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“I know that,” I say, and my voice comes out slightly smaller than intended.
“Do you?” Liv asks.
I consider this seriously. “I’m working on it.”
“Alright.” Luca settles back. “In that case.” He reaches across for the wine bottle with the expression of someone transitioning to a new agenda item. “How are things going with Noah?”
“Nothing is going on,” I say immediately.
Three completely unconvinced faces.
“He is a regular customer,” I say. “Who orders the same coffee every day and sits in the same seat and is very…he’s just…there’s nothing to…“
“He held Milo on his hip for twenty minutes last Thursday,” Luca says pleasantly. “And made a very informed speech about the social construction of mealtimes.”
“He’s good with babies…“
“He moved his chair so a woman with a pram had more room,” Harper says. “Without saying anything about it.”
“That’s just…that’s being a decent…“
“He asked Luca three weeks ago whether you took milk in your coffee,” Liv says. “In case he ever needed to know.” She reaches for her glass. “But sure. Nothing’s going on.”
I look at each of them in turn. They look back at me, unblinking.
“He’s patient,” Harper says, gently now. “He gives you space. He’s interested without putting pressure on you. Those things are allowed to matter, Elsie. You’re allowed to let them.”
I stare at the coffee table. I think about my feelings, not quite the panic I thought I would find, but more the worry about being vulnerable to someone again.
Then Luca leans across the table, eyes on my face, and with the measured focus of a man executing a heist, begins sliding my phone off the armrest.
“Don’t,” I say.
“I’m just going to…“
“Luca.”
“One message…“
I lunge across the coffee table. He gets halfway to his feet. There is a brief and entirely undignified scramble that ends with me clutching my phone to my chest and Luca pointing at me with the betrayed expression of someone whose masterplan has been foiled by someone who was simply paying attention.
From her armchair, Liv has not moved. She’s eating chips from the open bag in her lap and watching us with the calm, satisfied expression of a woman who has found her evening’s entertainment and has no notes.
“I hate all of you,” I tell them.
“No, you don’t,” Harper says, refilling my glass.
She’s right, of course. I don’t.
***
The espresso machine hisses through its warm-up cycle with the sound it always makes, somewhere between a kettle and a small, irritable animal, and the café smells like cinnamon and the coffee-soaked warmth that comes in the first half hour before customers arrive, when the space still feels like ours. I’m behind the counter with Maisie strapped to my chest in the carrier, her face turned slightly outward with the alert, considering expression she adopts when there are things happening that she intends to monitor personally. Milo is on the play mat behind the till, currently in the early stages of a complex physical relationship with a board book about farm animals. He has discovered that if you bang it flat against the mat repeatedly, it makes a sound. He is very interested in this.
I keep looking at the door.
I notice myself doing it and make a face at nothing in particular. I’ve looked at that door a hundred thousand times. It’s a door. It’s the same door it’s always been, glass panel, wooden frame, the bell above it that Luca insists on keeping because “ambience is not decorative, it’s structural.” I’m not standing here electrified by the concept of a door. I’m just… paying attention. Differently. That’s all.
Noah arrives at his usual time with his laptop bag over one shoulder and a paperback tucked under his arm, which is new, and orders the same coffee he always orders. He says good morning to me and to Maisie, who receives this with the gravity of a diplomat acknowledging an official greeting. He takes the window seat.
