“The pantry’s adequate, but not optimal. We’re low on flour. The brown sugar’s gone hard at the edges because someone didn’t seal the bag.” He glanced over his shoulder. Just a glance, quick and neutral, like he was checking the temperature of the room rather than the temperature of me. “That might have been me. I’m not entirely sure.”
“It was you,” I said.
“You don’t know that.”
“I know you made cinnamon rolls yesterday. The sugar was out.”
Caleb’s mouth did a thing at the corner. Not quite a smile. The precursor to one, the warmup act, and then he turned back to the skillet before it could fully deploy.
He slid a plate in front of me. Eggs, over easy, the yolks intact and golden. Bacon on the side, crisp at the edges. Toast that had been buttered while still hot, the way it was supposed to be done.
He sat across from me with his own plate and picked up his fork and started eating like this was just what mornings looked like now, and the ease of it was so complete it bordered on offensive.
I ate. Methodical. Focused. The way I did everything—treating food as fuel, refueling as a functional necessity. The eggs were perfect. The bacon was perfect. The toast was perfect.
I did not say any of this. I did not comment on food quality unless the food quality represented a tactical liability, and this food represented the opposite of a tactical liability.
I ate every bite.
Caleb talked about seed catalogs. About the carrot variety he’d circled yesterday that promised exceptional sweetness, which he seemed to find genuinely exciting in a way that made my chest do something I wasn’t going to examine. About the greenhouse temperature and whether the overnight lows were still dipping too far for the seedlings.
His voice was soft and unhurried and filled the kitchen without trying, bouncing off the ceiling beams and the cast-iron pans and the open shelving where the mismatched mugs lived.
I listened. I ate. I watched his hands move around his plate, the same hands, and failed immediately and completely to stop thinking about last night, which was a tactical error of considerable magnitude.
The wood stove held the night’s heat against the March cold. Pale morning light came through the east-facing window and turned the tabletop gold. The bunkhouse creaked. Somewhere in the distance, a crow called, and the sound carried across the winter pasture and found the kitchen window.
Caleb refilled my coffee without being asked. His forearm brushed mine when he reached for the mug, warm and brief, and he didn’t linger. Didn’t make it a thing. Just filled the mug and set it back in front of me and went back to his eggs like contact was normal, which it wasn’t, not for me, not in this context, and the fact that it had just happened without ceremony was its own kind of revolution.
I drank the coffee.
It was still perfect.
The door opened. Boots on the porch, heavy and familiar, and the particular cadence of someone who moved through the world taking up exactly as much space as he felt entitled to, which was considerable.
Mitch.
I did not look up from my plate. I ate the last bite of egg and set my fork down with the deliberate care of a man who had decided that whatever happened next was going to happen with or without his cooperation, and cooperation, at this moment, felt like a luxury I couldn’t afford.
The doorway filled. Mitch stood there with his hat on backward, arms loose at his sides, and his eyes moved from Caleb to me to the empty plates to the general atmospheric charge of a kitchen where something fundamental had shifted overnight.
He grinned. Wide. Slow. Deeply satisfied, the grin of a man watching a specific outcome arrive exactly on schedule, and the schedule, apparently, had been his all along.
Mitch crossed to the coffeepot in three strides, poured a mug with the focused determination of a man who treated caffeine as both sacrament and ammunition, and dropped into the chair beside me. Close. Close enough that our arms touched, his shoulder warm against mine, the heat of Mitch Pruitt radiating like a furnace that had decided, this morning, to be smug about it.
“Don’t,” I said.
“I’m not doing anything.” He raised the mug to his mouth, his eyes steady over the rim, the grin still there, wide and unrepentant.
“You’re doing something.”
Mitch set his mug down with the careful deliberateness of a man performing innocence for an audience of one who wasn’t buying it. “I’m drinking coffee. That’s the entirety of what I’m doing. Coffee consumption is a morning activity. This is a morning. The math checks out.”
“Your face is doing a thing,” Caleb said without looking up from his plate.
“My face always does a thing. That’s just my face. I was born with it. Had very little input on the design.”
“Not this thing,” Caleb said. “This thing is specific. This thing has an agenda.”
