I put my canvas bag on the prep table and start unpacking it. I do not look at Archer’s hands on the stall frame and I do not think about Tristan’s warmth at close quarters and I do not think about Jack’s expression when he saidthat sounds lonely.I also do not think about Ryan in the corner of the café, watching everything, giving nothing, and the weight of his attention like a hand between my shoulder blades.
I think about Amber.
I think about evidence, and timing, and what she would have needed to put in place to make the framing stick, and who might have helped her, and what I’m going to do about it. I think about the satisfaction of dismantling something piece by piece. I think about the next move, and the move after that, and how staying in Sweetwater Valley through theweekend gives me time and cover and cash and nothing else.
Nothingelse.
It’s temporary. I know what temporary is. I’ve been temporary my entire adult life. Temporary apartments, temporary jobs, temporary people who mattered and then stopped mattering because that’s what happens when you don’t put roots down. I don’t put roots down because I’ve seen what happens to roots, how they trap you, how they make you into something that can’t move when it needs to.
I’m staying through the weekend.
I’m going to work Tristan’s stall and sleep at Doris Harrow’s and not think about four men who smell like things I don’t have words for. And on Monday, I’m going to get in my car and drive toward the next state.
That’s the plan.
Tristan passes behind me to get to the burner setup, close enough that his arm brushes my shoulder, and my whole nervous system registers it like a note struck on a string.
“Good work today,” he says quietly.
I glance at the prep table. “Thanks,” I say, and my voice comes out normal, which is the only victory I’m counting right now.
The afternoon moves around me. The carnival takes shape, stall by stall, string light by string light. The Ferris wheel groans and rotates in a slow test turn, its empty cars swinging gently. The smells build—fried things,sugar, river,pack—and I work through the heat of it, my hands busy, my brain occupied, my body doing things I haven’t given it permission to do.
This is temporary. The partial bond will be reversed. I’m here through the weekend and then I’m gone. I repeat this at intervals, the way you repeat something you’re trying to memorize, the way you say a word over and over until it stops sounding like itself.
By the time the afternoon light goes golden and long across the ground and Tristan calls it for the day and hands me my first installment in cash, I have said it so many times it should feel true.
But it doesn’t quite feel true.
I fold the money into my jacket pocket and walk back toward Doris Harrow’s. The carnival lights come on behind me—they must be testing them, all the globe lights and the string lights and the Ferris wheel lit up in colors—and the light catches me like something following me home.
I don’t look back.
I absolutely don’t believe myself anymore.
But I don’t look back.
Chapter 7
Tristan
I notice things. This is not a skill I developed so much as something I was born into. I have an attunement to the people around me, to the small signals that most people broadcast without knowing it.
The way someone holds a cup tells you how tired they are. The way someone scans a room tells you what they’re afraid of. The way someone eats—or doesn’t eat—tells you almost everything you need to know about how they’re doing, if you’re paying attention.
I’malwayspaying attention.
It’s the caretaker instinct, Ryan would say, with the fondness he reserves for things he considers both useful and slightly exasperating. Archer would say I mother-hen. Jack would say nothing because Jack would have alreadyeaten whatever I made and be asking for more, which is its own kind of appreciation.
The point is, I notice things. And from the first moment Lola walked into my café and sat at the counter and ordered with the efficiency of someone who eats to function rather than someone who eats for pleasure, I have been noticing things about her that I don’t entirely know what to do with.
Day one: she ate the eggs. All of them, quickly, without dawdling. Good sign. But the way she did it—head slightly down, elbows in, taking up the minimum of space—that’s the eating posture of someone who learned early to finish fast before it gets taken away or before they have to move. Not deprivation, necessarily. But readiness. Always ready to go.
Day two: she worked prep with me for three hours and ate nothing.
I put things in front of her throughout the day—a small pastry, a portion of the test batch I was running for the weekend menu, a bowl of something warm around noon—and she looked at each of them. She was clearly hungry, but she didn’t touch a single one.
I didn’t comment. Commenting would close a door.Tristan, you’ll push her, I tell myself, which is what I always tell myself, which is sometimes enough.
