Page 62 of Broken Cedar

Savi is already reaching for the milk jug when she sees me come through the door. “The usual?”

“Yes please.” I tap my card. She doesn’t need to tell me the total. I’ve been coming here long enough that I already know it to the cent.

I take my coffee and walk the four blocks to the office. It rained last night and the pavement is still dark with it. The florist on the corner is out front with her early morning delivery, cutting the bottoms off stems over a bucket.

The woman from 6B has her watering can out, working her way along the planter boxes the way she does every single morning, rain or shine, like they might forget they’re alive if she doesn’t remind them.

The man with the golden retriever is waiting at the crossing like he is almost every morning. The dog’s tail sweeps the pavement twice as I pass. I think, stupidly, of the way Copper used to press his nose into my shoulder when he wanted something. I stop the thought before it can fully form and keep walking.

“You’re doing that thing,” Sophie says, dropping into the chair across from mine.

I look up from my sandwich. “What thing?”

“The thing where you’re physically present but spiritually somewhere in a different time zone.”

“I’m eating lunch.”

“You’ve been eating the same corner of that sandwich for ten minutes.” She waves her hand. “What happened in Montana?”

“Nothing happened. It was a memorial. I saw my family.”

“Right.” She pulls her coffee toward her. “You came back looking like that, though.”

“Like what?”

She just looks at me.

I sigh. “Sophie.”

“I’m not saying anything.” She tears open a sugar packet and stirs it into her coffee. “I’m just observing that in four years of being your assistant, you have never once come back from a trip looking like you left something behind.”

I don’t answer that. I take a bite of my sandwich.

She lets the silence sit for a moment, then reaches into her bag and slides a folder across the table. “Steven wants you on the Harcourt account.”

I flip it open. It’s the kind of account that used to feel like proof of something. “The whole thing?”

“Said you were the only one he’d trust with it.”

I look at the first page without reading it.

“Hallie.”

“I heard you.”

“You haven’t smiled yet.”

Any other week, I already would have.

The gym on Wednesday is exactly what it always is. Marcus at the front desk. The playlist that hasn’t changed since I joined. The woman on treadmill seven who I have privately nicknamed Paula because she looks like a Paula and because she is always, without exception, running like something is chasing her.

I pick a machine in the back and put my headphones in and try to be a person who is simply exercising. Somewhere around the twenty-minute mark I catch myself calculating. Thirty-six degrees in Billings today, which means it’s probably hotter out by the property line where the shade runs out. He’ll have been on the tractor since early morning. He never thinks about water until he’s already past the point of needing it, and sunscreen is simply not a category that exists in his mind unless someone puts the bottle directly into his hand.

I used to do that. Stand on the porch steps and hold it out without saying anything, and he’d take it and use it and hand it back and neither of us would make it into a thing.

I realise the machine has stopped moving. I close my eyes. I have absolutely no business worrying about whether a grown man is wearing sunscreen or drinking enough water. I pull the handle, and refocus on my workout.

Steven appears in my doorway just before lunch on Thursday. “Conference room in five. Davidson account.”