Sammie
I have a plan for if he comes in this morning, and the plan is to be completely normal. Though it wouldn’t surprise me if he never shows his face here again considering I molested him yesterday.
And I haven’t stopped thinking about it since. Not just because I could quite literally die from the embarrassment, but because of what I actually felt.
No amount of cold showers could eliminate that from my memory.
Delilah grins over at me, knowing exactly what’s happening inside my head right now.
“Stop it,” I say, trying my hardest to just let it go and forget about it.
If he comes, I will say good morning. I will hand him his coffee.
I will not think about yesterday, I will not think about napkins, and I will absolutely not think about what I felt beneath napkins.
I am a professional adult woman who runs a business, and professional adult women do not spiral about these things while operating industrial ovens.
The bell chimes at his usual time, and my entire plan dies on the spot.
He does his four-second read of the room. Then his eyes find me behind the counter, and I watch him register my face, which I already know is doing something, because I can feel the heat climbing my neck like it has somewhere important to be.
He crosses to the counter. I slide his coffee toward him. House blend, black, already made, because my hands at least are still following the plan even if my face has defected.
"Good morning," I say, and it comes out almost normal. Ninety percent normal. Very nearly normal with just a slightly high-pitched squeak at the end of the word morning.
"Good morning." He taps his phone to the reader, then, while I'm still congratulating myself on surviving, he picks up the cup and says, "The suit was recovered. The shirt, unfortunately, not."
I stare at him.
"In case you were concerned," he adds, and there it is, a tiny glint in his eyes that tells me he is finding this all too funny.
"I wasn't concerned," I say. "I'd already moved through concern into planning my new identity. I was thinking Margaret. Margaret runs a yarn shop in a coastal town and has never spilled anything in her life."
"Margaret sounds dull."
"Margaret is extremely dull. That's what appeals to me."
He looks at me for a second longer than the joke needs, in that footnote-reading way, and then he goes to his table, where Lucifer is already performing his sentry duties.
And that's it. That's the whole horror I lost sleep over, dismantled in thirty seconds by a man who apparently decided to be gracious about it, which is honestly the most confusing thing he's done yet.
Delilah appears at my elbow. "You're pink."
"I'm warm,” I counter. “Ovens."
"You're oven-adjacent pink on one side of your face only, and it's the side facing the corner table."
I hand her a tray and tell her table six wants their toasted sandwich.
The day rolls on the way our days do. Old Bill arrives at nine and takes up his post by the pastry display.
The green-coat woman, Pattie, gets her oat milk.
Red stares at the wall, receiving his transmissions.
Eduard drinks his coffee and watches his window, and I bring him fresh coffee twice and leave a slice of the lemon poppyseed on the second round, house policy, non-negotiable, and he eats it without comment.
He leaves earlier than usual. Mid-afternoon, before the school rush, folding his cash tip under the cup where he thinks I don't see him do it. At the door he pauses, just briefly, and looks back at me.
"Lock up properly tonight," he says. Which is a strange thing to say.
I file it under Mr. Grumpy Oddities, a folder that is getting genuinely quite full, and I say something breezy about how the deadbolt and I are old friends, and he leaves. I don't think about it again.
I should have thought about it.
The last customer leaves at five forty-seven, and I don't even have to check the clock because Delilah has been counting down for the past twenty minutes.
"Five fifty," she says, untying her apron.
"It's five forty-seven," I say, sipping a chamomile tea as I look through the receipts.
"Close enough,” she sing-songs while fluffing her hair. “I have a date."
"You have a date every Tuesday."
"I know," she says, very pleasantly, "because I have a life." She plants a kiss on my cheek, grabs her jacket off the hook by the back door, and leaves through the front door with a wave.
Closing is my favorite part of the day, which probably says something about me that I don't want to examine too closely. It's quiet in a way the café never is when it's open. Just the hum of the refrigeration unit and the sound of the cats settling into their evening arrangements.
I start with the tables. I have a system: wipe east to west, stack the chairs in pairs, mop the floor. Socks trails me the whole way, weaving just close enough to be a tripping hazard without technically being one. She does this every night. I've learned to shuffle instead of step.
Rhodes is already in his bed by the window, the big soft one I bought him specifically because he kept stealing the dog bed from the donation box.
He's enormous and gray and has the energy of a retired accountant, which makes me think of the sandwich man across the street for a second, which makes me think of Eduard, which is a thing that happens more than I'd like it to.
I move on to the pastry case.
There's a peacefulness to this part. Wrapping the leftover muffins, wiping the case down, making a note of what sold well and what sat.
Tonight's note: double chocolate too dense, scale back the cocoa next batch.
The lemon poppyseed was gone by eleven. I write that down twice by accident and don't bother crossing it out.
Through the front window, the street outside is doing its early-evening thing.
The sandwich shop across the way went dark at five.
The building opposite, the one I’ve seen Eduard watching from time to time, has a couple of lit windows on the second floor, but that's it.
I never paid much attention to that building before Eduard started staring at it.
Now I notice it every day, which is definitely his fault.
Cookie jumps up onto the counter and sits directly on my cleaning cloth.
"That's helpful," I tell her.
She blinks slowly. Unapologetic.
I'm mid-argument with her about it when movement across the street catches my eye.
Not the slow, unremarkable movement of end-of-day foot traffic.
Something faster. Wrong-shaped somehow, the way your eye catches a thing before your brain knows why.
Two men come around the corner from the north end, moving with a kind of deliberate-casual that isn't casual at all. And coming from the south, a third.
And between them, walking out of the building with his paper bag already crumpled in his jacket pocket, is the sandwich man. The one with the bench routine you could set a watch by. The one Eduard has spent seven mornings pretending not to watch.
I don't move. I'm not sure why. Maybe because the thing happening across the street has a distinct feel to it that my body understands before my brain catches up.
The three men close on him from different angles at the same time.
It happens fast. Faster than I expected, which is strange because I don't know what I expected, I've never seen anything like this in my entire life.
There are words, short ones, and the sandwich man puts his hands up, and then the sound reaches me through the glass, a sharp crack that bounces off the buildings in a way that makes it sound further away than it is, and he goes down.
My hand is over my mouth. Cookie bolts off the counter.
I don't scream. I don't know why I don't scream. It's not courage, I'm pretty sure. It's more that my voice seems to have made a private decision to stay where it is while the rest of me works out what's happening.
What's happening is that the sandwich man is on the ground and not moving, and two of the three men are already walking, not running, which is somehow worse than running, back the way they came.
The third one isn't.
He's standing still on the pavement, and I don't know when it happened, but he's looking directly at the café. Directly at the window. Directly at me.
I've never had someone look at me like that before. Like I'm a problem they've just noticed and are already deciding what to do about.
My whole body goes cold.
I step back. My hip catches the edge of the counter, hard enough to bruise, and I don't even feel it.
I step back again, further into the café, out of the direct line of the window, and my brain finally kicks in with something useful, which is: go to the back, lock the door, call someone, anyone, the police, Delilah, it doesn't matter.
I turn for the back and crash straight into a wall of muscle.
I’m just about to scream when my upper arms are grabbed and I’m pushed back just enough to see it's Eduard.
He's not in the suit tonight. He’s wearing a dark jacket, over darker shirt, moving the way he sometimes moves when he first comes through the door, that four-second read of the room, except this time it takes about half a second and it ends with him looking at me and nowhere else.
"Are you hurt?" he asks.
"No." My voice comes out surprisingly steady, which honestly surprises both of us. "I saw. Through the window. I wasn't trying to. I was just closing up, and I saw, and then he looked at me, the one who stayed, he looked right at me."
Eduard crosses to the window in four strides. He stays to one side of it, shoulder against the wall, and looks out without putting himself in front of the glass. A thing he does automatically. He scans the street, and something in his jaw tightens, and he pulls out his phone.
"Jasper." Flat. Immediate. "The café. Now." A pause. "Bring Demyan."
He hangs up and turns back to me.
The café feels very small all of a sudden. It always feels warm and snug when it's full of people and cats and coffee smells. But right now it just feels small. Eduard is very tall, and I am standing here with a cleaning cloth in one hand and genuinely no framework for this situation.
"You told me to lock up properly tonight," I say, and I hear my own voice arrive somewhere new. "This morning. You said it on your way out. You knew."
He doesn't flinch. He doesn't look away either. "I knew something was scheduled. Not here. Across the street. You were never meant to see it."
"That's not the comfort you think it is, Eduard. What was that?"
He looks at me for a moment. Not the way most people look when they're about to lie or soften something. More like he's deciding exactly how much truth fits the moment.
"A conversation that went the only way it was going to go," he says.
"That is possibly the least helpful sentence I've ever heard."
"His name was Gerald Finch. He'd been laundering money for a crew that operates against my interests." He says it the way someone else might say Gerald Finch left his lights on. Even. Factual. Like he's reading from a document. "Only he got sloppy."
I stare at him. "Your interests."
"Yes."
"And Gerald."
A beat. "Gerald made his choices, his boss cut his losses."
I look down at the cleaning cloth in my hand, then back up at him.
My brain is doing several things simultaneously, none of them fully successfully.
The one that's loudest is pointing out that Mr. Grumpy, my corner table regular, the man I accidentally molested, is apparently the reason Gerald Finch is dead on the pavement across the street.
"I need to sit down," I say.
"Don't." Eduard moves away from the wall. "Stay on your feet. Sitting down shuts the body off. I need you moving."
That's not what I expected him to say. I expected calm. I got command. There's a difference, I'm learning, and right now the difference matters.
"Okay," I say. "Okay. Moving."
Lucifer appears from somewhere and winds around my ankles, because apparently the universe has opinions about comic timing, and I shuffle forward without tripping and focus on the specific sensation of my sneakers on the tile and my hands and the cleaning cloth I'm still holding for absolutely no reason.
Eduard is watching me. Not the window. Me.
"The man who looked at you," he says. "Did he move toward the café?"
"No. He just stood there."
"For how long."
"I don't know. Seconds. I stepped back. Then I turned around, and you were here."
Something shifts in his expression. Not much. A fraction of a degree of tension that wasn't there when he walked in.
"You just became a loose end," Eduard says.
Outside, a car turns onto the block and the headlights sweep across the window. Neither of us moves until it passes. The refrigeration unit hums. Somewhere in the back, one of the cats knocks something off a shelf.
Eduard looks at me, and for the first time since I met him, I can read whatever’s happening behind his eyes.
Concern.
"You can't stay here tonight," he says.