Page 57 of Offside

I found it on the second try.

The first cabinet held cereal and a truly impressive collection of protein bars. The second held mugs, a French press, and a bag of dark roast with a receipt tucked inside from a place in Tempe I’d never been. I filled the kettle, set it on the burner, and stood in Maren Callahan’s kitchen at six-fifteen in the morning with some feelings I didn’t have an immediate name for.

Not regret. Nowhere close to regret. An emotion that settled quietly, like belonging. I was comfortable rooting around her kitchen for coffee supplies, as if I’d always been there.

I scanned while the water heated. Her kitchen was small and deliberately organized. Spices in alphabetical order on a narrow rack beside the stove, a row of succulents on the windowsill above the sink, each one in a different terra cotta pot. The corkboard above the breakfast bar held a postcard from somewhere coastal, a takeout menu with items circled in red, a photo of her and Griffin at what appeared to be a baseball game, both of them squinting into the sun. Griffin had his arm around her and was laughing at something off-camera. She was facing the camera with the expression she made when she was trying not to smile and losing, particularly with her brother.

I had seen that expression a lot in the last two months.

The kettle began to steam. I found the sugar in the third cabinet, next to a box of chamomile tea and a bottle of mezcal with about two fingers left and made two cups.

I was staring at the succulents and thinking about the night before, all of it, in vivid and unhelpful detail, when I heard her door.

She appeared in the hallway in an oversized T-shirt that hit her mid-thigh, her hair down, eyes still soft with sleep. She stopped when she saw me. A brief recalibration crossed her face, there and gone, and then she smiled, easy and warm.

I knew that smile. It wasn’t quite the one she’d been wearing at two in the morning.

“You made coffee,” she said.

“Found it eventually. Second cabinet.”

She held me in her stare for a moment, then at the French press sitting on the counter, then back at me. She pressed her lips together and crossed to the counter, then picked up the mug I’d left for her. She took a sip, and I watched her face do the thing it did when something was better than expected.

“It’s good.”

“I know how to make coffee.”

She watched me over the rim. “I didn’t expect that.”

“What did you expect?”

“I don’t know.” A small smile.

She studied me for a beat, the dry assessment I’d learned meant she was making a decision. I waited. I was good at waiting.

“Morning skate?” she asked.

“Seven-thirty.”

She nodded, wrapping both hands around the mug. She turned to the window at the Scottsdale morning, which was already bright and orange at the edges, promising another day of heat. She was doing the casual thing. I could see the effort of it, barely, but there, in the way her shoulders were set just slightly too deliberately, the way she was facing the window instead of me.

I recognized the posture. It was the same one I wore to press conferences when a question landed somewhere tender and I needed thirty seconds to decide how to answer.

I could call it. Tell her I saw what she was doing, that she didn’t have to perform indifference for my benefit. That I’d woken up at five-fifty and played with her hair and ran my fingertips along her ribcage for twenty minutes before I made myself get up, and I hadn’t wanted to get up. I wasn’t going to pretend the previous eight hours had been nothing because the morning light made it complicated.

I didn’t say any of that.

I picked up my own mug and leaned back against the counter. “Have you always alphabetized your spices?”

She blinked. “What?”

I nodded at the rack beside the stove. “Alphabetical. Allspice through turmeric.”

She studied the rack a beat too long, her eyes going unfocused on a memory she hadn’t touched in years. “My mom does it that way.”

“Does she also have four succulents on the kitchen windowsill?”

“Seven, actually. Mom goes big.” She was watching me now, the calculated casual starting to give way to an emotion less performed. “You were doing inventory on my kitchen?”