By Thursday, he had a usual.
Black coffee, the breakfast sandwich, the stool at the far end of the counter. He came in at 7:15, which was after the post-dawn regulars but before the tourist crowd found their footing for the day. That meant I had time to actually stand there and talk to him instead of just refilling his mug on the way past.
I didn't know if that was deliberate on his part. I suspected it was.
The conversations had started small and gotten longer without either of us making a decision about it. Monday had been the river—what the upper bend looked like after rain, whether the cutthroats would move off the riffle if the water rose. Tuesday had been Hollow Peak itself—how long I'd lived here, what it was like growing up in a town where everyone knew your father's name. Wednesday, he'd told me about a client who'd never held a fly rod in his life and had, on his third cast, put a dry fly into a seam that Hale had been working for twenty minutes with no result. He'd said it with the dry straightness of someone reporting a fact, and it had taken me a second to realize he thought it was funny.
Thursday morning, he was already on his stool when I came out of the back. He looked up from his coffee and said, "The upper bend. How early is too early?"
"For the cutthroats?"
"Before the sun moves off it, you said."
"You want to go today?"
"Client canceled. I've got the morning."
I had a shift that ended at eleven. I told him that, and he nodded like that settled it, and Mae appeared from the kitchen at that exact moment and set his sandwich down. Her expression told me that she'd heard the entire exchange and had opinions she was choosing not to voice.
She made it about four minutes before she voiced them.
I was pulling an espresso when she came up beside me and spoke at a volume calibrated specifically to carry no further than my left ear. "He comes in every morning."
"He likes the coffee."
"He likes something," she said. "It isn't the coffee."
"Mae."
"I'm just noting the pattern." She untied her apron and retied it, which was what she did when she was settling in for a conversation. "A man who can make coffee anywhere comes into a café every morning for a week and sits at the same stool and talks to the same woman for forty-five minutes and then leaves. That's not a coffee habit, sweetheart." She looked at me over the top of her reading glasses. "And you keep making that face."
"What face?"
"The one you make when you know something and you're waiting for permission." She retied her apron and went back to the kitchen. "You don't need permission."
I'd opened my mouth to say something reasonable when the door opened and June Vega came in. That was either perfecttiming or terrible timing, depending on how the next five minutes went.
June was grease-smudged at the wrist even this early, which meant she'd already been into something at the shop. She had the look she always had—like she was moving faster than the room and had decided to let it catch up on its own time.
She dropped onto the stool two down from Hale, looked sideways at him with the unfiltered assessment of someone who had never once worried about being caught looking, and said nothing. Then his phone buzzed on the counter. He glanced at it and stood.
"I'll be right back," he said, and took the call outside.
June waited approximately one second after the door closed. "That's him."
I kept my expression level. "June."
"What." It wasn't a question. "Mae told me."
"Mae," I said.
"I tell people things," Mae said, from the kitchen, without any apparent guilt.
June propped her chin on her hand and looked at me. "So. Are you going to talk to him or keep making his coffee until one of you dies?"
"I talk to him," I said. "Every morning."
"About fish."
