Chapter 10 #2
"I’m doing all right," I say, keeping it light. He doesn’t need anything more than that.
Relief loosens something in my shoulders when he’s here, the quiet knowledge that when customers come in I won’t have to split myself in two. He can take the front, keep the room moving, and I can figure out what I’m going to do about Stein without dropping the store on the floor in the process.
"Morning, Shane. Doing good, thanks." Callum glances around the shop before settling on me. "Looks like you two have got it handled. Pancake and I will just sit on the couch and get some work done."
Shane doesn't appear to notice things were tense before he walked in. He heads toward the back to hang his jacket.
He's looking at me in the careful, measuring way he has, and I cross the floor toward him. Not running, walking, the distinction deliberate enough that I know he'll read it the same way I do.
When I reach him I put my palm on his chest. "Thank you," I say, low enough that it stays between us.
His eyes stay on mine.
I shrug.
"Don't get excited. I still reserve the right to be weird about this."
He nods. "I assumed."
The floor beneath me feels steadier than it has in two weeks, and I keep that steadiness when customers start coming in and I watch Shane charm regulars into second cups of coffee and he makes me a flat white without being asked.
Stein's offer is in my bag. I'm not going to sell. That part has always been simple. It'll still be that way on the other side of whatever is happening, and I hold onto it.
I watch Shane work behind the register and out on the floor offering book suggestions. We work together like a well-oiled machine and I'm grateful for how easily he takes the room, how he talks books with anyone who walks in and somehow sends them out with one they didn’t know they needed.
Around two, when the line is three deep and the espresso machine hasn’t stopped hissing for ten minutes, Callum closes his laptop and stands.
"I’m going to head to the back for a minute," he says, already turning toward the hallway. "Bathroom."
He nods toward Pancake, who doesn’t bother to get up. "She’s good here."
"We’ve got her," I say.
He gives me a look that reads the room, reads me, and then he walks away.
Pancake waits exactly three seconds before standing, stretching long and slow like she has an audience, and then she walks out from behind the counter and plants herself near the espresso machine.
Shane steps around her with the reflexes of someone who has done this before. "You are a hazard," he tells her, arranging a basket of bagels on the counter. "A very cute hazard, but still."
She stares at the bagel like she's conducting a moral evaluation.
“No,” Shane says immediately, pulling it back. “Don't even start begging. Avery will fire me and you'll get fat, and then neither of us wins.”
I ring up a customer while he narrates his own self-control like it's a public service.
"We are not giving you carbs," he says, pointing at her. "You have a brand to maintain."
Pancake lowers her head onto his shoe.
"She’s playing you," I say.
"I know she’s playing me," he says. "I just don't know how to win."
He grabs a bagel from the basket, tears off a small piece, and drops it to her like he's signing a contract he doesn't agree with.
"Don't tell Callum," he mutters.
Callum reappears. "Everything good?" he asks.
"Perfect," Shane says, too quickly.
I meet Callum’s eyes over the register. "She’s been a model citizen," I say.
Pancake appears not to have moved from behind the register.
The store buzzes with low conversation, pages turning, the scrape of chairs as people settle in with laptops and coffee. Someone laughs softly near the front shelves while another customer drifts between displays with a stack already in their arms.
Shane runs the till while I head to the storeroom to pull the restock box.
My phone rings. Cordelia's voice has the specific, frayed quality of someone whose grip just slipped and is now calling the one person she trusts to help her put it back together.
"I need," she says, "approximately four minutes of your undivided attention."
I set the restock box down. "Okay."
What follows is the full account of a first date that began promisingly at a wine bar on Channel Islands Boulevard and devolved into a parking dispute, a citation, and a standoff with a meter attendant named Gerald who, Cordelia maintains, had it out for her specifically and personally.
"I was two minutes over," she says, with the conviction of a woman who has already begun constructing her legal defense. "Two minutes but Gerald didn't care."
"What about your date?" I ask.
"The date ended," she says, "when I started yelling at Gerald and telling him I'd be writing to my city councilmember." A pause. "I don't have any city councilmember's contact information."
"I have Mark Helmsley's. Do you want it?"
"I want it so badly."
We stay on the phone while I text her the contact.
She talks out her draft complaint in real time and by the time we hang up I've been standing in the storeroom for more than fifteen minutes.
The restock box is at my feet and I haven't yet pulled it away from the wall.
I'm aware, reaching for it, that I would have found what I find sooner if I hadn't stayed on the phone.
But I'm not sorry, because Cordelia's voice in the first thirty seconds of that call had the sound of someone who needed me, and being needed instead of the other way around was something I didn't know I needed today.
I reach for the restock box and see that something's on the floor near the baseboard, half-tucked against it as though it slipped from a pocket.
I pick it up and open it, and my breath goes quiet in my chest.
It's a printed schedule of some sort with handwritten notes in the margins in a casual, looping hand I know from a hundred inventory lists, three years of supply orders, and shift notes that have lived in my office inbox every Monday morning.
The schedule lists my building's address, a warehouse on Surfside Drive, and four other addresses on the block, with dates running through the next ninety days.
The notes seem to mark entry points, timing windows.
They also have the access details for the pop-up's loading corridor and the back delivery window in the same words Shane used to ask me about them.
I fold the paper and slip it into my bag next to the Stein envelope.
For a moment I don't move. I just stand in the storeroom. The room smells exactly the way it did before everything rearranged itself.
I feel the kind of sudden clarity that arrives when you understand that the one who's been here the whole time has been making your coffee exactly right, remembering every regular by name, and handing you his loyalty like you earned it.
And now I can't tell which parts were real.
I push through the stockroom door and step back onto the floor. Shane glances up from the register, one hand on the keypad, easy smile already in place.
"Can you please help the customer wearing the UCLA cap in Feed Yourself, Please? She was looking for a book combining Le Cordon Bleu and travel," he asks.
I set a stack of returns against the back wall behind the counter. "Sure can," I say, heading in that direction. "The usual mayhem."
My voice sounds the way it always sounds. I pass the folded paper to Callum as I move past his armchair on the way to the Cooking section, letting it drop into his hand without looking at him.
Then I turn toward the woman in the UCLA cap. "Hi, I can help you find that," I say, like nothing in this store has changed.