"What's in the envelope?"
"Keys. And a letter."
"The Elm Street building."
"Yes."
Graham was quiet for a long moment. The sound of a man recalculating.
"You know this is either the most romantic thing you've ever done or the most insane," he said.
"Knowing me, probably both."
"Probably." Another pause. "I'll deliver it. ButCallum—if she doesn't show up, you're going to need a plan."
"If she doesn't show up, I'll deserve it."
"That's not a plan."
"It's all I've got."
I hung up. Placed the envelope on the floor beside me. Leaned back against the exposed brick wall—gritty, solid, eighty years of history pressing into my spine.
The building was quiet. Dust motes drifted in the afternoon sun that came through the arched windows. The stamped tin ceiling held its pattern overhead—intricate, enduring, designed by someone who'd believed in permanence.
I'd spent forty years building structures meant to outlast the people inside them. Monuments to durability. Testaments to engineering. Beautiful, soulless proof that a man could build anything except the life he wanted.
I was done with that.
I was sitting on the floor of a building I'd bought for a woman who might never walk through the door, and I was done running, done retreating, done performing the role of a man who was too disciplined to need anyone.
I needed her. I loved her. And I was sitting in the dust and ruin of every wall I'd ever built, waiting to see if that was enough.
nineteen
WILLOW
I made a black coffee at seven-fifteen on Monday morning and didn't realize what I'd done until it was sitting on the counter.
No order attached. No customer waiting. Just a black coffee, brewed on autopilot by hands that had performed this particular sequence so many times the muscle memory had outlasted the relationship.
I stared at it. A perfect pour. Clean, dark, no frills. The exact drink I'd been making for the same man at the same time for over a year, and my body had produced it on cue like a reflex that hadn't gotten the memo.
Mika appeared at my shoulder. Looked at the coffee. Lookedat me.
Said nothing.
I poured it down the sink and went back to cleaning a counter that was already clean.
Three days. That's how long it had been since the Ashford dinner, since the driveway, since ten syllables rearranged my life. Three days of shifts I didn't need to work, of scrubbing surfaces that didn't need scrubbing, of filling every hour with motion so the stillness couldn't catch me.
Saturday I'd worked open to close. Twelve hours on my feet, smiling at customers, pulling shots, wiping tables. Mika had stayed for all of it without being asked.
Sunday I'd done it again. Added an inventory count nobody requested. Reorganized the supply closet. Alphabetized the syrup bottles, which earned me a look from Mika that communicated roughly sixteen things, none of them subtle.
Monday I was back at six a.m., an hour before we opened, pretending to audit the pastry case while actually just standing in the only place that still felt like mine.
My apartment didn't count. 3B was clean and repaired and painfully empty — I'd slept there twonights now, on Mika's air mattress, staring at the patched ceiling and listening to the silence of a life I'd outgrown. The avocado tiles gleamed. The new carpet smelled like chemicals. Everything was fixed and nothing was right.
