Chapter 18
eighteen
. . .
Stable Dynamic, Do Not Compliment
WARREN
Oliver knows.
Not everything. Not the exact details of what happened. But enough.
It didn’t take long to realize that Oliver is the type of man who became observant because he hates asking questions, but still insists on keeping people alive. He notices most things people miss.
He notices me coming downstairs from Halston’s apartment before sunrise and moving through her kitchen without turning on the lights. He notices that I make two cups of coffee. One for me and one for Halston before she comes down.
The man doesn’t sleep. He eats, sleeps, and breathes his business, coming in early during the week to do the books and inventory and leaving late, depending on how busy the bar is.
I should close the back door, but there’s a large part of me that wants Oliver to like me. To trust me.
He peeks in as he grabs a box from the alley, and his eyes zero in on the glass of water I place beside her coffee. Then, the small plate of toast.
Last night, Halston fell asleep with her hand in mine, and I watched her for hours through heavy eyelids. The rise and fall of her chest and the way her eyes flutter when she’s dreaming. The spray of freckles across her cheekbones.
Oliver doesn’t know all of that.
But when Halston appears at the bottom of the stairs ten minutes after me, barefoot and in an oversized t-shirt, I think he knows enough.
She takes the coffee between her hands and sips.
He stares from the doorway. “This is unpleasant.”
Halston nearly drops her mug and I look up from the prep list.
He stands between Bitter Bloom and Saints Marley isn’t even here. It’s just Halston, me, and Oliver.
Halston puts one hand over her chest. “Sometimes I think you’re a professional lurker.”
“I’m not. I just own the adjacent building and regret my choices.”
“You scared me.”
“You were giving him those weird little googly eyes over coffee.”
Her face flushes immediately.
I look back at my list and write “increase coconut syrup batch” to keep my hands occupied.
Halston clears her throat and reaches for the prep list. “What are we doing first?”
I hand it to her, and her fingers brush mine.
Oliver groans.
Halston turns on him. “What is your problem, Oliver?”
“I’m suffering.”
“You chose to be here.”
He rolls his eyes before his mouth curves just slightly.
I’ve spent years thinking chosen family was a luxury people talked about when they had enough distance from obligation to make it sentimental. My family wasn’t chosen. It was blood, absence, debt, and a sister who needed more than I knew how to give through no fault of her own.
Halston chose this. Oliver and Marley. Dev and Lisa.
Mrs. Alvarez. This neighborhood and the three-legged squirrel on the fire escape who scared the shit out of me this morning. Yet I was secretly happy to see he was still alive.
She built her life from people who came when she called, even if they complained a little while doing it.
By eight, the front door is open and the first rush builds around the smell of butter and espresso. Halston works the register today, then shifts to drinks because people keep asking for Coconut Blooms and she doesn’t trust Dev to add enough foam.
Lisa handles pastries. Marley arrives late with sunglasses over her eyes, a laptop, and the expression of someone who has already fought traffic, multiple emails, and possibly God.
She sees Oliver eating half a Vanilla Proof behind the counter. “I thought you didn’t like joy.”
He swallows. “Quality assurance.”
“That’s Warren’s lie.”
I don’t look up from portioning scones. They’re better now. Consistently even, although she still calls them rustic.
At ten fifteen, a woman comes in and asks whether Barrett Whitaker has “walked back” his review yet.
Halston’s shoulders tense. Marley’s head lifts from her laptop and Dev freezes at the espresso machine.
Halston smiles, and while it’s wide, it’s not real. “The Vanilla Proof is fresh today,” she says. “It has been doing an excellent job of speaking for itself.”
The woman laughs awkwardly and orders one.
Oliver stays at the table with Marley until the woman leaves, and then disappears back to his bar.
At noon, the rush fades, and Halston comes into the kitchen and leans against the prep table.
Marley looks at her over the counter. “You okay?”
Halston gives a thumbs-up without looking at her.
Oliver pokes his head in. “She’s not.”
I watch her as she bends slightly, her hand at her stomach. Oliver’s eyes drift to mine, and his expression changes by a fraction.
He’s an unwilling witness. A man standing at the edge of a slow-motion disaster he’d prefer not to acknowledge but can’t ignore because Halston is at the center of it.
The confrontation comes after closing.
The bakery closes and Halston is upstairs changing into something without powdered sugar on it before she and Marley drive to pick up some supplies in Canton. Dev has left, and Lisa is taking the last box of unsold muffins to her daughter’s school meeting. Marley just walked out the door.
I’m wiping the prep table, and the door to the alley slides open.
Oliver steps in with two glasses of water and places one beside me.
I look at it.
“Don’t be weird about it,” he mutters.
“I didn’t say anything.”
He leans against the wall, his arms crossed and his face unreadable.
For once, he doesn’t start with a joke.
I dry my hands with a towel.
Oliver’s eyes move over the kitchen. The cleaned counters. The labeled containers. The revised prep board. The note Halston wrote under tomorrow’s schedule reading, WARREN IS NOT ALLOWED TO REDUCE WHIMSY BELOW 72%.
“She’s better with you here,” he says.
I go still.
“She’s also worse.”
I nod once.
Oliver watches me. “Do you know what I mean?”
“Yes.”
“Good. I don’t like explaining things. It makes me want to fake a gas leak.” He rubs one hand over his jaw. “She trusts you.”
My chest tightens. “I know.”
“No,” Oliver says. “You think you know. I’m not sure you truly understand what that means.
” His gaze locks directly on mine. “Halston trusts like someone who keeps forgetting she’s allowed to choose better people,” he says.
“She gives too much away, then gets embarrassed for needing any of it back. Grant loved the smaller version of her because smaller was easier to display. Barrett liked her because he could call her promising and feel like a god.”
The muscle in my jaw jumps.
“She is not a layover,” he says firmly.
I hold his gaze. “I know.”
Oliver studies me for a second. “That’s unfortunate, because you look exactly like a man holding a boarding pass.”
The words land clean, and I look away first.
Because he’s right.
I’m a man with a boarding pass even when I don’t have an actual ticket. I’ve built my life around exit points and temporary rooms. Jobs with end dates. Cities I can leave before they make me ask whether I belong.
I know how to arrive. I know how to help. I know how to become useful enough to be missed but not honest enough to be needed.
Finally, I say, “I don’t know what I’m doing.”
His brows lift slightly at the confession. “Clearly.”
I look back at him.
He shrugs. “What? Did you expect me to reassure you? I’m not Marley.”
“No.”
“Good. I’d be bad at it.”
“You’re not bad at it—”
His hand comes up. “Please don’t compliment me. We have a stable dynamic right now.”
I almost smile.
“She loves big,” he says, and my heart stops at the word love. “She loves this bakery like it has a pulse. She loves Marley like blood. She loves Dev and Lisa and the old woman who comes in to gossip and that weird diseased squirrel outside her apartment.”
I nod. “That thing should really see a vet.”
He stares at me for a second before continuing as if I never said a word. “She loved Grant big too. That’s the part that makes me want to commit felonies. He didn’t deserve it, but she gave it away because Halston has never learned how to half-love anything in her life.”
His words settle uncomfortably within me as I think about her defending my tattoos. Her anger on my behalf and the way she said, “I would have hired you.”
Oliver’s voice lowers. “If she starts loving you, it won’t be neat.”
I say nothing.
“It won’t be convenient; it won’t fit your lists; and it won’t stay in Maryland just because that’s where you temporarily put it. It will be everywhere, because that’s how she is.”
My hand tightens around the towel.
“You need to decide whether you’re built for that before she decides you might be.”
“I’m not trying to hurt her,” I assure him.
His expression hardens. “Men who hurt women rarely start with that as a goal. That’s not impressive.”
His bluntness cuts.
“I’m trying to be honest.”
“Are you?”
Am I?
I told her I want her. Told her I’m supposed to leave. I told her I don’t know how to stay.
All of those are facts.
But facts aren’t always the full truth.
I haven’t told her I’m beginning to imagine mornings here before I can stop myself.
Haven’t told her that I know where all of her emergency candy is and that this knowledge, to me, feels more intimate than sex.
I haven’t told her I think about her bakery when I’m not in it, and I haven’t told Marley that my temporary help has become something else.
I haven’t even told myself what that something else means.
“No,” I say simply.
“No?”
“I’m not being fully honest.”
He nods. “Fix that.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“It never is. That’s why emotionally stunted people avoid it.”
I look at him, and he looks back with the calm of a man who knows exactly what he said.
“I assume that was directed at me,” I say.
“Good. You do have awareness.”
He looks around and pushes off the wall. When he reaches the door, he stops. “And you should think about whether you’re staying because you want to or because leaving got complicated.”
He opens the door. “And if you make her cry, Marley will threaten you loudly.”
“I know.”
“I won’t.”
I go still. His voice is flat, his eyes intense.
He’s been feeding Halston toast, checking her false smiles, and holding doors and water glasses for years. He’s been here before, during, and after Grant. Through a large chunk of her life. Through every day she’s spent feeling like she’s too much and not enough in the same breath.
He’s not her brother, her boyfriend, or her dad. But he was chosen.
Oliver looks me directly in the eye. “I don’t threaten loudly.”
I believe him.
“Yes,” I say.
He studies me for another second, then nods once, satisfied for now, and adds, “Also, stop organizing her mugs by handle angle. She noticed.”
“She noticed?”
“She noticed and then stared at them like you were flirting with her.”
I look away.
He groans. “Christ. You’re both worse than I thought.”
He leaves, and the door shuts softly behind him.
Halston walks in wearing jeans, boots, and a soft sweater the color of buttercream. Her hair is half-tied back, secured with a blue ribbon. She stops in the kitchen doorway when she sees me.
“Did I hear Oliver?”
“He’s back at the bar.”
“Did he give you a speech?”
“Yeah.”
She winces. “Dry or threatening?”
“Both.”
“That means he likes you.”
“I don’t think so.”
“If he didn’t, he’d be polite.”
Halston steps further into the kitchen and studies my face. “What did he say?”
I decide to start being honest. Setting the towel down, I cross my arms. “He said you’re not a layover.”
She goes still. “Oh.”
“I told him I know.”
“Do you?”
The question sits between us in silence.
I look at her. At the woman who takes up rooms. The woman who loves an old squirrel and gave him a name. A woman who stood behind sweetness in defiance while her hands shook. The woman who touched parts of my skin that I hide and got angry at the people who taught me to do it.
I want to say yes.
A full, clean yes.
A better man would have said it already.
Instead, I give her the truth.
“I’m trying to.”
Her lips tilt downward just a touch.
She steps closer, grabbing the twisted towel out of my hand and smoothing it between her hands. “Oliver scares people by caring at them.”
I wince. “It’s effective.”
“He can be horrible.”
“Yeah.”
“He once drove to Towson at midnight because I was crying in a grocery store parking lot.”
I look at her, watching as her eyes drop while she drags her fingers down the towel.
“I had seen Grant with another woman. Not that woman. This was before. I believed him when he said I misunderstood it.” Her mouth twists. “I didn’t call Marley because I knew she would go nuclear. I called Oliver because I thought he would tell me I was being dramatic.”
“Did he?”
“No. He showed up with fries and said, ‘You can be dramatic in my truck,’ and then drove me around until I stopped crying.”
My chest pangs.
“He knew?”
“No. Not until later.”
“But he knew enough.”
“Oliver always knows enough.”
Halston folds the towel and places it on the counter. “I know he seems like he hates everyone. But he kept me standing when I didn’t know I was falling.”
The words sink deep.
“You don’t have to be scared of him.”
“I’m not,” I assure her. But it’s a lie.
“Yeah.”
“That’s fair. He is concerning.”
I almost smile, and her eyes warm. She touches my wrist.
“Thank you for listening to him.”
“I had little choice in the matter.”
“You always have a choice.”
I look at her. She says it quietly, but she means it. Because choice matters to her. “I know,” I say.
Halston turns. “I have to meet Marley. We’re picking up some supplies and she apparently has some opinions on ribbon now.”
I groan. “She’s always had opinions on ribbon.”
“You don’t know her ribbon politics.”
“I raised her.”
“True. You probably caused most of them.”
I smile and let her see it.
She grabs her bank bag, her keys, and a tote from the counter. At the back door, she pauses. “Oh, and Warren?”
“Yes?”
“I’m not a layover.”
“I know.”
Her eyes hold mine. “Good.”
She leaves through the back door, which shuts behind her.
I stand in the kitchen for a long moment, staring at the place where she stood.
Then I look at the prep list, the organized mugs, the repaired oven, and the front of house.
Uncertainty stays with me. Just the quiet, unsettling knowledge that the people who love Halston are watching me, and somehow, instead of making me want to run, it makes me want to become the type of man who can be watched.