[STORY] Heartbroken Woman Kissed a Stranger at Her Ex’s Engagement—Unaware He Was a Billionaire

Heartbroken Woman Kissed a Stranger at Her Ex’s Engagement — Unaware He Was a Billionaire

Chapter One: Goodbye, Derek

“It’s over, Gabby.”

“Okay. That’s it? Just… okay? What else do you want me to say? Goodbye, Derek.”

He didn’t even sound sorry. He sounded relieved. Three years, and he sounded relieved.

I will be fine, I told myself, because that is what I do. I survive things.

Sasha, my best friend since the seventh grade, was the first person I called. We had shared lunches and secrets and late-night phone calls for over a decade. She’d hugged me the week before and said, “I’m so sorry Derek is an idiot.” The whole time, she already knew. The whole time, she was already wearing his ring in her heart, even if it wasn’t on her finger yet.

Then came the party invitation, forwarded to me as a joke, as if the universe wanted to see exactly how much I could absorb in a single month. Can you believe these people? my friend had written beneath it. I stared at the words engagement party and felt something in my chest fold in on itself.

“You are not going there to cry,” I told myself in the mirror that night, my reflection stern and unconvincing. “You hear me? Not one tear.”

“Congratulations, you two.”

“Thank you so much.”

This was ridiculous. I was standing in a room full of people celebrating a love story that had been built directly on top of the ruins of mine. Fine, then. Fine. If this was how it was going to be, then I was going to be fine too. I was going to be more than fine. I was going to be spectacular.

“Gabriella, you look beautiful,” Sasha said, crossing the room toward me in a dress that probably cost more than my monthly rent.

“The dress is perfect,” I said. “Thank you for coming.”

“Of course. I wouldn’t miss it. I wanted to wish you both all the best. I really do.” The lie came out smoother than I expected. “I’m completely fine. And I’m actually already seeing someone, so there’s no awkwardness at all.”

“Oh — you’re seeing someone?”

“Yes. Actually. He’s supposed to be here tonight.”

A man. I needed a man. Any man. One who looked like he could plausibly be mine.

Interesting things don’t happen to me. Not in the personal sense, anyway. In the business sense, yes — deals close, empires expand, competitors fold, or so I imagine other people’s lives go. But my personal life is very quiet, very controlled, very much the way I like it. Or the way I liked it, before this exact moment, when I turned around, spotted a stranger standing near the bar with the kind of composed stillness that made him look like he belonged somewhere far more important than this ballroom, and did something I had never done in my entire life.

I walked up to him and kissed him.

Chapter Two: A Stranger’s Lips

His lips were warm. He smelled like something clean and understated, cedar and something else I couldn’t name, and underneath it, something that was just him. My red lipstick, my gold earrings, and a very small tremor in my bottom lip that I was working very hard to control — I could feel all of it, hyperaware, as I pulled back and looked into a stranger’s startled eyes. Whoever this man was, he was not nearly as thrown as I expected him to be.

“Hi,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t be.”

That was not what I’d planned to say when I turned around. I’d planned to say something like what do you think you’re doing or excuse me. Instead, those two words tumbled out of me: “My ex is watching.”

I told him I was already seeing someone, and then I kissed him. “I completely understand if you want to walk away right now,” I added quickly. “I would totally understand that.”

He glanced past me, toward the crowd, then back at my face. “Which one is the ex?”

“How long were you together?”

“Three years. And he ended it.”

“Over a phone call. And that’s his fiancée beside him. My best friend.”

“What’s your name?”

“Gabriella. Gabriella Taylor.”

“Kyle.”

There it was — the almost-laugh. It made him look completely different. Softer, more real, less like someone performing composure and more like someone who actually had it.

“Gabriella Taylor,” he said. “How about we give your ex something worth looking at?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that you came here in that dress for a reason, and it wasn’t to stand in the corner feeling bad about yourself. So let’s walk around this room together, and you can tell me about yourself, and we’ll see what happens.”

Is he real, I wondered, or have I had more champagne than I thought?

“Okay,” I said. “For what it’s worth, the dress was worth wearing. I bought it for a date that never happened. He was too tired.”

“Then he’s an idiot,” Kyle said, “and I’m grateful for his poor judgment. What do you do? And what do you actually love about it? And what did you want to be when you were a little girl?”

“That’s a lot of questions.”

“I’m interested.”

I was answering honestly. I had come here tonight prepared to perform, and instead I was just talking. “I wanted to be a marine biologist,” I told him. “When I was seven I was completely obsessed with dolphins. I had dolphin posters, dolphin books, dolphin everything.”

“What happened?”

“Life happened. I ended up studying graphic design instead. I actually love it, so it worked out. But sometimes I still think about the dolphins.”

“You can still think about the dolphins,” he said, and something about that simple permission undid me a little. “What about you? What did you want to be when you were seven?”

“Taller.”

I laughed — a real laugh, surprising myself. “Don’t look back,” he said quietly. “Not once.”

I didn’t know if it was the champagne or the company, and I decided I wasn’t going to question it.

“I have to take this,” he said, his phone buzzing in his jacket. “I’m sorry. Give me two minutes.”

“Of course.”

The room didn’t feel hostile anymore. Somewhere between his first question and his last one, I had stopped performing and started just being.

“I didn’t think you’d actually come,” Sasha said, appearing at my elbow the moment Kyle stepped away.

“Why not, Gabby?”

“Gabriella. It’s Gabriella to you now.” I felt something cold settle behind my ribs. “I remember the Instagram posts. I remember the seven days of silence. I remember that three years were apparently nothing. I hope you’re happy, Sasha. I really do.”

“Who is he?”

“Someone who is none of your business. Goodbye, Sasha.”

“You okay?” Kyle asked, returning.

“Yes. And I still know nothing about you.”

“Um, let’s see. I run a company called Bright Diamond Corporation. My mother, Rosa, calls me four times a week without fail. I have a niece named Stella who is six years old and apparently the smartest person in any room she enters. And I don’t like parties. I came to this one because a business associate asked me to show my face for an hour, and I did it out of obligation, not pleasure.”

“You don’t look like someone who does things out of obligation.”

“I don’t, usually. But Rosa raised me to keep my word, so here I am.”

“Rosa sounds like a force.”

“She’s a five-foot-two woman who once made a grown man cry by simply looking at him.”

That laugh was real. That one came from somewhere genuine. Things might actually be okay.

“Thank you,” I said.

“For what?”

“For not walking away. If you ever want to talk about the dolphins—”

“Good night, Gabriella Taylor,” he said, smiling.

Tonight had started as the worst idea I’d ever had and ended as something I couldn’t quite name yet. But I wanted to name it.

Chapter Three: The Rule I Was Already Breaking

I was not going to be the girl who calls the handsome stranger she kissed at her ex-boyfriend’s engagement party. That was the beginning of a bad decision. And Gabriella Taylor had already used up her quota of bad decisions for this year, and probably the next two years after that.

“You look like you’re thinking about something else,” my coworker said, glancing over at my desk the following Monday.

“I’m fine.”

“You’ve erased the same circle six times.”

He was right. Six times. He had stood beside me when Sasha approached uninvited at the party, without making it dramatic, just standing there and letting his presence do the work. And the way he had looked at me when I laughed.

I had kissed a stranger out of nowhere, and then that stranger had texted me — because of course he’d gotten my number somewhere in the chaos of that night, and I hadn’t minded at all. He texted like he talked: complete sentences, actual punctuation. It was both funny and oddly attractive.

“You fixed the circle,” my coworker observed, looking over my shoulder at the screen.

“Well,” I muttered, “apparently he’s good for the work too.”

Eleven minutes. I would wait eleven minutes before responding, so I didn’t seem like I’d been waiting for this text, even though I had absolutely been waiting for it. Ridiculous. I chose not to examine that too closely.

When I arrived at the café he’d suggested, he stood up the moment he saw me. Such a simple thing. Nobody had done that for me in a very long time.

“You came,” I said.

“You invited me. Some people don’t come when you invite them.”

“Well, I came.”

“I see that. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. Tell me about the studio. The work, not the job.”

“Right now I’m fighting with a circle,” I admitted. “A logo for a bakery. It refuses to be the right kind of round.”

“Then it’s not a circle,” he said. “It’s a negotiation.”

I laughed, and then, without entirely meaning to, I found myself telling him the truth. “The worst part wasn’t even the betrayal,” I said. “The worst part was realizing I had been so focused on keeping that relationship alive that I stopped paying attention to whether it was actually making me happy.”

“That’s a hard thing to see.”

“Yeah, it is. Now — enough about me. Tell me about your family. About the company.”

“My grandfather started as a small jewelry shop. My father grew it into something bigger, and I took it from big to enormous. It took everything I had for a long time. All of my hours, all of my focus, all of the parts of myself that might have gone somewhere else.”

“Do you ever regret it?”

“No. But sometimes I think about what else might have been there, if I’d been looking.”

“I know exactly what you mean,” I said softly.

“Dessert?”

“Only if it’s terrible for me.”

“I’ll tell the waiter.”

We walked slowly afterward, on purpose, both of us slowing our steps without saying so. Neither of us was in a hurry for the night to end.

“Tell me something nobody knows about you,” he said.

“I can’t cook anything except scrambled eggs. And even those are inconsistent.”

“Inconsistent scrambled eggs. That’s adorable. You’re a billionaire who can’t cook.”

“The two things are unrelated. Your turn.”

“I still have all my dolphin books in a box under my bed,” I admitted. “I’ve moved three times, and I’ve never gotten rid of them.”

“You should put them on a shelf.”

“They’re children’s books.”

“So?”

Here it was. This was the moment.

“I’d like to see you again,” he said.

He cooks inconsistent scrambled eggs. He has a loud six-year-old niece. He stands up when I walk into a room. He listens without trying to fix anything.

“I’d like that too.”

“Good night, Gabriella.”

I was in a lot of trouble, and I did not mind, even a little bit.

Chapter Four: Rocks and Dolphins

“How was your week?” he asked, weeks later, as we walked our now-regular Friday route along the river.

“Busy, but good. Yours?”

“Same. Glad it’s Friday.”

“Me too. I love these walks.”

“Me too. They’re the best. So peaceful. Just us.”

“I have to go,” he said, three streets later, and didn’t move.

“You’ve said that four times.”

“You keep talking after I say it.”

“So do you.”

I did not think about Derek once all day. Not once.

“The museum has a dolphin exhibit,” he told me one afternoon, entirely too casually. “Do you want to come?”

“Yes.”

“Are you Uncle Kyle’s girlfriend?” a small voice demanded the moment we arrived, before I had even finished taking off my coat.

“Stella,” Kyle sighed. “She does that on a regular basis.”

“I’m Gabriella,” I said, crouching to the girl’s eye level. “I’m your uncle’s friend.”

“He doesn’t have friends,” Stella informed me solemnly. “Mama says he only has employees and acquaintances.”

“Stella—”

“It’s what Mama says,” she said, unbothered, “but you don’t look like an employee.”

“What does an employee look like?”

“Nervous. You don’t look nervous. You look like you like him.”

Do not look at Kyle. Do not look at Kyle.

“You’re very observant,” I told her.

“I know. Come on, I want to see the rocks first. Rocks are more interesting than dolphins.”

“I strongly disagree.”

“Why?”

“Because dolphins are amazing.”

Something important was happening to me, and I was not afraid of it. “Okay,” I admitted, examining the display Stella dragged me toward. “I see it. They’re pretty cool.”

This was the simple, uncomplicated happiness of being exactly where I was supposed to be.

“This is so beautiful,” I murmured at the dolphin tank, and the nearest dolphin turned and looked directly at me.

“I think it likes me.”

“She’s like this with everything,” Kyle said, watching me with an expression I hadn’t yet learned how to name. “I love it.”

“My best friend is named Cora,” Stella announced over lunch, “and my teacher, Mr. Delaney, gives too much homework for a first grader, which is genuinely unfair.”

“That does sound genuinely unfair. What kind of homework?”

“We have to read a whole book and write a report about it.”

“Oh, wow. That is a lot.”

“I know, right?”

This was the kind of person she was — direct, unfiltered, utterly herself. “You should come again next time,” she told me firmly as we said goodbye.

“I’d like that.”

“Uncle Kyle, you should keep this one.”

“Stella—”

“Sorry,” Kyle said, laughing despite himself. “She’s perfect.”

“She’s incredible. She’s terrifying.”

“Both things,” he said. “Both things.”

Later that evening, standing in the doorway of my apartment, he said quietly, “You kissed me back at the party.”

“I know.”

“You didn’t have to.”

“I know that too.”

It was gone — the last small piece of that tight, broken thing that had been living in my chest since Derek’s phone call. It just let go and dissolved into nothing, as if it had never been there at all. Derek had loved me the way people love something convenient, something that fit into the shape of his life without requiring any rearrangement. But Kyle loved me the way people love something they have chosen deliberately — the way you choose a direction and commit to it with both hands.

Kyle Wright was awake at 4:50 in the morning thinking about me. New rule, I told myself sternly. I am not allowed to fall in love with him yet. It is too soon. And the last time I fell in love, it ended on a cold bathroom floor. I need to be more careful this time.

Chapter Five: The Magnet on the Fridge

“Rosa gave it to Stella when she was three,” Kyle explained, pointing to a small dolphin magnet stuck to his refrigerator. “Stella decided I needed it more than she did.”

“He put this here for me,” I said slowly, understanding dawning. “He knew I would find it. You put that magnet there for me.”

“Yes.”

“That’s the most arrogant, wonderful thing anyone has ever done for me.”

“I’ll tell Stella you said that. She’ll take full credit.” He paused. “Bring her to Sunday dinner. Rosa. Sunday at two.”

He was using the careful, measured voice — the one he used when he wasn’t sure how I would react.

“Your mother wants to meet me.”

“You don’t have to come, Kyle.”

“I know. Of course I’ll come.”

“She’s going to love you.”

“How do you know?”

“Because she loves anyone who argues back.”

“I’m terrified.”

“Good,” he said. “That means you understand the situation.”

That somehow made everything worse and better at the same time.

“Stop,” Kyle said, watching me across Rosa’s kitchen the following Sunday.

“I’m not doing anything.”

“You’re smoothing your dress. You do that when you’re nervous. You’ve done it four times in two minutes.”

“Maybe I really like this dress.”

“That is both alarming and deeply charming,” he said. “You’re prettier than Stella said.”

“Gabriella!” Stella announced from across the table, without any preamble. “Cora took my crayon and said she didn’t, and then it was in her desk, and she said someone put it there. That’s completely unfair.”

“That’s what I said.”

“I know that look,” Kyle murmured under his breath. “Mama has already decided. As far as she’s concerned, this girl is family.”

This was what it looked like when food is love made physical.

“You’re too thin,” Rosa declared, piling more food onto my plate without asking. “Eat more.”

“Thank you. It’s delicious.”

“This is the best dinner ever,” Stella declared. “I love it. You look happy, Gabriella.”

“I know.”

“Uncle Kyle, look.”

I was going to have to have a serious conversation with myself about that rule I had already broken, because the way Kyle was looking at me across that loud, warm dinner table was doing serious damage to any walls I thought I still had up.

Later, in the kitchen, Rosa found me alone. “He doesn’t bring people here,” she said without preamble. “In ten years, I have met two women he was seeing, and neither of them made it past the front door. He called me on a Tuesday three weeks ago and said, ‘There’s someone I want you to meet.’ And Kyle does not say things like that.” She fixed me with a look that was equal parts warmth and warning. “Whatever you’re doing with him, be honest with him, because he gives everything, and he doesn’t show it. And if someone breaks that, he just closes up. I’m his mother, and I don’t want to watch that happen again.”

“I’m not going to do that,” I said. “I won’t hurt him.”

“Good. Now help me with these glasses.”

I had just passed some kind of test, and nobody had made a ceremony of it. That was exactly what made it precious.

“Did Uncle Kyle take you somewhere nice this week?” Stella demanded another Sunday, tugging on my sleeve.

“Yes, we went to a work dinner.”

“He took you to a work dinner? That’s not romantic. Gabriella, you should tell him to do better.”

“Stella, I’m helping you.”

“The child is right, Kyle,” Rosa called from the stove. “Do better.”

“I am so sorry about my family,” Kyle told me, laughing, as we drove home.

“Don’t be. I love your family, and I mean that. I really, truly do.”

“When you and Uncle Kyle get married,” Stella had announced weeks earlier, apropos of nothing, “can I be the flower girl?”

“Stella, we’re not—”

“I know you’re not yet, but when you do, because you will, I want to be the flower girl. And I want a pink dress, not white. White is boring.”

“If that ever happens,” I told her, “you will absolutely be the flower girl in whatever color you want.”

“Good.”

A year ago, I had been sitting on a cold bathroom floor after a phone call that broke me. I could not have imagined any of this — the warm garden, the family that opened its door and pulled me inside, loving a man who puts dolphin magnets on his refrigerator, talks about his father over cold tea, and stands up every single time I walk into a room.

Chapter Six: What His Father Asked Him to Carry

Come back next Sunday, Rosa had said, and Kyle had come back to me that night still holding whatever had been said between them in the kitchen. I had not felt this in a very long time — the sensation of being welcomed into something real.

“I’m in love with you,” I told him one evening, quietly, “and I am done being careful with true things. Being careful got me three years of something that looked like love and wasn’t. I am not doing that again.”

“I know,” he said. “You know? I’ve known for a while, and you didn’t say anything.”

“I was waiting for you to be ready.”

“How did you know I wasn’t ready?”

“Because you still look surprised every time I’m kind to you.” He paused. “I’m in love with you too, Gabriella.”

This kind of happy is hard to describe. It’s not dramatic or loud. It’s just warm and steady and full — like a room where all the lights are on, and the window is open, and someone you love is in the next room, and you can hear them moving around, and you know they are there.

But not everything settled quietly. Weeks later, walking near his office, we ran into a woman who greeted him with a familiarity that stopped me cold.

“Kyle,” she said. “It’s been a long time.”

“It has,” he said, something guarded flickering across his face.

“Stop it,” I told myself internally. “He is not that person anymore.”

Her smile was real, which somehow made it worse. “I’m Elena,” she said, extending a hand toward me. “Gabriella,” I managed, and underneath all of it was an entire ocean of unspoken things I was standing at the edge of without a map.

“I heard about your father,” Elena said to Kyle. “My condolences.”

“Thank you. Are you in the city long?”

“Just a week. I’m here for the Castiano merger. The firm brought me in on the legal side.”

“Of course. It was good to see you, Kyle.”

“And it was nice to meet you, Gabriella.”

“Are you okay?” I asked once she’d gone.

“Yes.”

“Kyle, I’m fine—”

“You’re walking faster than you were before,” I said.

He was right. And I hated that he was right.

“Who is she?”

“Someone I was with a long time ago.”

“How long?”

“Four years. We ended things three years ago.”

“So — while I was with Derek.”

“Yes.”

“What happened?”

“We wanted different things. She wanted me to step back from the company, and I wasn’t ready to do that. We kept trying to make it work past the point where it made sense, and then we stopped.”

“Did you love her?”

“Yes.”

“Do you still love her?”

“No.”

“Then why did you look like that when you saw her?”

“Because she knew my father,” he said quietly, “and seeing her reminded me of him.”

I had misread every single thing — shame for assuming, and grief for him for something I didn’t fully understand yet.

“Your father,” I said gently. “He died two years ago?”

“Kyle, it’s okay—”

“It’s not. You don’t have to say it’s okay.”

“No. I suppose I don’t.”

We sat together in his kitchen, the tea steeping too long, going bitter between us. “The tea will be terrible,” he said. “I am not very good at tea.”

“I’ll drink it anyway. Tell me about him.”

“My father was a large, loud man who laughed too much and told the same three stories at every dinner party. He built the company from the ground up with his own hands. And he got sick so quietly and so quickly that by the time any of us understood what was happening, there was not enough time left. I spent the last year of his life in boardrooms and on planes, trying to hold the company together, because that was what he asked me to do. ‘Hold it together, Kyle,’ he said. Hold everything together. And I did it. It cost me Elena, and it cost me years of my life, and I would do it again, because my father asked me to.” His voice thinned. “And the weight of it never lifted. It lives in me like something I carry in my chest. It’s always there. Even on the good days. Even on the best days.”

“Thank you for telling me.”

“I don’t usually talk about him.”

“I know.”

“It’s easier with you.”

“Good,” I said. “I want it to be easier.”

It was not a dramatic shift. It was a settling — the way a house settles into its foundation and becomes solid. I was going to love this man for a very long time.

Chapter Seven: The Green Room

He gave his mother my number without a fight. I chose to interpret that as a significant development.

“I need your opinion on something,” Rosa texted me one afternoon. “I’m redecorating Kyle’s old bedroom to make it a proper guest room, and I want to know if the green is too much. Can you send me a photo?”

“The green is beautiful, Rosa. Keep it.”

“I knew it. I knew the green was right. Kyle said it was too dark. He has no sense.”

“He really doesn’t,” I agreed.

“He’s different with you, you know,” Rosa said, a little more seriously. “How do you mean?”

“Lighter. He’s always been such a serious boy, even when he was small. Always carrying everything himself, never asking for help. And with you, he puts things down sometimes. I haven’t seen him do that in a very long time.” She paused. “He’s easy to love, isn’t he.”

“He is,” I said.

“Yes, he is. Okay, good. The green stays. Come Sunday — I’m making the lamb.”

That woman had just given me something precious, and nobody made a ceremony of it. That is exactly what makes it precious.

Chapter Eight: The Question

“Kyle, I’m not finished,” I told him one evening, mid-conversation, when he tried to change the subject on our porch. “I bought something three weeks ago and I’ve been carrying it around because I couldn’t figure out the right moment. And then I realized I was trying to manage the moment, and I don’t want to manage this. I just want it to be real.”

He opened his hand. In it sat a small, unmistakable box.

“So here,” he said. “I thought about you specifically when I chose this — not just any version of you, but the real one.”

I was furious at myself for crying, and I also did not care at all.

“You kissed me at a party,” he said, “and you apologized for it, and I told you not to, and I meant that, because that kiss was the most interesting thing that had happened to me in years. And you were the most interesting thing. And then you were the best thing. And I don’t want to manage how I feel about that anymore.” He took a breath. “I just want to ask you — Gabriella Taylor, who loves dolphins and can’t watch her ex-boyfriend get engaged without causing a small scene, and argues with six-year-olds about rocks, and made my mother love her in forty-five minutes, and made me put things down for the first time in longer than I can remember — I want to ask you to stay.”

I laughed, half a sob. “Is that a question?”

“Will you marry me?”

“Yes. That’s the question.”

“Yes. Obviously. Yes.”

There it was — the full laugh. The real one. I had worked very hard to earn that one over the past months, and I was going to spend a very long time trying to make him smile like that again, and I was going to enjoy every second of it.

“Stella, you were supposed to wait inside!” Kyle called out, laughing, as a small blur came sprinting across the lawn, having clearly been watching from a window this entire time.

“I did wait! I waited a whole minute! Is it — is it yes? Did she say yes?”

“She said yes.”

“Pink,” Stella said immediately, turning to face me with fierce, joyful seriousness. “Gabriella, you promise. Pink.”

“Pink, Stella. I promise.”

“Okay, good.”

Chapter Nine: What the Ocean Knew

A year ago, I had been sitting on a cold bathroom floor after a phone call that broke me. I could not have imagined this — a warm garden, a family that opened its door and pulled me inside, a man who puts dolphin magnets on his refrigerator and talks about his father over cold tea and stands up every single time I walk into a room.

“Stella told me about the flower girl conversation,” Kyle said, laughing, weeks after the engagement.

“She’s very direct.”

“She gets it from Rosa.”

“She wanted pink.”

“She’s wanted a pink dress since she was four,” he said. “She’s been looking for a reason.”

Our quiet together is always like this. Warm and full. “I’ve been thinking,” Kyle said one evening, “about the fact that I have lived my entire adult life managing things — managing the company, managing my family, managing my feelings, managing everything that comes at me. And I am very good at it. And it is also exhausting. And since I met you, I have managed less, and been better. And I don’t think that’s a coincidence.”

The thing that breaks you is sometimes just the thing that moves you to where you were supposed to be. Derek’s phone call had felt, at the time, like the end of everything worth having. It turned out to be the door swinging open on something I hadn’t even known to want — a loud six-year-old with strong opinions about rocks and pink dresses, a mother who redecorates rooms in green and calls four times a week without fail, a man who texts in complete sentences and puts a dolphin magnet on his refrigerator because he knew, somehow, that I would find it.

I still have the dolphin books in a box, though they’re on a shelf now, exactly where he told me they belonged. Some things you carry your whole life waiting for someone to notice them. And some people, when they finally do notice, don’t just glance and move on. They put your childhood obsession on display in their kitchen and wait, quietly, patiently, for you to walk in and understand exactly what that means.

I understand it now. I understood it the moment I said yes.

— END —