Page 5 of Soft Serve

I glance at the door as if he might still be visible through it.

He isn't, obviously.

I can still feel the exact quality of his attention, though, the way it settled on me as it had nowhere else to be.

Paloma

Painfully. Pray for me.

I shove the phone into my apron pocket and turn back to Millie, who is watching me with the expression of someone trying very hard not to say something and losing the battle in real time.

"Not a word," I tell her.

"I wasn't going to say anything," she says.

"You were."

"I was just going to say," she says carefully, "that you have honey peach on your apron and you've been talking to a very attractive man and you didn't even notice."

I look down. God, she's right.

"Get the afternoon prep started," I tell her, and walk back to the kitchen before she can see me almost smile for the second time in ten minutes.

Because whatever Charles Whitaker wants with my shop, whatever he thinks a conversation at eight o'clock is going to accomplish, he is going to find out very quickly that Soft Serve is not a stepping stone. It’s not a backdrop, and definitely not a story that belongs to anyone but us.

He can bring his pitch deck and his quiet money and his unsettling habit of looking at people like he's already three steps ahead. I built this place out of grief and stubbornness, and my grandmother's recipes, and I am not in the habit of letting go of things that matter.

National Ice Cream Day is going to be interesting. That's all it's going to be.

I tell myself that twice more before I believe it even slightly.

Chapter 2

Charles

Ihave sat across from men who wanted to dismantle everything I built, signed documents that moved the kind of money most people will never see in their lifetime, and held a room of forty hostile shareholders without once loosening my tie.

I arrive at Soft Serve at eight o'clock on a Monday evening in July, and I take a breath before I open the door.

The shop looks different at this hour. The overhead lights have been dimmed to something warmer, the chairs upended on the mismatched tables, the glass of the display case catching the last of the evening light coming in off the street. The cheerful chaos of the afternoon has been stripped back to something quieter, more honest, and the place feels smaller without the crowd in it.

It feels more like hers.

She's behind the counter when I push the door open, wiping down the prep surface with the focused attention of someone who does not do anything halfway. Her hair has mostly escaped whatever she had it pinned in this morning; there are dark curls loose around her face, and she doesn't look up when the bell rings.

"We're closed," she says.

"You told me eight," I say.

She looks up then.

The wariness is still there, steady, but something else runs underneath it now that the audience is gone. A sharper attention. The kind of look that doesn't perform anything for anyone because there's no one left to perform for.

I find that significantly more dangerous than anything she did this afternoon.

"Lock it behind you," she says, and goes back to wiping the counter.

I turn and flip the deadbolt, the sound of it loud in the quiet shop, and when I face forward again, she's watching me over her shoulder with an expression that says she's filing everything away.