“Good.” He set his keys on the hook. She heard him go to the kitchen, run water, fill the coffee maker.
“Good like the tomatoes were good,” she said, “or?—”
“The tomatoes were terrible. The pastries were genuinely good.” He leaned in the kitchen doorway. His collar was still right. There was color in his face that hadn’t been there this morning. “She had the almond croissant. She broke it in half and gave me the larger piece without asking.”
Stella looked up from her book. “She did?”
“Just—reached over and handed it to me.” He lifted one shoulder. “I don’t know. It felt like something a person does when they’re comfortable.”
“It is.” Stella closed the book. “Did you make plans?”
“Dinner. Next Friday.” He crossed to the armchair and sat. “She wants to try that place on Coast Highway with the fish tacos.”
“Good choice.”
“Luke recommended it.”
Tyler leaned back and stretched his arms over his head, the armchair creaking under him. A man unwinding from something good. “She asked about you, actually. How you were settling in. If the photography series was going well.”
“What did you tell her?”
“That you were doing something Mr. Reeves called ‘significant’ and that you were going to be irritatingly gifted and I was going to have to figure out how to be normal about it.”
Stella pressed her lips together. “You said that?”
“She laughed. Then she said she’d noticed in your file that you’d been placed in the advanced class after one conversation, and that Reeves only does that once every few years.” Tyler looked at her steadily. “She sees it too. Just so you know.”
The Tim Tam packet crinkled in Stella’s hands. She looked down at it, then out the window, where the afternoon was doing its golden September thing over the rooftops.
“Okay,” she said. “Good.”
“Yeah.” He stood, stretched again, headed for the kitchen. “I’m making a decent coffee. You want one?”
“I’m sixteen.”
“Half and half, mostly milk, approximately three sugars. That’s not coffee, that’s a dessert.”
“I’ll have a dessert then.”
The coffee maker started up, and Stella pulled her knees to her chest in the corner of the sofa, Tim Tams in her lap, listening to the ordinary sounds of the bungalow on a Saturday afternoon. The hiss of steam. The creak of the third floorboard near the window. The way the light came in at this hour and made everything look like something worth keeping.
She’d texted Bea from the darkroom that morning justhe’s nervous, it’s very funny, and Bea had sent back a string of laughing emojis followed bytell me everything later.
Later being now, she supposed. She picked up her phone.
Went well. Croissant-sharing level well.
Bea’s response came in forty seconds.
What does that mean?
It means she gave him the bigger half without being asked.
Oh. That’s actually quite something.
Right?
Stella looked at the kitchen doorway, where Tyler was doing something unnecessarily involved with the coffee and humming something off-key and apparently entirely unaware that he was humming.
