"What if I get there and I don't know what to say?”
"Then you wing it. You told Devon you were dating Callum Hayes on zero seconds' notice and look where that got you."
A laugh escaped. Wet and shaky and real.
"Go," Mika said. "I've got the shop."
"The shop is falling apart."
“So, it can’t get much worse. The shop will survive one afternoon without you. Go."
I stood. Took off my apron. Folded it and set it on the milk crate — a small, deliberate gesture that felt larger than it was. Picked up the letter, the keys, put them in my jacket pocket.
Mika handed me my car keys from the hook by the back door. "343 Elm Street?"
"343 Elm Street."
"Drive safe. Don't rehearse a speech. And Willow?—"
"Yeah?"
She smiled. The real one. The one she saved for the moments that mattered. "He's lucky. Don't let him forget it."
The drive took eleven minutes.
I know this not from checking a clockbut from counting the songs on the radio — two and a half, both terrible, both ignored. I drove with the windows cracked despite the February cold, letting the air hit my face, keeping me sharp, keeping me here.
The keys sat in my jacket pocket, pressing against my hip. Brass and new-cut and real. Not a metaphor. Not a promise. Actual keys to an actual building bought by an actual man who'd designed a reading nook around a comment I'd made in passing.
I didn't rehearse a speech. Mika told me not to and she was right — every version I tried in my head sounded either overly angry or overly forgiving or like a Hallmark card, and none of them sounded like me.
So I drove. Let the city scroll past. Turned left on Elm Street and scanned the numbers — 331, 335, 339 — until I saw it.
A two-story brick building between a used bookshop and a shuttered dry cleaner. Dark red facade. Arched windows on the upper floor. A recessed entryway with a transom that still had decorative ironwork.
His car was parked out front.
I pulled in behind it. Killed the engine. Sat.
The building looked exactly like the place I'd imagined owning in the versions of my future I'd stopped letting myself picture. Not sleek, not modern, nottrying to be anything other than what it was — old and sturdy and waiting for someone to see what it could become.
He'd seen it. He'd seen it and thought of me.
My hands were shaking. Not from cold. From the particular terror of walking toward a thing you want badly enough that losing it would be worse than never having it at all.
I thought about Devon. How easy it had been to want him and how cheap the wanting turned out to be. How I'd spent a year recovering from a man who'd never really seen me, who'd liked the idea of me without caring about the details.
Callum knew the details. Every one. Which hand I led with. Which direction I turned. Which dreams I'd mentioned and which I'd shouted.
He'd built rooms around them.
I got out of the car. Walked to the door. The entryway was recessed — sheltered from the wind, the ironwork overhead casting a latticed pattern on the concrete.
I put my hand on the door.
Behind it: a man who'd failed at this before. Who'd let a marriage die and a daughter drift and a life narrow to the width of a drafting table. A man who was scared and broken and forty and not at all what I'd planned.
Behind it: every room I'd ever wanted, designed by the only person who'd bothered to ask what they looked like.
