Evie points at Darlene. “Customer service.”
“I’m providing local color.”
“You’re providing emotional rabies.”
“Yet people return.”
They do. That is the first thing I begin to understand about Sweet Tooth. People return not only for food. The pastries are good. The coffee is strong enough to strip paint from a cruiser hull. The soup tastes like actual ingredients instead of rehydrated protein slurry and regret. But people come here because this building offers something Halo does not easily provide. A seat. A name remembered. A joke at their expense that still feels like affection. A place where hunger is not treated as moral failure.
I sit on the stool.
It groans. Darlene looks down at it.
“Don’t embarrass me,” she tells the furniture.
The stool holds.
Evie brings breakfast herself despite the way Darlene mutters about “doctor’s orders” and “fool women with cracked skulls.” Today the plate is smaller than yesterday but still generous: eggs, potatoes, a roll shiny with glaze, and a wedge of something savory filled with meat, onions, and spiced greens. She sets it down in front of me and lingers.
“You slept?” I ask.
“Some.”
“That is not an answer.”
“It is absolutely an answer.”
“It is an evasion.”
Her brows lift. “Look at you, conversational and accusatory before noon.”
“You are avoiding.”
“So are you.”
I look down at the plate. “I am eating.”
“Not yet, you’re not.”
I pick up the fork and take a bite to end the argument.
She laughs softly, and the sound moves under my ribs with uncomfortable precision.
The breakfast is better than yesterday. That is impossible, perhaps, but true. The tart is salty and rich, the pastry flaky, the greens bitter enough to balance the meat. I chew slowly because eating fast would reveal too much. Evie watches with open satisfaction.
“You like it,” she says.
“It is adequate.”
“You need new words.”
“I have many words.”
“Use better ones.”
I take another bite. “Acceptable.”
Darlene makes a disgusted sound from the register. “Man eats like he found religion and reviews it like a municipal report.”
