The drive to the Shack took four minutes. The October morning was grey—no marine layer, just overcast, the kind of sky that made everything look flat and tired. The ocean was the color of old pewter. No surfers out, which meant the waves were wrong, which meant nobody would be walking the boardwalk until the morning dog crowd at seven. Tyler parked and sat in the truck for a moment, looking at the dark restaurant through the windshield. The CLOSED sign hung in the window. The patio chairs were stacked. The string lights Anna had hung for the art night preview were dark.
He went inside and the Shack was cold. The grill took time to heat. He turned it on and stood with his hands two inches above the surface the way Margo had taught him—counting the seconds before the heat pushed his palms away. The cast iron needed time. Everything needed time that he didn’t have.
While the grill heated, he set up the breakfast station. English muffins on the cutting board. Canadian bacon in the pan. The poaching pot filled, vinegar measured — he didn’t need to measure anymore, his hands knew the amount, which was the one victory of this whole experiment. He could poach an egg with his eyes closed now. He could probably poach an egg in his sleep, which at this rate he might have to.
Meg’s hollandaise arrived at six-fifteen. She texted from the parking lot—left it at the back door, running late for Margaret, good luck—and Tyler retrieved the container and set it in the warm water bath she’d taught him to prepare. The hollandaise was perfect every morning. Meg had conquered it the way she conquered everything: through research, repetition, and the absolute refusal to be defeated by a French sauce.
The first customer came at seven. Then three more. Then a rush at seven-thirty — the boardwalk crowd, the coffee-before-work crowd, the couple who’d been coming every morning since Tuesday and now had a “usual.” Tyler plated eggs, toasted muffins, heated bacon, drizzled hollandaise. His hands moved through the process without his brain’s involvement, which was good because his brain had left sometime around Wednesday.
Dante arrived at eight. He was getting better — the register no longer challenged him, and he’d learned to make coffee that didn’t taste like dirt. Joey had texted Dante a fourteen-point checklist for the morning shift that Dante kept folded in his apron pocket and consulted like scripture.
By ten Tyler’s back ached from standing. His hands smelled like vinegar and butter. The burn on his left wrist fromWednesday’s bacon grease had scabbed over and cracked open again when he reached for the muffin bag. He put a bandage on it and kept going because that’s what you did. That’s what Margo had done for fifty years—showed up, lit the grill, and kept going.
But Margo had loved this. Tyler loved photography. The distinction was becoming harder to ignore.
Anna arrived at ten for the lunch transition. She looked almost as tired as he did—shadows under her eyes, hair pulled back in a knot that had given up being a knot and become something else.
“Go,” she said. “I’ve got it.”
“Dinner—”
“I’ve got dinner too. Go home. Take a nap. Shoot something. You look like you haven’t held a camera in a week.”
“I haven’t held a camera in a week.”
Anna pushed him toward the door. “Go.”
He went. But instead of going home, he drove to the high school. Stella’s pickup wasn’t for another hour, but he parked in the lot and sat there with his cold coffee and his phone and the heaviness of someone who had been doing two jobs and doing neither of them well.
The parking lot was quiet. A few teachers crossing to their cars. The calm of a school in the middle of a class period—everyone accounted for, everything in its slot. Tyler leaned his head back against the seat and closed his eyes. Just for a minute. Just to stop moving.
His phone buzzed and he jerked awake. He’d been asleep. In the school parking lot. In the middle of the afternoon. He checked the time—twenty minutes gone. Twenty minutes of sleep in a truck with the window cracked and the October sun warming the dashboard.
The buzz was nothing—a news alert, something he swiped away. But opening the phone showed him Lindsey’s name, three days back, unanswered. He’d forgotten to respond. Three days.
Hope the new hours are going well! Still up for rescheduling when things settle down?
Three days. He’d left Lindsey Matthews on read for three days because he’d been too tired to form a sentence that wasn’t about eggs.
He typed a message.
Things are settling. Sort of. Coffee this week?
Her response came fast—she must have been between appointments.
Tomorrow?
Tomorrow. He could do tomorrow. He would do tomorrow. He’d show up and be a person and drink coffee and have a conversation that didn’t involve hollandaise temperatures or napkin fold specifications.
Yes, he typed.
Tomorrow.
The pickup line filled. Parents in SUVs, most of them looking at phones, some of them looking like they’d slept a full night, which Tyler found personally offensive. A woman two cars ahead was applying lipstick in her visor mirror. A man in a Tesla was eating a sandwich with both hands. Normal people with normal energy doing normal things.
Stella appeared at the passenger door with her backpack and her camera bag—she still carried the camera bag every day, which was something.
“You look terrible,” she said, climbing in.
