“Be up in a few minutes,” she said, already moving again.
The rush stayed heavy for the better part of an hour. I ate my pancakes without hurrying, drank my coffee, and watched Riley work.
She was good.
Better than good.
A man at the window table sent his eggs back, and she handled it without fuss—no apology spiral, no defensiveness. Just a calm nod and a quick, “We’ll get that fixed for you,” already calling the correction to the kitchen before she’d even reached the window.
A kid knocked a glass of juice off the counter, and she had a rag on the spill before the father was halfway out of his chair. There was a quiet competence to her that I recognized immediately. I’d spent ten years hiring for it—the ability to stay functional when things went sideways, to keep the machine running without making everyone aware of the effort.
My mug was three-quarters empty when she appeared at my elbow and topped it off. I hadn’t flagged her down. Hadn’t held up the cup. She just noticed.
She set the carafe on the counter and looked at me with those careful eyes.
“You take it black. No sugar, no cream—you didn’t touch the little bowl Lauralie put out.”
A beat.
“You also haven’t looked at your phone once since you sat down, which is statistically unusual for a man I’m guessing to be in his thirties.”
I smiled at that. “I don’t like my phone much.”
“Most people are dependent on them.”
“Most people are,” I agreed. “I find it more useful to pay attention to the world around me.”
She studied me for a moment, like she was deciding whether that was a line or just something I’d said. Then she refilled Lauralie’s customer two seats down and disappeared back onto the floor.
I sat with my coffee and let my eyes move around the room.
I’d already picked up a few things about her.
Her ring finger was bare. She drove a small white sedan parked near the front door of the inn. And earlier, when the big round table paid out, she’d slipped the tip into her apron pocket…then two minutes later quietly folded half of it and slid it to Lauralie when she thought no one was looking.
The noticing part was normal.
I’d built a company from a two-man operation in a rented room in Austin into something big enough to get acquired for more money than I’d ever realistically spend. That kind of thing doesn’t happen because you’re the smartest guy in the room. It happens because you pay attention—to rooms, to people, to thedetails that tell you how things really work before anyone says a word.
Observation was just how my brain ran.
What wasn’t normal was what those observations were doing to me.
Because the same conclusion kept showing up, steady and unavoidable, before I’d even decided I was looking for one. The instinct that had carried me through all of it—the one that told me when something was real and when it was just noise—wasn’t giving me noise right now.
I stayed until the rush started to thin. Not hovering. Just finishing my coffee, reading the local paper someone had left two stools down.
When Riley finally slowed long enough to lean against the counter for a second, she looked like someone who’d been on her feet for three hours and wasn’t about to admit it. “You’re still here,” she said.
“I’m a slow eater.”
She glanced at empty plate, which had been empty for forty-five minutes.
“I had a lot on my mind,” I said.
One corner of her mouth moved. “What do people think about in Wildwood Valley?”
“Trails, mostly. I was thinking about the waterfall hike.” I looked at her. “I mentioned it yesterday. The wildflowers.”
