Page 21 of Soft Serve

Don't make a decision you can't reverse.

I think about that.

I think about the alley this afternoon, the narrow strip of shade, the way she stood with her arms not crossed for once, slightly open, slightly less defended, and said you don't know how they love me with a voice that was tired and honest and completely uninterested in performing strength for an audience of one.

I think about a four-year-old with both hands on a glass case and the quality of Paloma's smile when she crouched down to meet her.

I think about a photograph above a door and forty years of flour on an apron and a woman who came back for someone she loved and stayed for something she became.

I think about Eleanor's voice, saying personal attachment with the careful neutrality of someone filing something away for later use, and I think about how I said Paloma's name before I decided to.

The decision that can't be reversed.

I'm sitting very still in a cold, functional room that doesn't know me and doesn't want to. I'm thinking about a kitchen that smells like cream and sugar and something warm underneath it, and I understand with the kind of clarity that only arrives when you're alone and can't use proximity as an excuse, that this stopped being about the campaign some time ago. I don't know exactly when.

The morning she didn't look up when I came in. The wrist. The laugh that surprised her or the pause at the door.

Somewhere in the accumulated weight of small true things.

I finish the drink, set the glass aside, and sit with the knowledge the way she sat with the document, not ready to open it fully, not willing to put it face down again either.

Just keeping my place.

Outside, Hearts Bend does what it does every evening, quietly and without performance, existing completely in the way of places that have never needed anyone's permission.

I think I'm beginning to understand why she stayed.

Chapter 7

Paloma

By Thursday, I have developed a system. It isn't a complicated system. It doesn't require documentation or conscious effort. It has simply arrived, the way habits arrive when you're not watching carefully enough to stop them.

The system is this: I know where Charles is in the shop at all times without looking.

Not because I'm tracking him. Not deliberately. It's more that my awareness has quietly reorganized itself around him the way a room reorganizes around a piece of furniture that has always been there, except that he hasn't always been there, and the fact that it feels like he has is exactly the kind of thought I'm not entertaining.

I'm not entertaining it.

"You're doing the thing," Millie says, appearing at my elbow.

"I'm working," I say.

"You're working and doing the thing," she says pleasantly. "You can do both."

"What thing?" I ask, which is a tactical error because it implies there is a thing, and I've just acknowledged it.

Millie smiles with the patience of someone who has won an argument before it started. "The thing where you know exactly where he is without looking, and you're very focused on whatever is directly in front of you, specifically because of that."

I look at what is directly in front of me. A tub of strawberry base I finished with ten minutes ago.

"Get the afternoon prep started," I tell her.

"Already done," she says. "Rosie and I finished it during the eleven o'clock lull."

I look at her. She looks back with the open expression of someone who has nowhere to be and all day to be there.

"Millie," I say.