Page 229 of Ex Somnis

“I fucking hope so.” And the breezy snaps right back into place as she steals another buttery piece and heads for the door. “Plate those before they’re cold. We’ve got a famous author to make look good.”

“Out of my kitchen, Vaughn.”

“It’s half my kitchen, Maes.” She’s already gone, back toward the door, the arrangements, and the long day ahead.

I plate the French toast, and I let myself have the ache and the warmth at the same time, because that’s the only way it ever works.

By noon, the restaurant is full of people who came to watch a man sign books.

Our restaurant, sitting inside the inn that Nevan made cozy, warm, and full, a place people drive an hour for. There’s no dinner service today. Today the tables are pushed back, there’s a line out the door, and a banner over the bar. At a table at the front, under the banner, sits Ridge Bonnell Wells, signing his name in book after book with that crooked, unbothered half smile, like he can’t believe these people drove here for him, but also like he always knew they would.

The book is insane. I want that on the record.

It’s a sci-fi romance about a woman who can’t let go of the things she’s lost, except Ridge being Ridge, he couldn’t keep the horror out. Somewhere around chapter ten, it becomes a story about plushies that come back wrong and muffins that fall out of the sky. It shouldn’t work. It should be the strangest thing anyone has ever published, and yet, it went to number one in nine days.

His agent, Miller, is hovering at his elbow, vibrating with joy, telling anyone who’ll listen that he knew, he always knew, he never doubted for a second, which is a lie, but a happy one.

I catch Ridge’s eye over the crowd. He looks at me, and his mouth does the thing. He holds up the book he’s signing and taps the cover, where a small embroidered plushie with button eyes is screaming silently into a void.

I mouth, Mr. Muffin is going to sue you.

He mouths back, Mr. Muffin signed a release, and goes back to signing.

The acoustic version of Natasha Bedingfield’s “Unwritten” is playing over the speakers. Tessa’s and my song, the one I scream-sang across three thousand miles of highway five years ago with tears running down my face. Now it’s playing in our restaurant at a signing, and the difference between those two versions of this song is the difference between everything.

Paul is working the coffee station because he has decided that handing strangers warm drinks is his idea of a good time, and honestly, watching him do it, all controlled grace and quiet here you are, I get it.

There’s a woman a few feet from me who just got her coffee from him, telling her friend that “Dr. Bennett does dream therapy, like, actually meets his patients in their dreams.”

Her friend gasps. “Really?”

“Some people say he’s a crank, but the waitlist is eighteen months long.”

“Eighteen months?”

“I know,” she answers, almost reverently.

He is, for the record, having the time of his life. Mad scientist of sleep. He found the one thing on earth that lets him use everything he is at once, and he glows with it.

I load a tray with muffins and French toast, cut into little gold squares with a dusting of powdered sugar and a spear through each one, because today, apparently, I make French toast, then I start my rounds.

Paul first, because of course, Paul first.

I come up beside him at the coffee station and hold out the plate I made just for him. The muffin with the exact right crumb, no surprises in the texture, beige and gold, and safe all the way through. It took me a year to get it right, but then it became one of his safe foods. One of the small handful of things this careful man can eat without bracing.

“Found you.” I smile at him.

He looks up, and his whole face lights up the way it has every single time for five years.

“You did.” He takes the muffin, then takes my chin in his other hand and kisses me softly in front of everyone, completely unbothered. “Thank you, darling.”

“It’s only a muffin.”

“It’s never only a muffin,” he says against my mouth.

I move on before I forget I have a tray, and after a few hours, the signing is starting to thin out. The line is down to a handful, the crowd loosening into the after-party where people linger with coffee.

I’m crossing the floor with my half-empty tray when I catch a man standing inside the door, neither in the line nor holding a book.