Epilogue
Sammie
The morning rush hits at the same time as always, and I'm three orders deep before I've finished tying my apron.
Delilah is on bar, pulling shots with the efficient energy of a woman who has had exactly enough coffee herself, and the line is already halfway to the door.
October did something dramatic overnight, the kind of cold that arrives without warning and sends the whole city in for hot drinks, and Purr & Pour is benefiting in a way that my quarterly projections are going to be very pleased about.
"Double oat latte, the blueberry, and a black coffee," I tell her, sliding the ticket across.
"Your husband's here," she says.
"He's not here yet, his meeting runs until-"
"Sammie."
I turn around.
Eduard is at the door.
He does the same thing he has done every single morning for the last fifteen months: three steps inside, stop, read the room.
Every table, every person, every corner.
Four seconds. Completely natural if you don't know to watch for it.
Then his eyes find me, which they always do in under five seconds.
He's holding the baby.
Specifically, he's holding Lilah in the grey carrier strapped to his chest, her dark head tucked under his chin, one tiny fist wrapped around the lapel of his jacket with the grip of someone who has decided this is her property.
She's four months old and she already has his eyes and my stubbornness, which Valeria called the moment she was born and which Eduard took as a personal compliment.
Jasper said this means the rest of them are finished.
The couple by the window already has their phones out.
I notice this without judgment because I have also photographed Eduard in the carrier approximately forty-seven-million times and my favorites are in a dedicated album called Evidence that I will be presenting to Lilah when she is old enough to appreciate it.
He crosses to the counter. Delilah hands him his black coffee without being asked because we are nothing if not an efficient operation. He takes it with a nod that Delilah has told me twice she finds intimidating and that I know, with absolute authority, is his version of effusive gratitude.
"How was the meeting?" I ask.
"Resolved."
"Jasper behave?"
"Jasper was fine."
"Natan?"
He gives me the look that means Natan was also fine and I am asking questions as a warmup activity. "The Marchetti situation is handled," he says. "Jasper will explain the rest. He's coming by later."
"He always comes by later. Delilah made the apple cake."
Eduard looks at me.
"For the customers," I say. "It just happens to be his favorite. That's a coincidence."
It is not a coincidence. Delilah has been making Jasper's favorite things since July with the dedication of a woman conducting a very focused campaign, and Jasper has been arriving to collect them with the punctuality of a man who absolutely knows what's happening and has no intention of disrupting the process.
Eduard and I have reached a silent bilateral agreement not to discuss this directly.
Valeria has no such agreement and has been openly delighted since August.
Lilah makes a small sound against his chest, the complaint of a person waking up and identifying that she is not being looked at.
Eduard tips his chin down and says something too quiet for me to catch, and she quiets.
I watch this happen and feel something I have stopped trying to name because it's too large and too specific simultaneously.
It just lives in my chest and seems to have no plans to vacate.
"She slept?" I ask.
"Four hours straight."
"Eduard. That's incredible."
"Yes," he says, with the calm satisfaction of a man who does not emote publicly but is, right now, very privately thrilled.
I can tell because I have been studying this man's face for the better part of over a year and I know all the footnotes now.
Every margin note. Everything that happens in the space between his expressions that most people miss.
Old Bill has looked up from his newspaper. He raises his eyebrows at me with enormous meaning. I give him a small nod that means I know, and he gives me one back that means I told you so from the very beginning. Then goes back to his paper with the satisfied air of a man whose theory was correct.
Bill has been dining out on "the scary ones are always lonely" for months. I have stopped pretending he was wrong.
I duck under the counter pass-through and come around to them. Lilah hears my voice change distance and turns her head, which she has recently discovered she can do, and her dark eyes find my face with the focused intensity of someone conducting a very serious audit.
She has Eduard's eyes exactly. The same grey, the same quality of attention. The first time she looked at me like that I laughed for a full minute and Eduard stood there with his expression doing seventeen things at once.
"Hi, baby," I say.
She considers me. Then she releases her grip on Eduard's jacket lapel and reaches for me instead, which is not a new development but has also never once stopped being the best thing that happens to me on any given day.
Eduard lets me take her. He always does, this immediate, uncalculated transfer.
Like he already knows before the reach is finished that she's going to me and his whole posture adjusts to allow it.
The first time he did it, Valeria, who was standing behind him, put a hand over her mouth and looked at the ceiling for a moment.
I pretended not to notice. So did Eduard.
Valeria texted me about it that night in approximately two hundred words.
I settle Lilah against my hip. She grabs the collar of my cardigan in both fists and looks around the café with the expansive interest of someone surveying new territory.
"She's going to want to see the cats," I say.
"She always wants to see the cats."
"She has good taste."
Lucifer has already appeared from somewhere.
He has a specific relationship with Lilah that I don’t entirely understand but have chosen to accept, some kind of truce arrangement arrived at early and upheld without negotiation.
He winds around Eduard's ankles first, which is a formality, and then sits two feet from me and looks up at Lilah with the patient gravity of a creature who has decided this small person is acceptable.
Lilah reaches for him, babbling incoherently.
Lucifer allows one hand to make contact with the top of his head. This is a concession he has made for exactly one person in the seven years I've had him.
"She's going to grow up thinking Lucifer is the friendly one," I tell Eduard.
"He is friendly. With her."
"With you too."
Eduard looks at the cat. Lucifer looks back at him. There is a whole conversation happening that I am not party to. "He tolerates me," Eduard says.
"He sat on your jacket for forty minutes last week."
"He was cold."
"Eduard. He has fur."
He takes a sip of his coffee and looks at me over the rim of it, and I catch the couple by the window take another photograph and I don't blame them even slightly because I would also take this photograph.
The rush has found its rhythm. Delilah has the bar handled, the line has moved from the door to a reasonable four deep, and the café is doing the thing it does on a good October morning, full and warm and loud in the right ways.
Red is asleep on the window cushion. Socks has colonized the third table from the left in the window.
Duchess is doing her rounds with the proprietary air of someone checking on a portfolio.
Three months ago a woman came in specifically because she'd seen the carrier photograph on a local Instagram account and wanted to know if it was real.
It was of Eduard standing at the window in his suit with Lilah against his chest and a cat on the chair beside him, a black coffee in his hand.
The expression on his face she described to me as devastating.
I told her it was real. She asked if he was always like that. I told her yes.
"You're doing the thing," Eduard says.
I look back at him. "What thing?"
"The thing where you're thinking and smiling about it at the same time."
"I'm allowed to do that."
"I didn't say you weren't."
Lilah makes a sound of complaint, which we have both learned means she wants to be moving.
I start walking, a small lap of the café, which she accepts.
Past Old Bill, who looks up from his paper and says, "Morning, young lady," to Lilah with great seriousness.
Lilah stares at him with the unflinching grey regard of her father, and Bill laughs and shakes his head.
We shuffle past Rhodes, asleep in a warm curl on the end of the bench.
Past the window where Red hasn't moved in an hour and Lucifer has reconsidered his position and followed us at a distance that he would describe as coincidental.
Eduard is still at the counter. He's turned to track us, coffee in hand, watching in the way he watches everything.
The couple by the window have lowered their phones now.
There's a moment where a room just settles into itself and this is it, the café in its October warmth.
My seven cats distributed across every available surface, the coffee machine doing its good reliable work behind Delilah, and Eduard standing in the middle of it in his suit with his hands full of nothing for once.
Lilah turns her head and finds him across the café, immediately reaching both arms out.
He crosses to us in four steps. He takes her. She grabs his jacket lapel again with both fists, home, and looks up at him with those grey eyes. Eduard looks back at her with an expression he has never once tried to control, the one face he doesn't know how to make small.