"You're weird, Gabe."
"So I've been told."
"Good weird," she says. "Not bad weird. There's a difference."
"What's the difference?"
"Bad weird makes you want to cross the street. Good weird makes you want to sit down and have another cup of coffee."
She pours me another cup. I didn't ask for it. She just pours, like she's decided I'm staying, like she's decided I'm worth the extra pot.
I stay until one. We talk about nothing—about her farm, about my classes, about the difference between cows and people and whether stitching a wound is easier when the patient can't talk back. She tells me about a calf named Mercy, born breech, delivered by a ten-year-old girl with small hands and a mother who talked her through it.
She doesn't tell me her mother is dead. But I can see it. In the way her voice changes when she talks about her. In theway her hands slow down, just slightly, like they're remembering something.
I don't tell her anything real. I tell her about medical school, about the classes I'm taking, about the ways I'm trying to be something other than what I was born to be. I don't tell her about the mansion. About my father. About the empire that's waiting for me whether I want it or not.
I don't tell her my last name.
But I want to. For the first time in my life, I want to tell someone the truth. Not because I trust her—I don't know her, not really—but because she looks at me like the truth wouldn't scare her.
Like she's seen worse.
I come back the next night.
And the night after that.
I sit at the same stool, order the same coffee, ask the same kinds of questions. She tells me about her sisters. About her father, who lives in an apartment in Scranton and calls her every Sunday. About the city, which she hates, and the diner, which she tolerates, and the future, which she's stopped trying to imagine.
I tell her about my classes. About the anatomy lab, where I'm learning to cut into bodies that were once alive. About the late nights in the library, surrounded by books that smell like dust and ambition. About the pressure—not from my professors, not from my peers, but from something deeper, something older, something that breathes down my neck even when I'm a hundred miles away.
She listens. Really listens. The way she listened to my father, I realize—the same attention, the same stillness, the same sense that she's hearing not just your words but the things beneath them.
On the third night, she asks: "Why do you come here?"
"What do you mean?"
"You're a pre-med student. You should be studying. Sleeping. Doing whatever normal people do at midnight. Instead, you're sitting in a diner, drinking coffee you don't need, talking to a waitress you don't know." She tilts her head. "Why?"
I think about lying. I'm good at lying. I've been trained to lie, the same way I've been trained to walk into rooms and not flinch.
But I don't want to lie to her.
"Because you're the first person in a long time who's looked at me like I'm not a monster," I say.
The words hang in the air between us. Too honest. Too raw. I watch her face change—surprise, maybe, or confusion, or something else entirely.
"That's a heavy thing to say to someone you just met," she says.
"I know."
"Why would anyone think you're a monster?"
I should deflect. I should laugh, change the subject, make a joke about late-night coffee and existential dread. But her eyes are brown and steady and they're looking at me like I'm worth looking at, and I can't look away.
"My family," I say. "There are things about my family. Things I didn't choose. Things I can't escape." I pause. "I'm trying to be something different. But I don't know if trying is enough."
She's quiet for a long moment. Then she reaches across the counter and puts her hand on mine.
