Chapter 9 #2
"Callum is seventeen years older and he's the one who told you your job matters.
He's the one who notices that you show up at five-thirty and remembers every regular's order.
He's the one who bought you a book in a random town for no reason except you wanted it.
" Mika pointed her croissant at me. "Age isn't the variable you think it is, babe.
You're terrified that this man sees you—actually sees you—and if you let him in, he'll have the power to wreck you in ways that not even Devon managed but tried.”
"Devon didn't wreck me."
"Devon pulled a number on you. You're still carrying the dents. And you're looking at Callum and thinking, 'If this goes wrong, it won't be a dent. It'll be demolition.'"
The cooler groaned from the back, as if punctuating her point. I pulled the croissant apart into smaller and smaller pieces without eating any of them.
"When did you become a therapist?"
"I'm not a therapist. I'm a woman with eyes who's watched you argue with this man for a year and pretend the arguing wasn't foreplay."
"Gross."
"True, though."
"True," I admitted, and it felt both awful and freeing to say out loud.
"I am falling for him. I'm fully, stupidly, irresponsibly falling for a man I'm fake dating for business purposes who happens to be old enough to remember the Berlin Wall coming down, and the age thing doesn't bother me, and what bothers me is that I've stopped caring about the things I told myself should matter.
" I swept croissant crumbs into a pile. "What does that say about me? "
"It says you're growing up. It says you're starting to judge people by how they treat you instead of by the box they check on a form.
" Mika's voice went gentle—a gear I didn't hear from her often.
"Willow, there's no rule book that says you have to be with someone born in the same decade.
That's a made-up boundary people invented to feel comfortable.
The real question is whether this man is good to you. "
"He is."
"Whether he respects you."
"He does. Annoyingly."
"Whether you trust him."
I paused on that one. Sat with it.
"I fell asleep on his couch," I said. "Passed out.
Mouth open, book on my face, probably drooling, too.
And instead of waking me up or going to bed, he sat next to me.
Brushed the hair from my face. Waited until I woke up on my own.
" I met Mika's eyes. "I trust him more than I've trusted anyone in a long time.
Which scares me more than the age gap ever could. "
The bell above the door chimed. Our regular, Mrs. Okafor, shuffled in with her reusable cup and her usual cheerful wave.
Mika squeezed my arm. "We're not done with this conversation."
"I was afraid you'd say that."
"But for now—serve the nice lady her decaf, and stop tearing up that croissant. It's a waste of good pastry."
I fixed my customer-service smile—a little more genuine today, a little less brittle—and went to work.
The morning rush hit with its usual merciless energy, and I was grateful for it.
Every pulled shot and steamed pitcher was a three-minute vacation from my own head.
Tamp, lock, pull. Steam, pour, swirl. The muscle memory carried me while my brain chewed on Mika's assessment and tried to find holes in it.
There weren't any. That was the problem.
Between orders, I caught myself doing an inventory of the shop—not the usual stock check, but a deeper, more anxious kind.
The espresso machine's pressure gauge was fluctuating again, dipping into the yellow zone before climbing back.
The cooler had added a new note to its death rattle—a high-pitched whine that made the pastry case vibrate.
The drip coffee maker, Old Faithful for three years, had developed a leak at the base that I'd been managing with a folded towel and denial.
Pete and Linda hadn't called me back since our meeting. The silence was louder than any conversation.
I'd built my identity around this counter.
Told my parents, my ex, every doubter in my orbit, that this was my choice and my passion and the place I was meant to be.
And now the infrastructure was crumbling—literally, mechanically, financially—and I was watching it happen with the slow horror of a person who'd built their house on sand and refused to acknowledge the tide.
Parallels to my current personal life: noted and aggressively ignored.
During the afternoon lull, Mika cornered me again near the supply closet.
"Can I ask a question that might piss you off?"
I sighed. “Why not? Go for it.”
"If the fake dating arrangement ended tomorrow—if Callum said, 'We're done, I got what I needed'—would you still want to be with him?"
My stomach dropped. A freefall sensation that answered the question before my brain could construct a defense.
"Yes," I said. "And I resent how certain I am about it."
"Why do you hate it?"
"Mika, have you met me? My track record with men is a highlight reel of disasters.
I chose Devon, who thought my career was a punch line.
I chose the guy before Devon, who forgot my birthday twice and once called me by his ex's name during sex.
My picker is broken. It's been broken. And now it's pointing at a forty-year-old architect who was supposed to be a business arrangement and every cell in my body is screaming 'this one, this one, this one' and I can't tell if that's growth or just my next spectacular failure with better packaging. "
"Or," Mika said, "your picker is working for once and you just can't accept it."
I wanted to argue. Wanted to present a case, lay out evidence, build an irrefutable counterargument.
Instead I just stood there, in the back hallway of a coffee shop that was falling apart, and let the truth settle.
I was falling for Callum Hayes. Not despite the gap between us—the years, the experience, the tax brackets—but in full awareness of it.
He was forty and divorced and emotionally fortified and still learning how to be a decent father, and none of that diminished what I felt.
If anything, it deepened it. He'd been broken before.
He knew what failure looked and tasted and felt, and he was choosing to try again anyway.
That kind of courage from a man who hid behind blueprints and pressed suits and a punishing work schedule—that was the part that got me. Not the silver in his hair or the way he filled out a tuxedo or the fact that he kissed as if he were trying to memorize me.
Okay. Those parts got me too. I wasn't made of stone.
"The gallery is tomorrow," I said. "Our next appearance as a couple."
"And?"
"And the previous times, I could fake it. I could hold his hand and lean into him and play the adoring girlfriend and tell myself it was all performance." I picked at the hem of my sweater. "I can't fake it anymore, Mika. Not after last night. Everyone's going to see it on my face."
"Good."
"How is that good?"
"You've been faking your whole life, Willow.
Faking confidence for your parents. Faking contentment for Devon.
Faking that you've got it all figured out when you're terrified underneath.
" She put both hands on my shoulders. "The most radical thing you could do is stop pretending. With him. With everyone."
The cooler chose that moment to make a sound that could only be described as mechanical anguish. We both looked toward the back, winced.
"Go deal with your dying appliance," Mika said. "But think about what I said."
"I'm going to think about nothing else. Which is exactly my problem."
She grinned. "Callum Hayes doesn't stand a chance."
God, I hoped she was right. And God, I hoped she was wrong. And the fact that both of those prayers existed in my head at the same time pretty much summed up my entire emotional state.
I left Brew & Bean at four-thirty, which was a full hour before my shift ended, but Mika insisted and I was too wrung out to argue. I drove the distance to Callum’s apartment, purposefully taking the long way, because I needed to get my head on straight before seeing Callum again.
The doorman nodded at me. I nodded back. We'd developed a rhythm over the past few days—wary acknowledgment on his part, determined normalcy on mine. I'd stopped feeling the need to apologize for existing in a building that cost more per square foot than my annual salary.
Progress, I guess.
The apartment was empty when I walked in. A note on the kitchen island, in Callum's handwriting—precise and architectural, each letter deliberate:
Working late. Leftovers in the fridge. Don't wait up.
Don't wait up. As if we were an actual couple with actual routines and actual lives braided together instead of two people operating under a contractual arrangement that had caught fire.
I ate the leftovers—criminally good pasta even a day later—standing at the counter, thumbing through my phone without absorbing anything. Changed into his sweatpants and t-shirt—so much for my morning resolution about territorial claims—and curled onto the couch.
The gray throw pillow was where I'd left it. The copy of Pride and Prejudice sat on the coffee table where Callum must’ve placed it after I'd gone to bed. He'd smoothed the bent pages. I could tell from the creases—he'd taken care with it, the way he took care with everything he valued.
I opened it. Tried to read. Failed.
Tomorrow was the Whitmore Gallery. Tomorrow I'd stand next to Callum in a room full of strangers and pretend that holding his hand was an act. That leaning into him was strategy. That the way I looked at him was a performance calibrated for Richard Ashford's benefit.
Except I'd stopped performing on a couch in this very room, less than twenty-four hours ago, and I didn't have the faintest idea how to start again.
The apartment was quiet. His quiet—the expensive, soundproofed kind that left nothing to hide behind. No neighbors fighting. No street noise. Just my own thoughts, ricocheting off the walls of a space that belonged to a man I'd kissed and craved and was terrified of wanting.
Forty years old. Seventeen years between us. A daughter closer to my age than I was to his. A marriage that ended in ruin. A man who'd chosen buildings over people for two decades and was only now learning that the blueprints wouldn't hold him at night.
None of it mattered. Or rather—all of it mattered, and I'd weighed it, and it still didn't add up to a reason to stop.
Mika was right. The age gap wasn't the wall. Fear was the wall. And I was so tired of being afraid of the things that could make me happy.
I closed the book. Set it on the coffee table. Pulled his pillow into my arms and stared at the city through his floor-to-ceiling windows until the skyline blurred and my eyelids kept falling shut.
I should've gone to the guest room. Should've maintained the boundary. Should've done the responsible, sensible, adult thing.
I fell asleep on his couch instead.
And when I heard the front door open hours later—quiet footsteps, keys set down with care, the rustle of a man trying not to wake the woman asleep in his living room—I didn't open my eyes.
But I smiled.
And I knew, with the certainty that doesn't need evidence or justification or a single rational thought to back it up, that tomorrow night at the gallery, I wouldn't be pretending.
Not anymore.