"Devon didn't wreck me."
"Devon pulled a number on you. You're still carrying the dents. And you're looking at Callum and thinking, 'If this goes wrong, it won't be a dent. It'll be demolition.'"
The cooler groaned from the back, as if punctuating her point. I pulled the croissant apart into smaller and smaller pieces without eating any of them.
"When did you become a therapist?"
"I'm not a therapist. I'm a woman with eyes who's watched you argue with this man for a year and pretend the arguing wasn't foreplay."
"Gross."
"True, though."
"True," I admitted, and it felt both awful andfreeing to say out loud. "I am falling for him. I'm fully, stupidly, irresponsibly falling for a man I'm fake dating for business purposes who happens to be old enough to remember the Berlin Wall coming down, and the age thing doesn't bother me, and what bothers me is that I've stopped caring about the things I told myself should matter." I swept croissant crumbs into a pile. "What does that say about me?"
"It says you're growing up. It says you're starting to judge people by how they treat you instead of by the box they check on a form." Mika's voice went gentle—a gear I didn't hear from her often. "Willow, there's no rule book that says you have to be with someone born in the same decade. That's a made-up boundary people invented to feel comfortable. The real question is whether this man is good to you."
"He is."
"Whether he respects you."
"He does. Annoyingly."
"Whether you trust him."
I paused on that one. Sat with it.
"I fell asleep on his couch," I said. "Passed out. Mouth open, book on my face, probably drooling, too. And instead of waking me up or going to bed, he sat next to me. Brushed the hair from my face. Waited until I woke up on my own." I met Mika's eyes. "I trust him more than I've trusted anyone in a longtime. Which scares me more than the age gap ever could."
The bell above the door chimed. Our regular, Mrs. Okafor, shuffled in with her reusable cup and her usual cheerful wave.
Mika squeezed my arm. "We're not done with this conversation."
"I was afraid you'd say that."
"But for now—serve the nice lady her decaf, and stop tearing up that croissant. It's a waste of good pastry."
I fixed my customer-service smile—a little more genuine today, a little less brittle—and went to work.
The morning rush hit with its usual merciless energy, and I was grateful for it. Every pulled shot and steamed pitcher was a three-minute vacation from my own head. Tamp, lock, pull. Steam, pour, swirl. The muscle memory carried me while my brain chewed on Mika's assessment and tried to find holes in it.
There weren't any. That was the problem.
Between orders, I caught myself doing an inventory of the shop—not the usual stock check, but a deeper, more anxious kind. The espresso machine's pressure gauge was fluctuating again, dippinginto the yellow zone before climbing back. The cooler had added a new note to its death rattle—a high-pitched whine that made the pastry case vibrate. The drip coffee maker, Old Faithful for three years, had developed a leak at the base that I'd been managing with a folded towel and denial.
Pete and Linda hadn't called me back since our meeting. The silence was louder than any conversation.
I'd built my identity around this counter. Told my parents, my ex, every doubter in my orbit, that this was my choice and my passion and the place I was meant to be. And now the infrastructure was crumbling—literally, mechanically, financially—and I was watching it happen with the slow horror of a person who'd built their house on sand and refused to acknowledge the tide.
Parallels to my current personal life: noted and aggressively ignored.
During the afternoon lull, Mika cornered me again near the supply closet.
"Can I ask a question that might piss you off?"
I sighed. “Why not? Go for it.”
"If the fake dating arrangement ended tomorrow—if Callum said, 'We're done, I got what I needed'—would you still want to be with him?"
