Friendly enough for customers, sharp enough to keep people from getting too close. I watched her for a moment, needing something real. Something alive. Something that wasn’t Christina’s ghost whispering regrets.
Trudy’s eyes found mine again.
This time she didn’t wait.
She said something to Pati, wiped her hands on a towel, and came around the counter. I watched her walk toward me, hips swaying, face set in that stubborn expression that told me she’d already decided something and God help the man who tried to argue.
“You look like hell,” she said when she reached my table.
I looked up at her, and for once, I didn’t have a dirty comeback ready. “Feel worse.”
Her eyes dropped to the journal. “Another bad one?”
I laughed, low and humorless. “They’re all bad.”
“That wasn’t what I asked.”
No, it wasn’t. That was Trudy. Cutting through the bullshit without apology. I leaned back in my chair and rubbed a hand over my face, feeling every year I’d lived and every one I’d lost.
“She’s scared,” I said, the words surprising me with how rough they sounded. “Christina. In this entry. She’s dying, and she’s scared of what I’ll think when I know the truth.”
Trudy didn’t sit. She stood beside the table, arms crossed, waiting.
“She keeps talking about being a Dougal. Like everything she did was already written inside her before she ever had a chance to be something else.” I tapped the journal with two fingers, harder than I meant to. “She thinks she was poison. Thinks she ruined me. Ruined Grace. Thinks I should’ve stopped loving her a long damn time ago.”
Trudy’s expression softened, but only a little. She wasn’t the kind of woman who let softness take over when steel would serve better.
“Did you?” she asked.
I looked up. “Did I what?”
“Stop loving her.”
The bakery seemed to go quiet around us, even though it hadn’t. Pati was still talking to customers. Someone was still laughing near the front window. The espresso machine hissed behind the counter. Life kept moving around me while Trudy stood there asking a question I’d spent decades avoiding.
“No,” I said finally. “I hated her sometimes. But no. I never stopped loving her.”
Trudy nodded like she’d already known the answer. Maybe she had. Maybe it was written all over me every time I opened that damn book.
“That doesn’t mean I know what to do with this,” I continued, lowering my voice. “There’s more. Something worse. She says it over and over without saying what it is.‘The rest is coming,Stephen. God help me, the rest is coming.’” I swallowed hard and looked away from Trudy because looking at her made it too easy to be honest. “I don’t know if I can read it.”
For once, she didn’t answer right away.
Then she pulled out the chair across from me and sat.
That got my attention. Trudy didn’t sit with me during business hours. She moved through this place like a general commanding troops, wiping counters, barking at Pati, boxing orders, pretending not to notice me staring at her ass. Sitting down meant something.
“You don’t have to read it right now,” she said.
“I do.”
“No, Stephen, you don’t.”
The way she said my name hit different.Stephen. She never used Popeye. Like she knew I needed to be a man right now, not a walking ghost.
I looked down at the journal. “If I don’t read it, it stays in there. Waiting.”
“Then let it wait.”
