"Your mom sounds smart."
"She is. She's a doctor." Emma said this with obvious pride. Then: "Are you happy, Coach Jake?"
Out of the mouths of seven-year-olds.
Jake looked around the rink—at Tommy helping a kid with his stick grip, at Owen Fletcher (their twenty-one-year-old rookie, who'd volunteered to help today) dramatically pretending to be a goalie while kids shot pucks at him, at the scoreboard that still had last week's final score displayed.
"Yeah," Jake said, and was surprised to realize he meant it. "Right now I am."
Emma beamed. "Good. You should be happy all the time."
She skated away before Jake could tell her that happiness wasn't that simple, that being an adult meant making complicated choices between what you wanted and what you were supposed to want, between who you were and who you'd planned to be.
But maybe Emma was right. Maybe it could be that simple.
Maybe the problem was that Jake had spent so long chasing happiness that he'd forgotten to recognize it when it was standing right in front of him.
The lunch rush was exactly what Lucy needed—too busy to think, too busy to spiral, just enough mental space to focus on making sandwiches and pulling fresh bread from the oven and ringing up orders.
Mae handled the register with her usual cheerful competence while Lucy worked the back, assembling orders and trying not to think about Uncle Walter's words.
Your grandmother didn't leave you this place so you could disappear into it.
The words kept circling in her brain, impossible to ignore.
By 1:30 PM, the rush had slowed to a trickle. Mae was wiping down tables, humming along to the indie playlist Lucy had on low volume. Lucy was in the kitchen, prepping tomorrow's cinnamon rolls, when she heard the bell chime.
"Hey, Luce."
Lucy looked up to find Rei Nakamura leaning against the doorframe, PT bag slung over one shoulder, dark hair pulled into her signature high ponytail. Rei was small—barely five feet tall—but she radiated the kind of confident energy that made professional hockey players do exactly what she told them during physical therapy.
"You're here early," Lucy said. Rei usually came by after work, around 7 PM, for coffee and to complain about whichever player had skipped their exercises that week.
"Half day. Tommy's knees are acting up, so he cancelled afternoon practice." Rei grabbed a stool and sat. "Also, I heard about this morning."
Lucy's hands stilled in the dough. "Uncle Walter told you?"
"Uncle Walter tells everyone everything. It's his love language." Rei accepted the coffee Lucy slid across the counter. "So. How are you?"
"I'm fine."
"You're not fine. You look like you haven't slept in a week, there's flour in your hair—which, granted, is normal—but you're also doing that thing where you knead dough aggressively when you're upset."
Lucy looked down at her hands, which were indeed working the dough harder than necessary. She forced herself to slow down.
"Uncle Walter thinks I'm working too much," Lucy said.
"Uncle Walter is correct."
"I run a business. I can't just—"
"Yes, you can." Rei's voice was firm. "Lucy, I love you, but you're being ridiculous. You work six days a week, 16-hour days. You haven't taken a vacation in five years. You eat approximately one real meal per day. You're twenty-seven years old and you're living like a 70-year-old workaholic."
"I'm honoring Grandmother's—"
"Your grandmother would be horrified," Rei interrupted. "She came to this country so her family could have betteropportunities. She didn't build this place so you could sacrifice your entire life to it. She built it so you'd have a foundation—not a prison."
Lucy felt her eyes start to burn. Not Rei too. She couldn't handle both Uncle Walter and Rei ganging up on her in the same day.
