“Another damn book delivery to the wrong door.” It was becoming a running joke—though not one Ilaughed at—that packages meant for The Story Lantern, Wesley’s bookstore, kept ending up in my coffee shop. Our places sat side by side, divided only by a shared wall. Once upon a time, it had been a single store until somebody carved it in half back in the seventies. Now Wes was 29A Main and I was 29B Main, and you’d think that tiny letter would be enough to keep the couriers straight. Apparently not.
“Oh,” Jamie said, sounding puzzled by why it riled me up so much.
I didn’t know why it bothered me that yet again Wesley had left the A off his address; it just did.
Everything bothers me.
“So, you took them over?” he asked as though he really did want me to talk about it.
“Yeah. Can I get a coffee?” I deflected because I needed it. Stat. We opened at seven-thirty, and after a lack of sleep, I needed caffeine like air now that the morning rush was over. The voices last night from next door—shouting, laughter, fun—would’ve woken me if I’d been asleep. But insomnia had had me in its grip this past week, dragging me down until I was running on fumes. I kept waiting for it to crack so I could refill the tank.
“Sure,” Jamie said, all cheerful, damn him, and got to work on a mug of black coffee, the way I liked it—strong and bitter as a bitter thing wrapped in… I don’tknow, maybe another bitter thing. Twice the bitterness, double the misery.
Just like me, a voice in my head sneered. I told the voice to fuck off and retreated into the kitchen.
The timer on the pastries went off the moment I got inside. Jamie would handle the front, and I’d get the next load of pastries on display and pretend I wasn’t obsessing over how Wesley’s damp hair had curled, one stray lock falling over his eye, and how he kept pushing it back with his fingers.
He was an irritating mess, always spinning wild stories that felt reckless. What if someone actually believed them? As a history professor, I had a responsibility to the truth, to facts, to the world. Right?
After the morning rush came the slower rhythm—groups of moms and dads with strollers who lingered over cappuccinos, and the knitting circle that had been turned away from the bookstore next door due to a lack of space. By the time I escaped to my cramped office on the floor above the café, I dropped into the chair and pulled out the single sheet of paper I updated every day. The single thing worth tracking.
“Five ninety-six done,” I muttered under my breath. Five hundred and ninety-six days since I’d stepped into this so-called inheritance, with all its provisos and wherefores, and became a coffee shop owner-manager. One hundredand thirty-four days left, then I would be free. On Valentine’s Day, next year, I could sell this place to who the fuck ever, walk out of here, my two years done, and get back into a classroom where I belonged. Back to teaching. Back on track. Back to a life where I meant something to the world.
I slipped the small piece of paper back into the drawer where I kept every page I’d filled since day one—handwritten numbers stacked on top of each other like a tally of survival. As if making a note each day would somehow make it easier to be here, licking my wounds and enduring the most convoluted inheritance known to man. Two years, the lawyers said. Two years of running The Real McCoy before I could sell it and pocket the lucrative inheritance from a great-great-something-cousin-uncle-whatever I’d never known. Harry McCoy had stopped working here but still kept his hand in, according to everyone who came in and liked to remind me about the time Harry didthisorthat. What hedidn’tdo was have children, and that meant I’d been left the lot.
Every number written was a promise to myself that I was one day closer to freedom.
My phone rang, and as soon as I saw the name, I answered without hesitation—the only person who stayed in touch with me from Ashcroft College. Professor Lydia Grant, head of geography, with herbooming laugh and endless curiosity, had been my lifeline more than once.
“You won’t believe what he’s done now!” she said without preamble. I didn’t have to ask who she meant, I knew this would be about my ex-fiancé—the one who’d wrecked my career and my trust at Ashcroft. Screwed me over personally and professionally, then walked away with both the job and the future I thought I had. I didn’t enjoy these calls, but I also secretly loved that he was fucking things up for the faculty. Not the students, I hated that, but the college that believed his lies, yep.
“Hello to you, too, Lydia.”
Lydia didn’t wait for me to respond. “I couldn’t make this up,” she began with a weary sigh. “He pushed through this flashy digital learning platform, talked the department into shifting a big chunk of the budget to it. Of course, it fell apart halfway through the term, and now they’ve had to scrap it and go back to the system you set up. The faculty is quietly relieved, but the dean’s embarrassed, and donors are asking questions.”
“Uh oh,” I said, because that is all she needed to hear from me.
“Yeah.” She chuckled.
“So, other than that, how are things?”
“You heard back from UCLA?”
With its highly ranked and prestigious historydepartment, UCLA was one of the best in the country, boasting a reputation, resources, and a competitive environment that fostered successful careers. Securing a position there would demonstrate to my former college what they’d lost when they let me leave.
“Not yet.”
“It won’t be long,” she reassured me. “And Seattle?”
Seattle, with a nationally respected program, plus the holy grail of tenure-track. Not as flashy as UCLA, but far more realistic for long-term stability.
“That would be a no as well.”
“Well, shit, I guess you did have eighteen months off.”
Not by choice. If I wanted the money out of The Real McCoy, then it had to be in two years.
“Yeah, there was one thing that happened, a dean from a college near here approached me.”
