Jake typed back:how did you know I was watching westerns
because that's what you always do when you can't sleep
creepy that you know that
creepy that you're so predictable. Go. To. Sleep.
Jake put his phone face-down on the coffee table and pulled the blanket over his legs. On the screen, Shane was saying goodbyeto Joey, riding off into the mountains, choosing to leave before he destroyed the thing he was trying to protect.
Sometimes leaving was the right choice. Sometimes staying was.
Jake just wished he knew which one applied to him.
Through the wall, something crashed. His neighbor swore—loud enough that Jake actually heard words this time.
And that's when he realized: his noisy neighbor was a woman.
For some reason, that made it worse. A woman, living alone, moving around at all hours, dropping things. Was she okay? Should he check? That felt creepy. But ignoring it also felt wrong.
Jake lay there, frozen with indecision, while his neighbor moved around on the other side of the wall. So close. So far.
Story of his life, really.
At 11:47 PM, the noise finally stopped. Jake's phone buzzed one more time: his alarm, set to remind him that if he wanted to get to the rink before sunrise, he needed to leave in four hours.
Four hours. Maybe this time he'd actually sleep.
(He wouldn't. He never did.)
Outside, Timber Falls was dark and quiet. Inside, Jake stared at the ceiling and thought about pork buns and hazel eyes and the way Lucy had smiled when she handed him his coffee this morning like it was the easiest thing in the world.
Maybe Marcus was right. Maybe he thought too much.
Or maybe he didn't think enough about the right things.
Jake closed his eyes and tried to sleep and failed, same as always.
Four floors down, in the bakery kitchen, Lucy was already awake, kneading dough for tomorrow's bread, flour on her cheek and pencils in her hair and absolutely no idea that the guy in the apartment next door had finally learned her name.
Chapter 2
The thing about running a bakery was that Wednesdays always came around.
Lucy had been tracking Jake Morrison's routine for three years without meaning to. Every Wednesday at 8:17 AM—give or take thirty seconds—he would walk through the door of The Bread Basket, order six pork buns and a black coffee, pay, and leave. For the first two years, he'd barely made eye contact. For the past year, he'd started nodding hello.
This morning's "these are really good" had been the longest conversation they'd ever had.
Lucy told herself it didn't matter. He was a customer. A regular, sure, but still just a customer. The fact that his Wednesday visits had become the most reliable part of her week—more reliable than sunrise, more reliable than the temperamental oven in the back—was completely irrelevant.
"You're doing it again," Mae said from the register.
Lucy looked up from the croissant dough she'd been rolling for the past ten minutes. "Doing what?"
"That thing where you stare into space and get all weird." Mae was twenty years old, majoring in environmental science at UVM, and completely unafraid of her boss. It was one of the reasons Lucy had kept her on staff for two years. "Is it about Hockey Guy?"
"His name is Jake."
"Ooh, you know his name now. Progress."
