They moved away from the stall and walked together without discussing it. The market stretched ahead of them, other vendors and other vegetables, the city humming around them with its usual sirens and conversation.
“What are you here for?” he asked.
“I have three client events this week and the warehouse inventory for the weekend. I come Wednesdays because the weekend crowds are unbearable and the Tuesday produce is half asleep. Wednesday is the sweet spot.”
“You have a Wednesday.”
“Wednesdays for produce. Tuesdays for The Strand. Thursdays for the coffee shop.”
“And Mondays?”
“Mondays I’m at the warehouse by six in the morning. I get a reprieve when I go to Lucy’s to argue about menus, and then I don’t come up for air again until seven at night.”
“That isn’t a day. That’s hostage-taking.”
“It’s the price of running a business.” She paused at a stall selling fresh mozzarella, weighed two containers like she was negotiating, read the labels, and tossed one into her bag. “I wouldn’t trade any of it. Even when Mondays are trying to kill me.”
He reached for a container too. Tessa caught his wrist before his fingers landed.
“Not this one. Burrata, remember. The cheese stall by the south flag does her own, hand-pulled. Worth the extra five dollars.”
She walked him over. The vendor was a stocky woman in a flour-dusted apron who knew Tessa by name. They exchanged a few sentences in fast Italian, and the woman packed two rounds of bread into a paper carton lined with damp parchment. Gabriel paid. Tessa pressed a business card into the woman’s hand on the way out.
“You give your card to cheese vendors.”
“I give my card to anyone who feeds me well. That’s how you build a network.”
“Tell me you don’t have a spreadsheet.”
“I have three.”
Two stalls down she lifted a bunch of basil to his nose. The scent came up sharp and green, alive in ways the plastic clamshells he’d been bringing home for years had never been.
“Two bunches,” she said to the vendor without looking. “The middle ones. The middle came in this morning.”
The vendor gathered them. Gabriel paid and laid the basil across the top of his sack, careful of the leaves.
“You’re fast at this.”
“I’ve got a lot of experience.”
He watched her pick out the rest of her cheese at her own pace, the way another man might’ve watched her dance.
The crowd at the bread vendor pressed close, and someone with a stroller pushed through, knocking them sideways. His hand was at her lower back before he registered moving it. She turned her head. Her mouth was inches from his.
“Sorry,” he said. He didn’t move his hand.
“It’s fine.”
The crowd shifted. The space opened. He dropped his hand and stepped back.
He turned to the bread case while he still had something to do with his hands and pointed at a round country loaf with a darkly blistered crust. The baker bagged it, told him to warm it for ten minutes at three twenty-five, and not to fight the crust with anything but a serrated knife. Gabriel paid and nested the loaf at the top of his sack, paper still warm against his palm.
She moved on to a farm stand of squash and root vegetables and started filling her bag from a list he couldn’t see. The strap was cutting a line into her shoulder.
“Some of this is for donations,” she said without looking at him.
“Donations.”
