I'd stared at the ceiling and thought:I am. I'm good at this.
Callum had found me sitting on the bathroom floor afterward. He didn't ask what was wrong — just sat down next to me, back against the tub, shoulder to shoulder. I told him Elena had called. He nodded. Didn't push. Didn't try to manage. Just sat with me in the quiet, the way two people did when they'd learned that presence was more useful than solutions.
We were getting better at that. Both of us.
The afternoon lull hit around two. Mika went on break. I wiped down the counter — a reflex, a meditation, the thing my hands did when my brainneeded to sort.
The community board was full. Band flyers, yoga schedules, a watercolor class run by a woman named Agnes who came in every Tuesday for a cortado and called me "dear" in a way that made me homesick for a grandmother I'd never had. Business cards from regulars — a freelance designer, a dog walker, a guy who tuned pianos and had given Callum his card with the hopeful enthusiasm of a man who'd found his target audience.
The piano tuner had come to the apartment last month. Callum's piano — the one he'd stopped playing for years and started again the night he played for me — was now tuned and maintained and played regularly. Not performances. Just Callum, late at night, working through a thing he couldn't say with his mouth. I'd lie in bed and listen to the notes drift through the apartment, and it was the closest I'd ever come to hearing a man think out loud.
The door chimed. I looked up.
Devon.
He stood in the entryway of Brew & Bloom in a fitted blazer and that same expensive watch, scanning the room with the particular look of a man who'd wandered in expecting a generic coffee shop and found a thing he couldn't categorize. His gaze traveled the brick walls, the tin ceiling, the L-shaped counter, the reading nook — and then landed on me.
His face went through about four stages in two seconds. Confusion. Recognition. Surprise. And then the specific discomfort of a man recalculating his entire understanding of his ex-girlfriend.
"Willow?"
"Hey, Devon."
He approached the counter the way a person approached a situation they hadn't prepared for — carefully, with the charming smile dialed down to half-power. "This is— is this yours?"
"It is."
"You own this place."
"I do."
He looked around again. Slower this time. Taking inventory. The Slayer espresso machine. The community board, pinned thick with local life. The reading nook with its armchairs and morning sun. The counter behind which his ex-girlfriend stood in her own apron, in her own building, running her own business.
"Wow," he said. "This is... wow."
"Thank you. What can I get you?"
"Uh — latte? Oat milk?" He was still recalibrating. I enjoyed it more than I should have. "I was just in the neighborhood. Didn't realize this was?—"
"Mine? Turns out dropping out of college wasn't career suicide after all."
He had the decency to flinch. "I deserved that."
"You did. But I'll still make you a latte." I started pulling the shot. Steady hands. Easy rhythm. The muscle memory of a woman in her own kitchen, on her own turf, with nothing to prove. "How's Vanessa?"
"We, uh. We split up. A few months ago."
"Sorry to hear that."
I wasn't. I also wasn't not sorry. I was neutral in a way that surprised me — the level of neutrality that only came from being so thoroughly over a person that their love life had the emotional impact of a weather report.
"And you?" he asked. "Are you seeing anyone?"
The door chimed. Seven-fifteen had come and gone, but Callum had a habit of coming back for a second cup in the afternoon — an excuse to check on me that he'd deny was about checking on me.
He walked in. Saw Devon at the counter. Saw my face.
Callum's gaze moved from Devon to me and back to Devon with the assessing calm of a man who'd spent twenty years reading rooms.
