My friends thought sending me on a blind date with one of Boston’s most feared mafia bosses would be hilarious. But when I finally told him, “They sent me here as a joke,” Daniel Brooks didn’t laugh—and within seconds, neither did anyone else watching our table.

The first thing I heard upon entering the Grand Oak was a woman near the bar whispering, “Oh my God. They actually sent her to him.”

I stopped so abruptly the hostess nearly collided with me.

Across the chandelier-lit dining room, a man in a charcoal suit slowly rose from a corner table.

Daniel Brooks.

Everyone in Boston seemed to know that name.

At thirty-eight, Daniel controlled nightclubs, private clubs, shipping companies, and enough of the city’s underground business that people lowered their voices when discussing him.

Newspapers called him an elusive businessman, but rumors used a much simpler description.

Mafia boss.

And apparently, he was my blind date.

Three hours earlier, I’d been working behind the register at Maple Street Books when my phone buzzed.

Tonight. 7:30. Grand Oak. Blind date. Don’t cancel.

Three laughing emojis followed.

I immediately replied, Absolutely not.

Olivia called thirty seconds later.

“Please, Emily. Thirty minutes.”

“You put laughing emojis after ‘blind date.’”

“We laugh at everything.”

“You laughed when Megan got locked outside in a bathrobe.”

“She laughs about it now.”

“She moved to Arizona.”

Still, Olivia knew how to wear down my defenses.

Ever since Jason ended our four-year relationship by casually admitting over leftover Chinese food that he loved another woman—whom I later discovered he’d been seeing for almost a year—I had avoided dating entirely.

Solitude couldn’t surprise me.

Eventually, however, I agreed to thirty minutes.

What Olivia conveniently forgot to mention was that my date wasn’t some random man pretending to be dangerous.

Daniel Brooks was actually Daniel Brooks.

Now I caught my reflection in a mirrored column.

Simple navy dress.

Silver earrings.

Six-year-old shoes.

A handbag with an ink stain near the zipper.

Nothing about me belonged in a restaurant where dinner probably cost more than my weekly grocery budget.

Daniel watched me approach.

Strangely, he didn’t look annoyed.

“Ms. Carter?” the hostess prompted.

I forced myself forward.

Daniel was taller than photographs suggested, with dark hair and calm gray eyes.

No flashy jewelry.

No exaggerated swagger.

Just the unnerving stillness of someone accustomed to entire rooms noticing when he moved.

“Emily?”

“Yes.”

“I’m Daniel.”

“I figured.”

One corner of his mouth lifted.

“That obvious?”

“People talk about you.”

His eyes held mine.

“Hopefully only nice things.”

A nervous laugh escaped me before I could stop it.

He pulled out my chair, and I sat.

For seven unbearable seconds, neither of us spoke.

Then I decided humiliation was easier when delivered quickly.

“I should probably tell you something before we order.”

Daniel folded his hands.

“That sounds serious.”

“My friends sent me here as a joke.”

His expression changed instantly.

Not anger.

Not embarrassment.

Something colder.

“A joke?”

I swallowed.

“They thought it would be funny to send someone like me to someone like you.”

“Someone like you?”

I glanced toward the bar—and froze.

Olivia and two of our friends were sitting at a table half-hidden behind a column.

Watching us.

Laughing.

Daniel followed my gaze.

Their smiles disappeared one by one.

He looked back at me, then slowly reached inside his suit jacket.

Every person at their table stopped laughing.

And Daniel quietly said, “Emily, I think your friends and I need to clarify exactly who tonight’s joke was supposed to be on.”

—

Daniel didn’t raise his voice.

He simply lifted two fingers toward the corner table and said, “Would the three of you join us?”

It wasn’t a question.

Olivia, Tessa, and Nina crossed the dining room like students summoned to the principal’s office.

Olivia’s face had gone the color of paper.

“Emily,” she began, “I can explain—”

“Sit down, Ms. Turner,” Daniel said gently.

She sat.

Daniel finished reaching into his jacket.

He drew out a small folded rectangle of cardstock, worn soft at the edges from being handled too many times.

He set it on the white tablecloth between the bread basket and the candle.

I stared at it.

A bookmark.

Cream paper, a tiny printed oak tree, and the words Maple Street Books along the bottom.

My breath caught.

Beneath the printed tree, in blue ink, were two lines in handwriting I knew better than my own.

If you’re the kind of person who loses a notebook, I hope you also find a good book.

“That’s mine,” I whispered.

“I know,” Daniel said.

Eleven months earlier, on a rainy Tuesday in November, someone had left a black leather notebook on the reading table near the poetry shelves.

I had looked up just in time to see a tall man in a gray coat step out into the downpour.

I grabbed the notebook and ran after him.

I caught up to him at the corner, soaked to the skin, holding the notebook against my chest like a wounded bird.

He turned around.

He didn’t give me his name.

He only looked at the notebook, then at me, and then he pulled an envelope from his coat.

It was thick.

Very thick.

I’d pushed it back into his hand.

“It’s a notebook,” I told him. “Not a ransom.”

Then I’d slipped one of our bookmarks between its pages, because Mrs. Halloran always said a book should never leave the shop without one.

I had never seen him again.

I had never known who he was.

“It took me eleven months to find the shop that printed this,” Daniel said.

Nobody at the table moved.

“I had a bookmark and a rainy street corner. That was all.”

I found my voice.

“You could have just walked in.”

“I could have.” His mouth tightened slightly. “I didn’t want to frighten you. A man like me appearing at a woman’s workplace is rarely a gift.”

He turned his gray eyes on Olivia.

“So I asked Kyle Turner, who works in my accounting office, to find out whether you’d be willing to have dinner with me. I asked him to be respectful about it.”

Olivia flinched.

“Kyle told me a mafia boss wanted to meet you.” Her voice shook. “Emily, I thought you’d say no. You never say yes to anything. So I told you it was a joke.”

“You told me it was a joke.”

“I thought—”

“You sat behind a column and laughed.”

Tessa stared at her hands.

Nina wiped her eyes.

“We didn’t think it would hurt you,” Nina said.

“You didn’t think,” I said, “about me at all.”

The candle flame trembled.

Daniel let the silence sit.

Then he folded his hands.

“I said the joke would be clarified,” he said quietly. “Here it is.”

He looked at each of them in turn.

“Three women laughed at the one person in this city who returned something I could never have replaced, refused a reward, and asked for nothing. The joke was never on Emily. It was on you.”

Nobody breathed.

“You may go,” Daniel said.

They stood.

Olivia paused beside my chair, tears running down her face.

“Emily, I’m so sorry.”

I didn’t answer.

She left, and the others followed her out into the night.

For a long moment, neither Daniel nor I spoke.

Then he said, “You may go as well. My driver will take you home. No follow-up. No calls. If you never want to see me again, I’ll understand.”

I looked at the bookmark.

I thought about six-year-old shoes and an ink-stained bag and four years spent believing I was easy to leave.

“I told you I’d give you thirty minutes,” I said.

“You did.”

“I’d like to use them.”

He nearly smiled.

“Then ask me anything.”

I picked up my water glass.

“Why me?”

“Because eleven months ago, you did something you don’t yet understand—”

His phone buzzed against the table.

He glanced down.

His expression didn’t change, but his hand went still.

He tilted the screen toward me.

A message from someone named Owen.

Bar, far end. Man in navy jacket. Photographing your table.

Beneath it, three words.

Don’t turn around.

—

I kept my eyes fixed on the candle.

“Is he dangerous?” I whispered.

“He’s curious. It’s usually the same thing.” Daniel lifted his water glass with perfect calm. “Owen’s already moving. Keep looking at me and eat your bread.”

I broke off a piece of sourdough with fingers that didn’t feel like mine.

Behind me, someone’s chair scraped.

Then footsteps.

Fast.

Then the front door.

Daniel’s phone buzzed again.

“He’s gone,” he said. “Owen’s men are following.”

“Followed by your men.”

“It’s a very Boston evening.”

I laughed.

I didn’t mean to.

It burst out of me, loud and slightly unhinged, and a woman at the next table glanced over in alarm.

Daniel watched me with something soft in his eyes.

“Better?”

“No,” I said. “But I’m here.”

A waiter appeared and set down two bowls of clam chowder I hadn’t ordered.

“I took the liberty,” Daniel said. “You strike me as someone who’d rather have soup than a tasting menu.”

“That’s alarmingly correct.”

“I’ve had eleven months to think about you.”

I tore another piece of bread.

“Tell me about the notebook.”

He was quiet for a moment.

“Fourteen names,” he said.

“What?”

“There were fourteen names inside. Dock workers. Bookkeepers. A retired customs inspector. People who had trusted me to keep them out of certain conversations.”

My spoon stopped halfway to my mouth.

“Eleven of them have children.”

“Daniel—”

“That night, a man named Victor Kane had three cars three blocks behind me. He’d been trying to take that notebook for weeks.” His voice remained level. “If it had been found by the wrong person, those fourteen families would have been visited by very unpleasant men.”

I set down my spoon.

“I just ran after you in the rain.”

“You ran after a stranger to return something that wasn’t yours.” His eyes held mine. “Do you know how many people in this city would have opened that book?”

“I didn’t.”

“I know. The page I’d left folded was still folded.”

For a moment, I couldn’t speak.

Then I said, very quietly, “I thought it was somebody’s diary.”

“It was,” Daniel said. “Just not the kind you’d expect.”

We ate.

The chowder was good.

The conversation was strange, careful, and somehow easy.

He asked me about the bookstore.

I told him about Mrs. Halloran, seventy-five years old and fiercely opposed to e-readers.

He asked about my favorite book.

“Persuasion,” I said. “Because Anne waits eight years and still gets to say what she means.”

“Do you think that’s realistic?”

“I think it’s earned.”

He smiled at that.

A real smile.

It changed his whole face.

Then his voice gentled.

“May I ask something personal?”

“That depends how personal.”

“Is there anyone I should know about? Anyone who might have a reason to resent me sitting across from you?”

I thought of Jason.

Jason with his easy laugh and his terrible timing and his leftover Chinese food confession.

“Only my ex,” I said. “He left me for someone else about a year ago. Last I heard, he’d changed careers. He’s in logistics now, working for some shipping company.”

Daniel’s spoon paused.

“Which company?”

“Kane something. Kane Freight, I think.”

The change was small.

If I hadn’t been looking straight at him, I would have missed it.

His shoulders stilled.

His breath stopped.

His eyes went from warm gray to the color of frozen harbor water.

“Emily,” he said quietly. “Say that name again.”