Bev brought the coffee. Two mugs, no questions about cream or sugar—she just set a small ceramic pitcher and a bowl of sugar packets between us and moved on. I gripped the mug and let the heat sink into my palms. The bandage on my right hand was already damp from condensation.
“Where are you staying?” Gabriel asked.
“Bev took me in last night. She has a spare room above the diner.” I wrapped both hands tighter around the mug. “Someone from the department called this morning—said the apartment’s on a separate electrical panel, no structural damage to the floor assembly. I can move back in today.”
“Good.” He nodded once. “That’s good.”
“It smells like smoke. Everything smells like smoke. But it’s mine and it’s standing and right now that’s enough.”
He didn’t answer that, but something shifted behind his eyes—a flicker of something that looked like concern pressed flat under control. He picked up his coffee and drank it black, no hesitation, like a man who’d been drinking bad coffee for fourteen years and had stopped noticing.
“What made you open a bakery in Whispering Pines?” he asked.
The question caught me off guard. People asked me that a lot—usually with a tone that suggested they couldn’t imagine why anyone would move to a town this small on purpose—but Gabriel asked it like he actually wanted the answer.
“It needed one,” I said. “I looked at a lot of small towns. Some of them already had bakeries, or they were too far from a main road to get foot traffic, or the rent was too high. Whispering Pines had the right combination of things. Tourist traffic in summer and winter, a Main Street that people actually walk down, and a lease I could almost afford.”
“Almost.”
“I made it work.” I took a sip of coffee. It was good—better than mine, which was annoying. “I put everything I had into the deposit, the equipment, the buildout. I did most of the interior work myself. The display case, the chalkboard, the tables—I sanded and refinished those tables on my apartment floor over two weekends.”
I was talking too much. I always talked too much when my brain was running from something—and right now it was running from two things at once. My kitchen was a blackened shell. And the man sitting across from me had carried me out of it like I weighed nothing.
I’d noticed that yesterday. The ease of it. The way he’d lifted me off the floor without breaking stride, without grunting or shifting or adjusting his grip. Like carrying me was the simplest thing he’d ever done.
Stop it, Brenna.
“You did the buildout yourself?” he asked.
“Most of it. I watched a lot of video tutorials. The countertop took me three tries.” I looked down at my coffee. “I’m not telling you this so you’ll feel sorry for me. I’m telling you because whenpeople say ‘it can be rebuilt,’ I need them to understand what it cost the first time.”
The words came out harder than I intended. I braced for the polite retreat—the change of subject, the request for the check, the thanks for the company followed by a clean exit.
Gabriel didn’t move. His jaw eased. His shoulders dropped a fraction. He sat there holding his mug, his eyes steady on mine, and gave me one slow nod—the kind that said he didn’t just hear me, he understood.
“I rebuilt my house from studs,” he said. “Took me two years. Tore out every wall, rewired, replumbed, put it back together by hand. If someone burned it down and told me I was lucky because the foundation was still there, I’d want to hit them.”
The laugh escaped before I could stop it. It was short and rough and surprised us both.
“I’m not going to tell you it could be worse,” he said. “I’m not going to tell you to be grateful. You already know all of that. You knew it yesterday on the curb.”
My throat tightened. I picked up my coffee and drank so I wouldn’t have to respond immediately, because what I wanted to say washow did you know that?What I wanted to ask waswhy are you sitting here?What I was afraid of was that the answer to both questions would make me feel something I couldn’t afford to feel right now.
Bev appeared with two plates—scrambled eggs and toast for me, a stack of pancakes and bacon for Gabriel. She set them down and laid a hand on my shoulder, just briefly, just enough pressure to sayI see youwithout making a production of it.
“You need anything else, you holler,” she said. Not to both of us. To me.
I nodded. She left, and I picked up my fork because it was easier than looking at Gabriel.
We ate without talking for a few minutes. The eggs were good. The toast was buttered and warm and exactly the kind of simple, solid food that my body needed even though my brain kept insisting I wasn’t hungry. I ate all of it and mopped up the eggs with the last corner of toast, and when I looked up, Gabriel was watching me with an expression I couldn’t quite read.
Not pity. I knew what pity looked like, and this wasn’t it.
“What?” I asked.
“Nothing.” He looked down at his plate. “Good to see you eat.”
My face went warm. Not a blush—I didn’t blush—but a flush of heat that started at my collarbone and climbed. I busied myself with my coffee and tried to ignore the fact that this man, who I’d met yesterday morning while he was pulling me out of a fire, was sitting across from me in a diner eating pancakes like this was something he did. Like this was normal. Like he planned to do it again.
