At the door, he pauses.
I stare at the floor because I cannot watch his face.
“I love this place,” he says quietly.
My throat closes.
“I love the bakery. I love the mornings. I love Darlene’s insults. I love the way you sing badly when the dough rises. I love your ridiculous magnets and your angry little plants and the way you argue with invoices as if numbers can be shamed into kindness.”
I squeeze my eyes shut.
His voice roughens. “I love being here.”
Say it, I think helplessly.
Say the rest.
He does not.
After a long moment, the lock turns. The door opens. Cool hallway air slips into the apartment, thinning the warmth around my ankles.
“I am sorry I hurt you,” he says.
Then he leaves.
The door closes softly.
Not slammed.
That makes it worse.
For several seconds, I do not move. I stand in the kitchen with sauce simmering behind me and my heart lying somewhere near the door he just walked through. Then my knees decide they have been overachieving, and I sink onto the floor.
The first sob comes out ugly.
I clamp a hand over my mouth, but there is no one here to hear it now. No customers to reassure. No Darlene to deflect. No Kauss to ask whether I am injured with that beautiful, infuriating seriousness. Just me, my tiny warm apartment, rain on the windows, and the terrible knowledge that I said love first to a man who could not say it back.
I cry until the sauce burns.
The smell drags me upright eventually, bitter tomato and scorched garlic cutting through the room like punishment. I turn off the stove, dump the ruined dinner into the trash, and laugh through tears because of course I burned dinner too. Apparently emotional devastation and cooking remain incompatible.
My compad buzzes once.
For one wild second, I think it is him.
It is Darlene.
I answer because if I do not, she will come upstairs anyway and possibly bring tools.
Her projected face appears above the counter, gray hair wrapped in a scarf, eyes already narrowed. “What happened?”
“Nothing.”
“Your nothing looks like hell.”
“I don’t want to talk.”
“Too bad. I’m old and nosy.”
