6. Gabriel’s Gaze #2
"It's a hard road," she says. "Even when you have the money."
"Yeah."
"Worth it, though. I think. If you can make it."
"I'm going to make it."
She smiles. It's a small smile, tired at the edges, but genuine. "I believe you."
I don't know why that matters. I don't know why the approval of a stranger—a diner waitress, a girl who doesn't know my name or my family or the things I've seen—should make my chest feel tight. But it does.
"What about you?" I ask. "If money wasn't an issue. If you could go back. Would you?"
She's quiet for a long moment. The coffee pot hisses behind her. The cook scrapes the grill. A car passes outside, headlights slicing through the window, and I watch the light move across her face.
"Yeah," she says finally. "I think I would. I think I'd still want to save things."
"Things?"
"Animals. People. Whatever needed saving." She shrugs, like she's embarrassed by the admission. "It's stupid. I know."
"It's not stupid."
"How would you know? You don't even know me."
"I know that wanting to save things isn't stupid." I hold her gaze. "I think it's the opposite of stupid. I think it's the only thing that isn't stupid."
She stares at me for a long moment. Then she laughs—a short, surprised sound, like she didn't expect to find something funny in the middle of this conversation.
"You're weird, Gabe."
"So I've been told."
"Good weird," she says. "Not bad weird. There's a difference."
"What's the difference?"
"Bad weird makes you want to cross the street. Good weird makes you want to sit down and have another cup of coffee."
She pours me another cup. I didn't ask for it. She just pours, like she's decided I'm staying, like she's decided I'm worth the extra pot.
I stay until one. We talk about nothing—about her farm, about my classes, about the difference between cows and people and whether stitching a wound is easier when the patient can't talk back.
She tells me about a calf named Mercy, born breech, delivered by a ten-year-old girl with small hands and a mother who talked her through it.
She doesn't tell me her mother is dead. But I can see it. In the way her voice changes when she talks about her. In the way her hands slow down, just slightly, like they're remembering something.
I don't tell her anything real. I tell her about medical school, about the classes I'm taking, about the ways I'm trying to be something other than what I was born to be. I don't tell her about the mansion. About my father. About the empire that's waiting for me whether I want it or not.
I don't tell her my last name.
But I want to. For the first time in my life, I want to tell someone the truth. Not because I trust her—I don't know her, not really—but because she looks at me like the truth wouldn't scare her.
Like she's seen worse.
I come back the next night.
And the night after that.
I sit at the same stool, order the same coffee, ask the same kinds of questions.
She tells me about her sisters. About her father, who lives in an apartment in Scranton and calls her every Sunday.
About the city, which she hates, and the diner, which she tolerates, and the future, which she's stopped trying to imagine.
I tell her about my classes. About the anatomy lab, where I'm learning to cut into bodies that were once alive.
About the late nights in the library, surrounded by books that smell like dust and ambition.
About the pressure—not from my professors, not from my peers, but from something deeper, something older, something that breathes down my neck even when I'm a hundred miles away.
She listens. Really listens. The way she listened to my father, I realize—the same attention, the same stillness, the same sense that she's hearing not just your words but the things beneath them.
On the third night, she asks: "Why do you come here?"
"What do you mean?"
"You're a pre-med student. You should be studying. Sleeping. Doing whatever normal people do at midnight. Instead, you're sitting in a diner, drinking coffee you don't need, talking to a waitress you don't know." She tilts her head. "Why?"
I think about lying. I'm good at lying. I've been trained to lie, the same way I've been trained to walk into rooms and not flinch.
But I don't want to lie to her.
"Because you're the first person in a long time who's looked at me like I'm not a monster," I say.
The words hang in the air between us. Too honest. Too raw. I watch her face change—surprise, maybe, or confusion, or something else entirely.
"That's a heavy thing to say to someone you just met," she says.
"I know."
"Why would anyone think you're a monster?"
I should deflect. I should laugh, change the subject, make a joke about late-night coffee and existential dread. But her eyes are brown and steady and they're looking at me like I'm worth looking at, and I can't look away.
"My family," I say. "There are things about my family. Things I didn't choose. Things I can't escape." I pause. "I'm trying to be something different. But I don't know if trying is enough."
She's quiet for a long moment. Then she reaches across the counter and puts her hand on mine.
Just for a second. Just a brush of her fingers against my knuckles. But I feel it everywhere—in my chest, in my throat, in the places where I've been holding myself together for so long I forgot I was holding.
"Trying is enough," she says. "Trying is everything."
She pulls her hand back and picks up the coffee pot, and the moment is over. But I can still feel the ghost of her fingers on my skin. I can still feel the warmth.
I stay until two. She tells me about her mother's fever, about the winter that took half a dozen souls from the valley, about the way her father never remarried because he couldn't imagine loving anyone else.
I tell her about my mother. About her death, about the silence that followed, about the way my father became a stranger overnight.
I don't tell her that my mother was murdered.
I don't tell her that my father ordered the killing in return.
I don't tell her any of the things that would make her look at me the way everyone else looks at me—with fear, with pity, with the cold calculation of someone trying to decide whether I'm worth the risk.
But I tell her enough. More than I've told anyone.
When I leave, she says: "Same time tomorrow?"
"Same time tomorrow."
She smiles. That small, tired smile that I've started to think of as mine. "Good. Save me a piece of apple pie."
"For you?"
"For Gabe," she says. "My favorite customer."
I walk out into the cold. The door chimes behind me, and I stand on the sidewalk for a long moment, breathing in the smell of exhaust and rain and something else. Something that feels like possibility.
I don't tell her I'm Aleksander's son.
I don't tell her that the man in the suit is my father.
I don't tell her that I've been watching her for a week, that I followed him here, that I sat in my car in the cold and studied her through the window like a specimen under a microscope.
I don't tell her any of that.
But I will.
Someday.
When I'm ready for her to know.
That night, I lie in my bed in the mansion and stare at the ceiling.
The room is too big, too quiet, too full of the ghosts of everyone who came before me.
I can hear the house settling around me—the creak of old wood, the whisper of the heating system, the distant sound of my father's footsteps in the hallway.
He came home at three. I heard his car in the driveway, heard his key in the lock, heard the soft pad of his footsteps as he passed my door. He didn't knock. He never knocks.
But he paused outside my room. Just for a moment. Just long enough for me to hold my breath.
Then he moved on, and I was alone again.
I think about Monika. About her hands. About the way she said trying is everything like she believed it. About the way she looked at me—not with fear, not with hunger, not with any of the things I've come to expect from people who know my name.
She doesn't know my name. She knows Gabe. She knows a boy who wants to be a doctor, who stays up too late drinking coffee, who sits in a diner and talks about his mother like she's still alive.
She doesn't know Gabriel Mire.
I want to tell her. I want to show her. I want to see if she still looks at me the same way when she knows what I come from.
But I'm afraid of the answer.
I'm more afraid than I've been in years.
Because if she looks at me differently—if she looks at me the way everyone else looks at me—I'll lose something I didn't know I had.
Something I'm not ready to lose.
I close my eyes and see her face. Brown eyes, steady hands, a smile like a crack in a stone wall.
She reminds me of someone. I can't figure out who.
Maybe she just reminds me of the person I want to be.