I didn't look up. Didn't need to.
"Your foam art is improving," Callum said, arriving at the counter with the punctuality of a man whose internal clock was accurate to the minute. He wore a navy suit today — slim cut, no tie, the top button of his shirt undone in a concession to August heat that I was choosing to interpret as personal growth.
"Good morning to you too, sunshine."
"I said it was improving. That's a compliment."
"From you, that's practically a marriage proposal." I pulled his shot. Black coffee. No sugar, no cream, no joy. "Your shirt's unbuttoned."
"It's ninety degrees."
"Callum Hayes without a tie in public. Mark the calendar."
"I'm adapting. You've ruined my standards." He leaned on the counter — my counter, in my shop, in a building he'd renovated with the obsessive care of a man who'd measured every doorway to make sure it was exactly right. "Is that a heart or a sheep?"
I looked down at the foam. I'd poured a rosetta into a customer's latte — clean, symmetrical, objectively beautiful.
"It's a rosetta, and it's flawless, andyou know it."
"It looks vaguely bovine."
"Get out of my shop."
"I just got here."
"And you're already on thin ice." I slid his coffee across the counter. Our fingers brushed. I didn't pull back. Hadn't pulled back in six months. "Sit down. Drink your coffee. Let me work."
He took his mug to the corner table. His table — the same position he'd occupied at Brew & Bean, back to the wall, sightline to the door. I'd arranged the furniture so that spot existed, and he'd claimed it opening day without a word, and neither of us acknowledged the choreography of it. Just another thing we didn't need to say out loud.
I turned back to the machine. The morning rush was building — a line at the register, Mika calling orders, the particular rhythm of a coffee shop hitting its stride. Except now the rhythm was different. Now it was happening in a room with an L-shaped counter and exposed brick walls and a stamped tin ceiling that caught the morning light and held it.
My room. My walls. My ceiling.
I still wasn't over it. Might never be.
The shop had been open twelve weeks, and here's what I'd learned: owning a business was harder than running one, and I'd been naive to think otherwise.
The renovation had taken four months. Callum designed it. Callum oversaw it. Callum had opinions about every tile, every fixture, every shade of paint — and so did I, which meant the process involved a level of arguing that made our coffee shop banter look diplomatic.
The subway tile fight alone lasted three days. He wanted white. I wanted sage green. We compromised on white with a sage green accent wall behind the community board, which meant we both won and both lost, which was how most of our arguments ended.
Mika had left Brew & Bean and followed me here — a decision that required zero convincing and one conversation that lasted approximately ninety seconds. She was my co-manager now, a title she accepted with the gravity of a woman being handed nuclear codes.
Pete and Linda had sold Brew & Bean in April. A young couple from Portland bought it, renamed it, and turned it into a pour-over bar with an eight-dollar minimum. I'd driven past once. The community board was gone. The booth where Pete and Linda told me they were selling had been replaced with standing-height tables.
I didn't drive past again.
But Pete called me on opening day. His voice cracked when I described the community board — cork-backed, framed in reclaimed wood, already covered in band flyers and poetry readings and business cards from every regular who'd followed me from Maple Street. Linda got on the line and told me she was proud of me. I held the phone with both hands and did not cry.
Fine. I cried. A little.
The reading nook was the biggest hit. Two armchairs in the southeast corner, a low shelf stocked with paperbacks, morning sun through the double windows. I'd started a book club — monthly, the last Thursday, open to anyone. Fourteen people showed up the initial time. Elena flew in from Stanford for it and read the entire book on the plane, which was either dedication or procrastination. Knowing Elena, both.
She came every month now. Crashed on our couch — Callum's couch, technically, in Callum's apartment, which had become our apartment through the gradual, undramatic process of a woman who stopped going home and a man who stopped pretending he wanted her to. My shampoo was in the shower. My owl mug was on the shelf. My pillow was on the left side of the bed, permanently dented, and he'd stopped complaining about the aesthetic disruption.
Elena and I texted daily. Memes, mostly. Oat milkdiscourse. The occasional late-night voice memo where she talked about school or her mom or a guy in her statistics class who she claimed was "irrelevant" with an intensity that suggested the opposite.
She'd called me three weeks ago, at eleven p.m., crying about a fight with Jessica. I'd sat on the bathroom floor for forty minutes, listening, offering nothing but presence and the occasional "that sucks." When she hung up, she said, "Thanks, Willow. You're good at this."
