I study the bones of the room. Two exits. A front door and a back door under a red exit sign that leads to a hall with stairs. Ceiling camera that does not work. The lens is dusty. I glance at the hinge side of the kitchen door and see a cheap latch meant to keep children out, not men. Fire extinguisher by the espresso machine. Good. Sight lines are clean if you stand at my end of the counter, bad if you stand under the chalkboard menu. The counter is bolted. The glass case would shatter if hit hard. The metal shelf behind the coffee machine has a rack of mugs on hooks. Those hooks can anchor a line if I need a barrier fast. I file all of it.
I take the people in a single sweep. Two old men at the corner table with a paper folded to the crossword. A woman in a tweed coat and a blue handkerchief knotted at her throat counting coins on a saucer before she leaves. She lingers, her hand still over the money, eyes bright with the kind of curiosity small towns live on. A boy in a knit hat swinging his feet under a bench and trying not to.
A woman stands at the register, eyes arched, mouth in question. She does not move forward. She waits, measuring. The light from the window finds the silver in her hair and catches on her ring when she taps the counter. The face settles into memorybefore I admit it. Maria Hart. The mother. The kitchen door sits behind her shoulder, a swing door with a porthole. I can see racks and the flash of a mixer bowl when it turns.
From the far end of the counter, the mirror under the shelf gives the whole room to anyone who knows how to look. I set my hands on the wood where people can see them. The girl comes down the line with a smile that is local and practiced, a student doing hours outside of school to earn money, learning how to talk to strangers without giving anything away. She asks if I want coffee, and I nod once. Her voice carries the accent of the place, soft at the edges, certain in the middle.
The old men talk again. The girl works the machine. Maria still watches. Everything here looks ordinary, which means it is not. The girl sets a cup that smells like a real grinder, not a machine. A cinnamon roll arrives warm with a glaze that was not made cheap. She watches me take the first sip.
“It’s oven fresh,” she says, smiling, gap-toothed and bright as the morning. “From Maria,” she adds, nodding toward the counter. Maria looks away, but I know better. Hospitality here is control.
“Looks good,” I respond.
“Passing through?” the girl asks.
“For the holiday,” I say. I do not give a name. I do not give a story.
“You from around here?”
“No.”
“Well, welcome,” she says, because this is what people say when they want to watch someone talk and know they will not.
The bell over the door rings three times in a row as local men in work jackets come in for coffee and to see the stranger. They turn their shoulders to angle a better view. I do not take offense. I have done the same in cities that cost more than this town has ever held in a bank.
I taste the roll. It is butter and cinnamon and sugar that melts wrong if you bake at the wrong temperature. This one is baked right. I swallow and feel the idea of the woman behind the door like pressure on my chest. I do not like that.
Maria glances at the kitchen and then at me. She sees more than most. She is waiting for something. So am I.
The kitchen door swings open, and she steps out with a tray of sugar cookies dressed for winter. Hazel eyes. Freckles that belong only to this town. Hair pulled tight in a rope that finds its own way. Her movements are careful, practiced, the kind that know when eyes are on them. She carries herself like someone who once understood angles and later learned to hide them behind grace.
For a second, all the work, all the control, stops and looks. For the first time in years, something moves in me that does not take orders.
She sees me. Stops. The color leaves her face and then returns in a rush. The tray tilts, one cookie slides, and the sound of the room folds into silence.
I stand without thinking. The old men at the table push their chairs back a centimeter. The boy in the hat goes still. The woman in tweed hesitates by the door, hand halfway to the handle. Maria behind the counter breathes in sharply and puts her hand on the edge of the case so it will not tip.
The cookies hit the tile like coins. Sugar and glaze break softly against the floor. Her eyes lock on mine. Five years drop out from under us, and the room narrows to a point I can step across in one stride.
I do not move. I let the squall come.
8
LILA
Sugar stars and bells slide across the tile. Heat from the ovens climbs my neck as he crouches to gather the cookies, big hands careful in a way that doesn’t fit the rest of him. He looks up through his lashes and says my name like it belongs to him.
“Lila.”
Everything inside me tips. I grip the edge of the counter so I do not.
“Why are you here?” I manage.
He sets a cracked tree cookie on the tray, straightens it with the rest in one clean line, and keeps his voice low for me, not for the room. “There is trouble coming. You need protection.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“I am the answer you get.”
