Every time I look up from my laptop, he's on his stool. Every time he looks up from his, I'm in my booth. We keep catching each other in the act of looking and neither of us looks away fast enough to pretend it didn't happen.
I order the IPA. The nachos. Over a week of the same order. Jason serves them without comment, but his eyes move between me and Ezra with an expression that suggests he knows something happened and is deeply invested in finding out what.
"You're glowing," Jason says to Ezra when he thinks I can't hear. Which is ridiculous, because I'm fifteen feet away and I've learned that everything said in this bar is heard by everyone in this bar.
"I'm not glowing. I'm doing receipts."
"You're doing receipts and glowing. It's a whole thing."
"Go reorganize the vodka."
I don't look up. But I smile. And I'm sure every shifter in the building clocks the change in my heart rate.
The afternoon passes in the strange suspended animation of two people who are pretending this morning didn't happen while being completely unable to think about anything else. I work on my report — the real one, the one I'll never submit toColdwell, the one that documents everything I've found. Ezra works on his books. We type in parallel the way we've been doing for almost two weeks, except now the parallel has a charge to it, a hum, like two wires running close enough to create interference.
At two, Robin arrives from the café with a box of something that smells like cinnamon. He sets it on the counter, looks at me in the booth, looks at Ezra on his stool, and turns to Jason.
"What happened?"
"I don't know but Ezra's glowing."
"I canhearyou," Ezra says.
"We know," Robin and Jason say simultaneously.
Robin brings me a pastry without being asked. Cinnamon roll, fresh, still warm. He sets it next to my nachos with the determined aggression of a man who has decided to feed me whether I want it or not.
"You can't eat nachos every day," he says. "Your body needs variety."
"The nachos have variety. Cheese, jalapeños, beans—"
"That's not variety. That's a sodium delivery system with toppings. Eat the cinnamon roll."
I eat the cinnamon roll. It's extraordinary — layers of dough so thin they dissolve, cinnamon sugar that's somehow both sharp and warm, a cream cheese glaze that makes my eyes close.
"Good?" Robin asks, already walking away.
"How do you do this?"
He stops. Turns. "Do what?"
"Make things that taste like this. In a café in a library in a town that isn't on most maps." I've picked up enough during the week to know a bit about him. A bit about all of them.
Something softens in Robin's face. For just a second, the guardedness drops and I see the person underneath, the one who writes supply lists in the margins of napkins, who brings test batches to the bar for opinions, who makes food the way some people make art. Because they can't not.
"Practice," he says. "And good butter."
He goes back to the counter. I finish the cinnamon roll and make a note in my leather notebook that has nothing to do with property assessments:Robin: cinnamon rolls. Ask about butter.
Not assessment notes. People notes. I've been keeping two sets of records for days now and the personal one is longer.
* * *
Around three-thirty, Knox comes out of the office.
He's been in there all day — unusual for Knox, who normally cycles through the bar every hour or so, checking the room the way a man checks a perimeter. Whatever he's been doing with the information I gave him this morning, it's taken most of the afternoon.
He walks to the bar. Pours himself coffee. Stands with his back to the room for a moment, which I've learned is Knox processing. When he turns around, his face has the settled quality of a man who's made a decision.
