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His face is enormous with joy about the spoon. Pure, focused, unreserved joy about a spoon and the sound it makes and the fact of his own hand, swinging away.

Something opens in my chest, not explosive or dramatic, nothing that would make a good scene in someone’s third act. Just wide and warm and quiet. Like a window in a room that’s been closed for a long time.

The future is somewhere out there on the other side of that door, and it feels, for the first time in longer than I can properly work out, like something worth walking toward.

I lean on the counter, tilt my head at Milo, and think maybe this time.

You never know.

Twenty

Noah

The word “usual” snags on something in my mind when I settle into the window seat. My usual seat. My usual coffee. My usual Thursday morning at a café I initially told myself I was coming to for the quiet, which was either self-deception at a clinical level or just optimism, and either way has aged extremely poorly since the third week of October.

I set my laptop bag down, pull out the Italian manuscript I’ve been translating since September, and open it to page forty-seven. Page forty-seven. It’s been page forty-seven for three visits running, and this morning it’ll be four, because the espresso machine is doing its warm-up hiss across the room and Elsie is behind the counter with Milo balanced on her left hip, using her free hand to intercept Maisie’s determined lunge toward a bowl of blueberries, and simultaneously conducting what appears to be a heated debate with Luca about croissant presentation. I read the same sentence twice. Then twice more. The Italian sits on the page, meaning nothing.

“…by size is objective and defensible,” Elsie is saying, one hand still at Maisie’s wrist like she’s defusing something. “By emotional impact means whatever you want it to mean, which is not a system, Luca, that is just your mood.”

“Art is a mood,” Luca says with the placid confidence of someone who has already decided they’re right.

“You’re describing a pastry case.”

“I’m describing a curated experience.”

Elsie stares at him for one flat second, and then laughs, the involuntary kind that catches her by surprise, her chin dropping forward, her whole face creasing with it. Milo finds this hilarious and makes the sound he makes when he’s extremely pleased with something, bright and sharp and slightly manic, and Maisie, in the distraction, gets both hands into the blueberries.

I look back at page forty-seven.

It contains the phrase la luce filtrava attraverso le persiane, the light filtered through the blinds, and I have now read it four times and cannot tell you what paragraph it comes from or what happens before or after it. I set my pen down.

This is the thing nobody explains about the transition from a life organised around quiet. Just three months ago, I had a flat, a manuscript, good headphones, and a working relationship with silence that I genuinely mistook for contentment. I’d come home at six, eat something unremarkable, read until eleven, and consider that a day lived correctly. No disruptions. No variables. No laughing from behind a counter that catches you somewhere deep in your chest and refuses to leave.

I’m not entirely sure when that started feeling like less than enough. It happened the way most things happen I suppose, gradually, without any decisive moment I could point to. Just a series of weekday mornings where I sat at this table and thought, without quite admitting it: this. I want more of this. And then came back the next day anyway.

I take a sip of my coffee. It’s already going cold. This is also a running theme.

Luca materialises at my elbow without making a sound, which is alarming given that Luca generally announces himself from several feet away. He refills my cup from the small jug he’s carrying, sets it down, and stands there for a moment with the expression of a man who has been watching a very slow, very obvious thing unfold over many weeks and has reached the limit of his restraint.

“If you keep looking at her like that,” he says pleasantly, “I’m charging you a staring tax.”

“I wasn’t…“ I start.

He raises one eyebrow. It’s a very expressive eyebrow, the kind that communicates an entire essay’s worth of scepticism without requiring a single additional word. Then he walks away before I can finish the sentence, already redirecting toward a table near the door where someone is flagging him down about the specials.

I look at the chalkboard above the counter, which I somehow missed on the way in. TODAY’S SPECIAL: PATIENCE (limited stock), written in Luca’s cursive, each letter slightly different sizes as if the concept demanded some kind of escalation. I consider whether this is directed at me personally. I decide not to look into it.

The morning fills in around me the way it always does, the door chiming in small intervals as the first wave of regulars arrives, someone dragging a chair across the floor, the espresso machine cycling up to full volume and then settling into its operational hum. A woman I recognise from previous Tuesdays comes in with a canvas bag and orders something with oat milk. Two men in work coats take the table by the door and conduct a conversation that appears to be entirely about a specific section of concrete pavement on the high street.

Behind the counter, Maisie is now sitting on the floor with blueberries arranged in a small arc around her, examining each one before committing. She has her mother’s face when she concentrates, that particular down-tilt of the mouth, the slight furrow. I notice this, which is possibly evidence that Luca’s staring tax is actually warranted.

Milo, from somewhere near the play mat, makes a noise like a small furious kettle hitting its boil, apparently about a board book that has done him some kind of personal wrong. Elsie doesn’t look up from the coffee she’s pulling, just says, “Yes. I agree completely. Tell me more,” and he pauses, slightly thrown, and then resumes with increased conviction.

I’ve started to turn back to the manuscript when Elsie glances up.

It’s nothing. Half a second. She’s checking a timer or looking for Luca or whatever the seven reasons are that you look up from something in a busy café, and her eyes just pass over my table, and she smiles. Not a big smile. The kind that’s already got something in it, a thread of shared understanding, the smile you give someone when you share a secret, or just maybe have kissed before. At least, that’s how I am going to take it.

I look back down at the manuscript before she turns away.