Johnny
I had a very specific routine.
It was a product of ten years in prison—you had to give yourself over to the monotony of it or you would lose your mind, especially when you were in your twenties and put away for somebody else’s crime.
Up at five-thirty, no alarm, just awake.
I would lay there for exactly as long as it took to be fully conscious—maybe thirty seconds—and then I was up.
My place in Chicago was small and clean and entirely mine.
One bedroom, second floor of a two-flat on a quiet Bridgeport street where my downstairs neighbor, Mrs. Okafor, had lived for thirty years and brought me soup the first winter I moved in without being asked.
I owned the building outright. When I was up at the distillery for long stretches I rented the unit to a quiet rotation of quiet, responsible people I vetted personally, and Mrs. Okafor texted me if anything seemed off. It worked.
The place itself was fine. Functional. A man who knew what it was to have nothing didn’t need much.
The mattress was firm but comfortable, the sheets were good, the kitchen had exactly what I needed to make the one breakfast I’d been making every single morning for seventeen years.
The walls had two things on them: a photograph of the lake at Due North that Elle’s kid, Cassius, had taken and framed for my birthday, and a print of a Detroit street corner that Elle had given me when I first got out, so I’d remember I was from somewhere even if that somewhere didn’t feel like home anymore.
Everything else was just…orderly. Tidy. Blank.
I did forty minutes of work in the living room—pushups, situps, pullups on the bar in the bathroom doorframe. No gym, no equipment, nothing you couldn’t do in a small space. Old habit.
Shower.
Then bacon.
The bacon was from a butcher three blocks over who knew my name and had my order ready by the time I walked in on Saturday mornings.
During the week I kept it in the refrigerator and cooked it slow the way it deserved, in a cast iron pan that was the single most expensive thing I owned that wasn’t real estate, my bike, or whiskey.
Eggs from the farmer’s market—two of them every morning, fried in the bacon fat.
Toast from a sourdough loaf, also from a local bakery.
Ten years of powdered eggs and shitty white bread meant I didn’t take good food for granted.
I only relaxed once the routine was done; sat down at my kitchen island, ate my breakfast, drank my coffee…
let my shoulders sink. Sometimes I ignored my phone completely for the day, especially if I was out at the distillery, where no one could bother me.
If I was in Chicago, I usually had meetings, though—so I picked up my phone to glance at my email.
Pretty standard inbox for a Friday. Two requests for private events at the Due North tasting room here in Chicago, one for a bachelor party, the other for some visiting business partners from Japan.
A follow-up from my distributor in Milwaukee about the spring allocation.
An email from Elle’s other kid, Marco, with a subject line in all caps reading YOU HAVE TO SEE THIS that just ended up being some internet meme I would pretend to understand next time I saw him.
They were both twenty-five—hell, Marco even had a baby of his own on the way—but they still acted like kids with me. Like I was their dad.
It made something in my chest ache.
Something I didn’t care to examine.
The email that really caught my eye, though, was the one from Poppy Hayes.
Normally, emails from Bloom came from company email addresses—poppy@bloomagency or sophie@bloomagency.
This one, though, came from a personal email address: poppyflower98.
I was shocked it hadn’t been caught in spam, but I figured it was probably because of the very professional subject line: Bloom Agency—Pause Period Check-In.
I peered at the email. Noted the timestamp.
She’d sent this at 3:17 in the morning.
Not exactly peak working hours.
The email was professional, carefully worded…
something about the data team flagging my file, Jasper Ellison having observations about my compatibility profile that warranted a follow-up, Poppy coordinating on his behalf.
A request for a brief coffee meeting at my convenience to discuss next steps, somewhere out of the office.
I read it twice, confused.
Then I looked at the timestamp again.
This…this wans’t standard.
Something weird was going on here.
I had a bit of paranoia around things like this—scams, traps, dishonesty. It was a natural consequence of the shit I’d been through in my life. If I was smart, I’d’ve immediately reached out to Sophie and flagged it as unusual activity, maybe some kind of phishing attempt.
But…I wasn’t smart.
Not when it came to Poppy Hayes.
I looked at the email one more time. She’d included her phone number at the bottom of the email, right beneath her name. No Bloom Agency signature.
This wasn’t coming from Sophie or from Bloom.
This was coming from Poppy specifically.
I added the number to my contacts and sat at the counter for what felt like a very long time.
Then I got up…put my phone in my pocket, went to look out the window.
The neighborhood was waking up slowly; a frazzled-looking young man was walking his dog down the street, rubbing his eyes, hugging his coat around him.
It looked like it would snow soon, maybe.
I pulled my phone out again.
Stared at Poppy’s name.
JOHNNY
Poppy—this is Johnny Lawson. Happy to meet. Just tell me when and where and I’ll be there.
I hit send before I could think about it too hard.
I put my phone back in my pocket and watched the dog walker disappear around the corner. The young man had given up hugging his coat and just looked resigned to the cold, which felt like the right attitude for Chicago in November.
But I wasn’t thinking about some stranger outside.
I was thinking about Poppy and her wild red hair and the listing bouquet of flowers and the crooked buttons on that too-tight shirt.
I was forty-five. I had spent ten years learning patience the hard way and fifteen more choosing it, and I knew better than most people what it meant to do something you couldn't take back.
I also knew what 3:17am meant. I knew what a personal email address meant. I knew what Jasper Ellison has observations meant from a gmail account called poppyflower98—born in 1998, most likely, because that was what kids born in the internet age did when they were making throwaway email addresses.
She was twenty-six years old.
I was forty-five.
The math wasn't complicated.
But I still got this little thrill when my phone buzzed…when it was a text from her, faster than I’d ever expected, when I could feel her smile through those few words.
POPPY
Great! How about The Perch in Lakeview? 10am today work?
Today. Shit. She was moving fast.
The whole damn thing was moving fast…and I knew I shouldn’t say yes, but I did it anyway.
JOHNNY
Sounds good. See you then.
Sure, I had a meeting at noon. Yes, this was a horrible fucking idea.
But it was happening.
And I needed to get dressed and get a move on if I was going to make it to Lakeview in time.