations—empty pails of plaster, stray nails, remnants of two-by-fours. Behind a roughed-out wall where the new bathrooms extended, Will stood atop a stepladder, framed against the exposed brick between two windows. He was shirtless and covered in white dust. There was no furniture in the room, no evidence of the night a dozen giggly women got ready for an amateur burlesque show—no chair, no storm-tossed bed. He was holding the end of an iron curtain rod with one hand, a screw gun with the other, his T-shirt tucked into his belt.

“Thanks for coming up here. Can you eyeball this for me, Cass?”

Cass. When had he ever called me that? It made me sound like a pal.

“How’s this?” he asked, balancing the rod.

“A little higher.”

He jerked the rod a few inches too high.

“Nope, lower … lower.”

He had it nearly perfectly positioned, and then he brattily dropped the rod way below the window line, at an awkward angle.

“How’s this? Is this good?” he asked, throwing a goofy smile over his shoulder at me.

“I don’t have time for this. I have customers.”

He brought the rod even. When I gave him the go-ahead, he quickly drilled a screw to hold it in place and stomped down the ladder.

“Okay. Are you going to stay mad at me forever?” he asked, stepping towards me. “I’m just trying to do the right thing, Cassie. But I’m at a loss when it comes to you.”

“You’re at a loss?” I hissed. “Let’s talk about loss, shall we? You lost nothing. Me? I lost everything.”

Matilda would have slapped my mouth shut. Have you learned nothing? she’d have said. Why do you paint yourself as the loser?

“You didn’t lose anything,” Will whispered. His eyes met mine, and my heart stopped beating for three whole seconds. I picked you and you picked me. “I am still here. We are still us.”

“There is no us, Will.”

“Cassie, we were friends for years. I miss that so much.”

“Me too, but … I’m just your employee now. That’s how it’s got to be. I will come to work and I will do my job and I will go home,” I said, avoiding his eyes. “I can’t be your friend, Will. And I can’t be that girl either, the one who … who hovers on the sidelines, waiting like some buzzard circling overhead, to see if your relationship with Tracina dies and turns cold.”

“Wow. Is that what you think I’m asking you to do?”

He brought the back of hand to his forehead and wiped his brow with it. His face was lined with sadness, exhaustion and maybe even resignation. A tense silence fell between us, one that made me question whether I could continue to work at the Café while my heart’s pain still existed. But I also knew this was my problem, not his.

“Cassie. I’m sorry for everything.”

Our eyes met, seemingly for the first time in weeks.

“For everything?” I asked.

“No. Not everything,” he said, quietly placing the hammer on the sawhorse and tugging his T-shirt from his belt to wipe his whole face. The sun began setting over Frenchman Street, urging me to get back downstairs and close up shop.

“Okay. You’re busy. So am I. Curtain rod looks good. My job here is done,” I said. “I’ll be downstairs cashing out if you need anything from me.”

“It’s not a matter of if I need you. You know I do.”

I’ll never know what my face looked like in that exact moment, but I imagine the flash of hope was impossible to conceal.

I went home and made a solid set of promises to myself. No more pining. No more pouting. That was yesterday.

Today was my birthday. I was meeting Matilda to talk about my new role in S.E.C.R.E.T. When you’re fresh off your own fantasies, it’s a tricky year. You’re not on the Committee. Not yet. You have to earn your spot. But you’re given a choice of three roles, and I was eager to plunge in, to have something else to do, someplace else to be, someone to think about other than Will or myself.

One of the roles was Fantasy Facilitator, a S.E.C.R.E.T. member who helped make fantasies happen, by booking travel, acting as a background player or participating in scenarios like Kit and Angela had the night of the burlesque show. Without Kit faking her injury, I wouldn’t have danced on that stage. And without Angela’s help with the sexy choreography, I would have made a complete fool of myself up there. This year they were becoming full Committee members, so those two slots were open.

I could also be a Recruiter like Pauline, the woman whose misplaced diary had originally led me to S.E.C.R.E.T. She was married, but her husband wasn’t threatened by her role as a recruiter of the men who’d participate in the fantasies, because, well, he’d once been one of them. Recruiting men for S.E.C.R.E.T. was different from training them; Pauline merely enticed them into the fold. Full-on training, or fine-tuning a recruit’s sexual skills, that was reserved for full Committee members, as was participating sexually in the fantasies—not that I was ready for that anyway. The third role was Guide, providing encouragement and support to a new S.E.C.R.E.T. candidate. There was no way I could have navigated the strange terrain of my crazy, sexy year without my Guide, Matilda. So I chose Guide, the least daunting of the three roles, though Matilda’s advice was to keep an open mind. “The most surprising opportunities could come up,” she said. Last thing left was to sign my S.E.C.R.E.T. pledge and bring it to our lunch.