No

Lana laughs.

It comes out too bright, the kind of sound people use when they want the sentence to turn into a joke before it lands.

“Okay. No. I’m not doing that.”

She looks at Adam like he might still save the table. He doesn’t. He turns the cup a quarter inch and lets Mia have the silence.

“I’m serious,” Lana says, quieter now. “I came here to meet your wife. Not to get recruited.”

“I know how it sounds,” Mia says.

“It sounds like you two decided something in bed and I walked into the aftermath.” Lana shakes her head. “I liked you. That’s what’s annoying. I was sitting here thinking, oh, she’s lovely, this is grown-up, and then you asked me to sleep with your husband.”

“I asked if you would consider it,” Mia says. “You can still walk.”

“I should.”

She doesn’t. She stares at the lid of her cup instead.

Adam finally speaks, and it is almost nothing. “If you want to leave, leave. Nobody’s going to text you after.”

Lana shoots him a look. “Helpful.”

Mia leans in, not crowding, just enough that it stays between them.

“I didn’t want the first time to be a stranger,” she says. “That’s the part I keep circling. I can want this and still not want to watch him disappear into someone I don’t know. I was the one who said your name. He didn’t offer you. I asked if it could be you, because you already know him. You already know what he’s like when he stops being polite. I didn’t want to start with a blank page.”

Lana’s mouth tightens. “So I get to be the practice round.”

“You get to be the person I trusted enough to name first.”

That lands harder than the first version. Lana sits back.

“He told you about us.”

Mia nods. “After I said you. I asked. He didn’t bring you up like a suggestion. I wanted to know if I was naming you because of a fantasy or because it was true.”

Lana glances at Adam. Color creeps up her throat.

“And?”

Mia keeps her eyes on Lana, not on him.

“He told me you two were good together. Not sweet. Good. That you matched. That you took him without flinching and wanted more of it. He didn’t have to talk you into anything. That was enough for me to understand why your name came out of my mouth first.”

The cafe noise feels suddenly far away.

Lana lets out a breath that is almost a laugh and almost not.

“You named me.”

“I named you,” Mia says. “That’s why we’re here. Not because I want to reopen what you two had. Because I know it was good. Because if I can sit there and watch him have you, of all people, I can get past the part of me that wants to keep him in a locked box. If I can survive the jealousy of that, I can let him have other women after. You’re the hard one. That’s the point.”

Lana stares at her. “You want to use me to train yourself.”

“I want to start with someone who already knows how he fucks,” Mia says. “And I think you still remember it too, even if you’d rather I hadn’t said it over coffee.”

Lana looks at Adam again. He meets her eyes and doesn’t decorate it.

“She said your name,” he says. “I told her the truth when she asked. That’s all I did.”

“You could have said no to her.”

“I didn’t want to.”

Lana sits with that. Her thumb worries the cardboard sleeve on her cup. A minute goes by. Then another.

“This is insane.”

“Yes,” Mia says.

“And you’d be in the room the whole time.”

“Yes.”

“Watching.”

“Yes.”

Lana closes her eyes for a second. When she opens them, the fight is still there, just thinner.

“I did miss it,” she says, so low it almost isn’t for the table. “I wasn’t going to say that. I was going to be the dignified ex who drinks her coffee and leaves. But you’re sitting here talking about us like you already know the shape of it, and now I can’t pretend I forgot what he felt like.”

Mia doesn’t smile yet. She waits.

Lana lets out a long, irritated breath.

“Once. I mean it. Once. If I hate it, I leave. If I feel like a prop, I leave. And I can’t believe I’m agreeing to this.”

“Okay,” Mia says.

Lana looks between them, flushed, still half angry at herself.

“When do you want to do it?”

Mia and Adam look at each other. The same small smile finds both of them, quiet and certain, like the last piece just clicked into place.