Page 11 of Her Age Gap Match

It was Friday…the day after my whole life had blown up, maybe, all because of a stupid piece of paper. There might be an email waiting for me. There might not.

No matter what the outcome, things were about to change.

I just didn’t know exactly how.

CHAPTER 4

Johnny

I had a very specific routine.

It was a product of ten years in prison—you had to give yourself over to the monotony of it or you would lose your mind, especially when you were in your twenties and put away for somebody else’s crime. Up at five-thirty, no alarm, just awake. I would lay there for exactly as long as it took to be fully conscious—maybe thirty seconds—and then I was up.

My place in Chicago was small and clean and entirely mine. One bedroom, second floor of a two-flat on a quiet Bridgeport street where my downstairs neighbor, Mrs. Okafor, had lived for thirty years and brought me soup the first winter I moved in without being asked. I owned the building outright. When I was up at the distillery for long stretches I rented the unit to a quiet rotation of quiet, responsible people I vetted personally, and Mrs. Okafor texted me if anything seemed off. It worked.

The place itself was fine. Functional. A man who knew what it was to have nothing didn’t need much. The mattress was firm but comfortable, the sheets were good, the kitchen had exactly what I needed to make the one breakfast I’d been making every single morning for seventeen years. The walls had two things on them: a photograph of the lake at Due North that Elle’s kid, Cassius, had taken and framed for my birthday, and a print of a Detroit street corner that Elle had given me when I first got out, so I’d remember I was from somewhere even if that somewhere didn’t feel like home anymore.

Everything else was just…orderly. Tidy. Blank.

I did forty minutes of work in the living room—pushups, situps, pullups on the bar in the bathroom doorframe. No gym, no equipment, nothing you couldn’t do in a small space. Old habit.

Shower.

Then bacon.

The bacon was from a butcher three blocks over who knew my name and had my order ready by the time I walked in on Saturday mornings. During the week I kept it in the refrigerator and cooked it slow the way it deserved, in a cast iron pan that was the single most expensive thing I owned that wasn’t real estate, my bike, or whiskey. Eggs from the farmer’s market—two of them every morning, fried in the bacon fat. Toast from a sourdough loaf, also from a local bakery.

Ten years of powdered eggs and shitty white bread meant I didn’t take good food for granted.

I only relaxed once the routine was done; sat down at my kitchen island, ate my breakfast, drank my coffee…let my shoulders sink. Sometimes I ignored my phone completely for the day, especially if I was out at the distillery, where no one could bother me. If I was in Chicago, I usually had meetings, though—so I picked up my phone to glance at my email.

Pretty standard inbox for a Friday. Two requests for private events at the Due North tasting room here in Chicago, one for a bachelor party, the other for some visiting business partners from Japan. A follow-up from my distributor in Milwaukee about the spring allocation. An email from Elle’s other kid, Marco, with a subject line in all caps reading YOU HAVE TO SEE THIS that just ended up being some internet meme I would pretend to understand next time I saw him. They were both twenty-five—hell, Marco even had a baby of his own on the way—but they still acted like kids with me. Like I was their dad.

It made something in my chest ache.

Something I didn’t care to examine.

The email that really caught my eye, though, was the one from Poppy Hayes.

Normally, emails from Bloom came from company email addresses—poppy@bloomagency or sophie@bloomagency. This one, though, came from a personal email address: poppyflower98. I was shocked it hadn’t been caught in spam, but I figured it was probably because of the very professional subject line: Bloom Agency—Pause Period Check-In.

I peered at the email. Noted the timestamp.

She’d sent this at 3:17 in the morning.

Not exactly peak working hours.

The email was professional, carefully worded…something about the data team flagging my file, Jasper Ellison having observations about my compatibility profile that warranted a follow-up, Poppy coordinating on his behalf. A request for a brief coffee meeting at my convenience to discuss next steps, somewhere out of the office.

I read it twice, confused.

Then I looked at the timestamp again.

This…this wans’t standard.

Something weird was going on here.

I had a bit of paranoia around things like this—scams, traps, dishonesty. It was a natural consequence of the shit I’d been through in my life. If I was smart, I’d’ve immediately reached out to Sophie and flagged it as unusual activity, maybe some kind of phishing attempt.