She closed. Wiped down. Restocked. Counted the register—up from a normal day, not dramatically, but the breakfast hours had added something. She wrote the number on a piece of paper and stuck it to the back office wall.
At five she reopened for dinner.
The evening light through the windows was different from the morning light—warmer, amber, the kind of light that made the Shack’s wood floors glow and the ocean outside look like something from a painting Margo would struggle to finish. The thought caught Anna mid-step—Margo’s canvas, the foregroundshe couldn’t get right. Anna had seen it last week, the empty space where the Shack should go. She wondered what kind of light Margo would choose for those windows. Then she let the thought go, because there were tables to set and a dinner service to open and she was learning not to chase every thought to its end.
She’d extended the lunch menu into dinner—focaccia, three kinds of soup, grilled cheese variations, a salad she’d thrown together from the farmers’ market because someone should probably eat a vegetable. It wasn’t a dinner menu. It was lunch wearing a different hat.
Bea arrived after school and set up in her booth with calculus and a highlighter. Stella came from the darkroom and took her usual spot, camera on the table. They’d both volunteered for the dinner shift, which meant homework happened between customers and the textbooks shared table space with napkin caddies.
Dante had gone home at three and come back at five looking slightly less terrified, which Anna counted as growth.
Two tables by six. A couple who’d seen the sign change from CLOSED to OPEN and wandered in. A man eating soup alone by the window.
And then Michael walked in.
He wasn’t carrying his briefcase. No laptop, no legal pad, no pens. He wore a collared shirt — still pressed, still tucked in — but his sleeves were rolled to the forearms. First time she’d seen that.
He sat at the counter. Not the back office where he’d spent weeks during the audit — the counter, out in the open, like a customer.
“You’re here,” Anna said. “Again.”
“The first evening of expanded service. I wanted to see how it goes.”
“You don’t work here anymore.”
“The revenue data is more accurate when observed in person.”
Anna looked at him. He looked back. His expression hadn’t changed—it never changed—but he was here. At the Shack. For dinner. Without a business reason that held up to even mild scrutiny.
“What can I get you?” she said.
He looked at the menu board. She watched his eyes move across it—grilled cheese, grilled cheese, soup, grilled cheese, focaccia, salad. Everything with dairy except the focaccia and the gazpacho.
“Focaccia,” he said. “And the gazpacho.”
“Same as always.”
“It’s a reliable combination.”
Anna turned to the kitchen and pulled out focaccia and ladled gazpacho into a bowl. She set both in front of him and watched him arrange the plate the way he arranged everything—square to the counter edge, spoon parallel to the bowl. Same as during the audit, except now there was no audit. Just Michael, eating focaccia at her counter on a regular night.
“How were the breakfast numbers?” he asked.
“Good. Not dramatically. But good.”
“Tyler’s eggs?”
“The first customer said they were really good. Tyler may never recover.”
Something moved across Michael’s face. Not a smile. But close.
The evening went on. A few more tables filled and emptied. Stella did calculus between shots of the sunset through the windows. Bea highlighted something in her textbook, looked up, and caught Anna watching Michael eat his gazpacho. Anna went back to wiping the counter.
At eight o’clock, Tyler came back. He’d changed clothes and his hair was wet—he’d showered, which meant he’d gone home and come back, which meant he wanted to be here for closing night one.
Meg called at eight-fifteen.
“How did it go?”
