Chapter Twenty-Two
It’s all coming down
Who’ll catch me now?
—US Lyric Bot [@HourlyUS]
Have you tried smacking it again?” Amber asked.
It was the next afternoon—the final day before the livestream—and Amber and I stood in front of the cash register in The Tiny Tiger, trying to get it to work.
“I actually have,” I admitted with a huff, thwacking the register’s side for a third time. The neon-green—and entirely incorrect—string of numbers blurred out for a moment before stubbornly returning.
Most of the day had been spent getting ready for tomorrow’s livestream, like arranging the café and sending the US social media team our reservation, adoption, and donation links. I could take a break soon, if I could just get this stupid cash register to stop glitching.
The sound of laughter distracted me, and I glanced over at Jake and the boys in the cat room. They were all getting a kick out of something, and Jake had his head tipped back and eyes closed as he grinned so wide he scrunched up his nose.
My mind went back to dinner last night, at Jake’s and the boys’ reactions to Mom giving them an open invitation. What if that was something that could be a more familiar sight?
He said he wanted to come back. But Jake probably thought he’d come back last time. And it took four whole years.
I tried taking Mom’s words to heart about how love was more than obvious gestures and being there in person.
But did it still count if they didn’t keep you in their thoughts when you were apart?
It made me happy to learn Jake hadn’t ghosted me because he didn’t care about me after he got famous, but it still happened.
It didn’t make him a bad person, but it also didn’t make him dependable for me in that way either.
Considering he stayed silent and unreachable over the past couple years, and I was the one who had to reach out to him, what did that mean about our relationship? Yes, Jake answered, but would I always have to catch his attention?
And could I the next time? And the time after that?
Would I always be left wondering?
Forcing myself to look away from Jake, I firmly turned back to the cash register.
But I wasn’t quick enough.
“So, I heard you guys had dinner,” Amber said as I tried punching in an override code. “How’d that go?”
Really great, and that’s really terrifying because that means I’m letting myself think about a relationship. Which may be just insane. “Good.”
“Uh-huh,” Amber said, in the tone of someone who knew me just a little too well to buy that was all of it.
I snuck another look at Jake. He had Arpeggio in his arms again, and I thought of yesterday, when Jake held Peggy for the first time and told me Marie hadn’t forced him to come down. It’s not like I had a choice had been a lie, apparently.
Unless . . .
I felt a tiny ember of hope in my chest. Did Jake mean it the opposite way? Did he feel he had no choice but to come help me because he felt so strongly about it?
But, if he felt so strongly, then why would he wait until all these years later?
I shook my head and looked away, feeling confused.
“When I asked you before what Jake was like, you said you didn’t know anymore,” Amber said, watching me closely. “Do you know now?”
I paused, fingers on the Total button. Jake’s dimples flashed through my mind at the same time as his new, cocky grin. “The new Jake’s—”
A knock at the front of the café interrupted me, and I saw my mom outside. Rushing over, I held the door open while Amber pulled a chair out from behind the counter so Mom could sit down.
“Mom, what are you doing here?” I asked in surprise. “I didn’t think you were going to come in today.”
“I wanted to talk to you girls in person,” Mom said, and Amber and I exchanged a glance. Uh-oh. This wasn’t good.
“What happened?”
Mom took a deep breath, then—like ripping off a Band-Aid—said, “The bank denied our loan.”
Ouch, that hurt.
“I wanted to thank the both of you for everything you’ve done for the café this summer,” Mom continued.
She set her crutches against the counter, then reached out to briefly squeeze one of my hands and one of Amber’s.
“But it’s down to the livestream tomorrow.
If we don’t see a significant change, we’re going to have to close by the end of next month. ”
“What?” The month deadline felt like a sucker punch down to the cold, hard ground. “So soon?”
Reality hit. Hard. I knew this might be something we had to deal with, but I always thought of closing the café as a looming danger, something we could still keep putting further and further off and maybe never deal with at all. Now, it was actually happening.
“What about the boys?” Amber asked, gesturing toward the cat room. “They clearly love this place. What if they donated something?”
“Well, as generous as that would be, it wouldn’t fix the real problem,” Mom explained.
“This place needs to be sustainable on its own. The whole point of it is to get cats adopted out. If we don’t have guests, there’s no reason to stay open an extra month or two.
Our resources would be better put toward trying to find safe, alternative options for the cats.
” Mom sighed. “I didn’t want to put pressure on any of you by saying that whether we permanently close our doors or not depends on the livestream, but . . .”
“But it depends on the livestream,” I echoed.
“Yeah,” Mom nodded. “It really does.”
Or else everything I treasured would be gone within a month.
I glanced over at Jake through the glass.
If it wasn’t already gone this week.
***
The livestream was in less than twenty-four hours. Everything came down to that moment, and it decided if I got to keep this place I loved so much or not.
But, right now, all we could do was wait.
Jake was rehearsing, one last time. Aside from the group vocals, Jake’s guitar would be the sole source of music. We decided that too many other instruments would bother the cats.
But from what I could tell, the cats seemed to like his guitar.
Bunny was curled up inside the plush, emerald-green lining of his guitar case, while the other cats were watching his fingers move across the strings with fascination.
Rumple, in particular, seemed riveted by the music.
Then again, he might merely have been waiting for an opportunity to steal a guitar pick.
Out of nowhere came the thought: What if these are some of the final moments I get to spend in the café?
And how much longer would the boy strumming the guitar be in my life?
The music stopped. “What’s wrong?” Jake asked.
Looking up, I saw Jake staring at me from across the café.
“Just thinking,” I said quietly.
Jake shifted the curve of the guitar over his thigh. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“Thanks, but you know what? I actually don’t.”
I’d been worrying about so many things for so long that I just couldn’t anymore.
I’d have to face it all tomorrow, but until that moment came, in a weird way it felt like time was suspended.
Twilight settled over the café. Streetlamps sent a low, peaceful glow through the windows.
Jake strummed his black guitar, filling the air with music.
Right then, the café felt something like liminal space—an empty, nearly surreal place of transition, like an airport terminal or hotel hallway. A slice of quiet caught between the chaos.
Rising, I crossed the café toward Jake, stopping to pet Bunny. As I leaned down, I caught the smell of something sweet interlaced with spice.
I stilled, my fingers coming to a stop in Bunny’s fur.
Memories of Jake’s second day here flitted through my mind. Us in the pantry. His arms accidentally caging me in against him. The hypnotic heat of his breath against my skin. The scent of his soap flooding my senses.
Except the scent wasn’t soap, after all. Or even cologne. It was coming from Jake’s guitar.
“You okay?” Jake asked, watching me with a peculiar expression on his face.
“The guitar smells nice,” I admitted.
What I actually meant was a very dangerous, You smell nice.
“It’s the Spanish cedar,” Jake explained. “Different guitars have different smells depending on their wood and lacquer. But this one’s my favorite. No matter where I am on the road, the guitar still smells like home. It makes me feel safe.”
I nodded, carefully filing that fact away in the back of my mind as Jake resumed playing.
This time, though, the song was slow—softer and sweeter than what he was playing before.
“What’s that?” I asked. It sounded different from what US usually released. “I don’t recognize it.”
“Hmm? Oh.” Jake looked down at his guitar, like it’d been playing without his knowledge. “It’s nothing.”
“No, it’s not.”
“It really is. Just me tooling around,” Jake deflected, shrugging it off, like the incomplete melody wasn’t already circling around my mind, begging for me to know how it ended like a novel I couldn’t put down until I reached the last page. “I’ve got a dozen half-finished songs.”
A month before Jake disappeared, he’d brought a stack of empty sheet music into the café and sat at a table in the corner, scribbling notes across the pages.
He’d stayed hunched over the table for hours, looking like he was creating some kind of spell.
When I asked him about it, he’d sworn that one day, he was going to write something people couldn’t stop humming.
Curiously, I asked, “Do you get to write a lot?”
“Well, I wrote most of The Song That Shall Not Be Mentioned—”
“Don’t start.”
“You so hate it.”
“I so don’t,” I said. Under my breath, I muttered, “Trust me.”
“What did you say?”
“Livie,” I lied. “I said Livie. I’m sure she liked it.”
She must’ve. She made several posts gushing over Jake before they broke up, all with the song’s audio. I never had any ill will toward her, but I couldn’t help feeling a twist of wistfulness right behind my rib cage when I saw news about them.
“Isn’t that what matters?” I asked. “That the person you wrote the song for likes it?”