Page 39 of Soft Serve

He gives me the real one.

"I was twelve when my father sat me down and told me what I was going to be," he says. "Not asked. Told. The way you tell a child what school they're attending or what sport they're playing. You're a Whitaker, which means this is your life, which means everything you want that doesn't serve the company is a distraction you can afford to feel but not to follow."

He sets the glass down.

"And the thing is," he continues, "I believed him. Not because I was naive, but because he said it with such complete certainty that it never occurred to me to question whether the life he was describing was actually mine or just the one that had been built around me while I was too young to notice the difference."

The kitchen is very quiet.

"What did you want?" I ask. "Before he told you what you were going to be."

He looks at me with the expression of someone being asked a question they haven't let themselves answer in a long time.

"I wanted to build things," he says. "Not companies. Actual things. With my hands. I used to take everything apart to see how it worked, and my father thought it was a phase, and my grandfather thought it was useful, and the truth is I was happiest in my grandfather's workshop with sawdust on my hands and no one watching."

I think about a man who restocks topping stations with careful attention and learns the shop's rhythms like he's reading a blueprint.

"You still do it," I say. "Just differently."

He looks at me.

"You take things apart to see how they work," I say. "The shop. The town. The flavors." I pause. "Me."

"Yes," he says quietly. "Though you're considerably harder to read than a topping station."

I almost smile. "That's intentional."

"I know," he says. "I like it."

The honesty of that sits between us, warm and undefended, and I feel my armor doing what it does around him lately, not disappearing exactly but becoming something lighter, less necessary, a thing I'm carrying out of habit rather than need.

"My father died six years ago," he says after a moment. "And the first thing I felt, before the grief, before anything else, was the terror of a man who has spent his entire adult life building toward someone else's standard and has just realized there's no one left to meet it for."

His voice is even, but underneath the evenness, there's something that has been living in him for a long time without a great deal of air.

"And then…," I say.

"And then I kept going," he says. "Because I didn't know how to do anything else. Because the company was real and the people in it were real and stopping felt like betraying something, though I couldn't always say what." He pauses. "And then Vermont happened, and a family lost something I should have protected, and I came to Hearts Bend to repair an image that I was starting to understand might be the least of what needed repairing."

I look at him across the small table in my kitchen. At the man underneath the Whitaker name, the boy who took things apart in his grandfather's workshop, the twelve-year-old who was handed a life and was too young to know he could have put it down.

"You could still build things," I say. "With your hands."

Something moves through his expression, surprised and unguarded.

"That's not a practical suggestion," he says.

"I didn't say it was practical," I say. "I said you could."

He looks at me the way he does sometimes, like I've said something that landed somewhere he didn't expect, and the kitchen holds the quiet around us, and I'm aware of how late it is and how close the table is and how completely my armor has set itself down without asking my permission.

He leans forward slightly.

Just slightly.

His eyes are on mine, and the space between us has become a different kind of space, charged and aware, and I feel my breath change in the way it changes around him when we've stopped pretending the distance is about anything other than the choice to maintain it.

His hand moves toward mine on the table.