17. Teddy
TEDDY
OBSERVER BECOMES PARTICIPANT
I don’t say anything. There’s nothing I can add that wouldn’t make this stranger than it already is.
The diner swallows us whole the moment we step inside—chairs scraping, voices overlapping, the smell of food hitting like this is just another normal Sunday afternoon. Like we didn’t just walk in from whatever the hell that was.
The woman with the coupon gets seated, completely unbothered by what she witnessed.
She’s maybe mid-forties, composed in the way of someone who’s been through something and come out the other side of it still standing.
She glances around the diner with a quiet, assessing look, like she’s deciding whether it meets her standards.
Apparently, it does.
I stay near the counter. Close enough to see. Far enough not to get pulled in.
Dannica surveys the table. Her friends have arranged themselves with the energy of people waiting to be sentenced. Then she looks at Luke, and something in her expression shifts—not softer exactly, but different.
“Luke.” He looks up. “You can go sit down. You didn’t know what you were getting into.”
He blinks. “Well, technically…”
“Luke, I didn’t give you the whole story. So this is all on me,” one of the women says.
He looks at the youngest of them all. “What do you mean, Mary?”
“You two can sort this out later,” Dannica says. “Right now, I want to know what the hell is going on. Luke, go grab a pack of peas in the back. Dinner’s on us.”
He goes, visibly relieved. When he’s back with the peas, he settles into the chair across from the woman with the coupon, who is watching this whole exchange with open interest.
“I’m Diane, by the way,” she says to Luke.
“Luke.” He looks at Diane with an expression that borders on lovestruck before adjusting the ice pack. “Sorry about the chaos.”
“Honey,” she says, “I was married for nineteen years. This is nothing.”
The others all introduce themselves to her, talking over each other, filling space that doesn’t need filling. I hang back until they get to me.
Quadri glances over. “Mystery Man.” Half a joke, half a prompt. “You got a name?”
I consider deflecting. Staying exactly what they’ve already made me in their heads. But I don’t like the way it sounds, and after today I think I’ve earned the right to correct it.
“Teddy,” I say.
Dannica turns, a brief smile moving across her face. “Pleased to meet you, Teddy. Finally.”
I nod, settling back against the counter, hands tightening on the back of the chair beside me.
It should be fine. It is fine. But it doesn’t sit right. I should have told her when she asked. When it was just us, when it might’ve meant something. Not like this—thrown into a room full of people, stripped of any weight it might’ve had if I’d given it myself.
My jaw clenches slightly. I let it go.
Dannica moves to the head of the table. That’s the only way to describe it.
Not at the end, not near the front. At the head.
Like it was always hers. Her hands rest lightly against the surface, and she doesn’t rush, doesn’t stumble, doesn’t fill the silence with anything unnecessary.
She just looks at them, one by one, until the room quiets on its own.
I watch three grown women fold under a look. No raised voice, no spectacle. Just the particular stillness of someone who doesn’t need either. I haven’t seen that since my grandmother. It’s a specific kind of authority that can’t be faked—you either have it or you don’t.
She has it.
“So,” she says. “Let me get this straight.”
Behind me, Diane’s voice drifts over. “…sold the house as part of the settlement, which is why I’m in one of those fringe apartments for now, and I said, ‘Gerald, you can keep the throw pillows, I never liked them anyway?—’”
“Good for you,” Luke says, completely sincere.
Dannica doesn’t look away from Quadri. “You found out from Luke where Teddy lives. You designed a coupon for a free meal and invented a happy hour so you could lure him to the diner.” She glances at the table Diane and Luke are occupying like they’re on a date—sage tablecloth, pink roses, candles flickering gently. “For this.”
Quadri opens her mouth. “Coupon, yes. Happy hour? No.”
“And you,” she says, turning to Shelly, “had Luke build a tandem bike, staged a fake competition so Teddy would win it, and then tampered with my bike to force some kind of proximity scenario.”
Shelly winces. “When you say ’tampered’—”
“Shelly.”
“Yes. Correct.”
Dannica turns to Mary. Holds it a beat longer than the others.
“And you had Luke fake-mug me.”
Mary’s wince travels through her whole body. “It was meant to be very gentle. And the happy hour was me.”
“And all of this,” Dannica says, her voice still even, still measured, “was for a bet.”
Three heads drop in near-perfect unison.
“Technically,” Quadri says, “it was matchmaking, the bet was an added bonus.”
“It was a bet dressed up as matchmaking.”
“Yes.”
I fight the smile. She has every right to be furious, but she’s not. She’s calm, which is somehow worse, and watching them reckon with that is the most honest thing I’ve seen all day.
“—and the apartment’s actually quite peaceful,” Diane is saying. “Though the pipes make a noise at three in the morning that I’ve decided not to investigate.”
Luke nods gravely. “Smart. Some things you don’t want confirmed.”
“I’m going to say this once,” Dannica says. “And I need you to hear it.”
They nod, immediately.
“This was insane.”
More nodding.
“And invasive.”
Still nodding.
“And dangerous.” She looks at Mary. “Someone could have actually gotten hurt.”
“I know,” Mary says quietly, all her bluster gone. “I’m sorry, Danni. I really am.”
Dannica exhales. It’s slow, controlled, but not quite steady. I watch her pull it back—the full weight of whatever she’s really feeling underneath the calm—and lock it somewhere it can’t spill.
“Don’t do it again.”
The relief around the table is immediate, almost physical.
“Never,” Shelly says.
“Absolutely not,” Mary adds.
“I genuinely thought it would work,” Quadri says.
“That somehow makes it worse.”
“I know.”
“And for the record,” Dannica continues, “you all lose.”
Shelly blinks. “We what?—”
“The bet. You made it, which means it plays out. And I’m the outcome.” She gestures between herself and me. “Which means you all lose.”
Quadri’s mouth opens. Closes.
“You each owe me a shift,” Dannica says. “And you’re deep-cleaning the diner tonight.”
Shelly groans. Mary sighs with her whole body.
Dannica doesn’t move. “How did you get Luke involved, anyway?”
“They flirted with me,” Luke says from across the room, cheerful about it. “Except Mary. She just manipulated me.”
“You owed me,” Mary says.
“Hey, I didn’t flirt,” Shelly shouts.
“There was that whole service thing,” Luke says.
“That was a genuine mistake.”
“All right, everyone.” Dannica brings the whole room’s attention back to her. “We’re square now.”
“Mary,” Dannica says, “you are never staging a crime again.”
“Define crime.”
“Mary.”
“Noted.”
A breath slips out of me before I can stop it. I press my mouth together.
“And Shelly, you’re getting my bike fixed.”
“I can do it for free,” Luke calls immediately.
Dannica doesn’t even look at him. “No, you will not.”
“I’m very good with bikes?—”
“Luke. You’ll charge a reasonable rate.” She pauses. “And they’re taking you out to dinner.”
A brief silence. Then Mary says, very quickly, “I’ll take him. I was going to anyway.”
Does Diane look disappointed? She does. That’s interesting.
“—honestly,” Diane goes back to her conversation, perhaps to hide her feelings? Luke hangs on every word. Hmmm. “Gerald could’ve at least pretended to be sad about the house.”
“Some men don’t know what they have,” Luke says, with a conviction that seems slightly disproportionate to their ten-minute acquaintance. Diane looks at him like she’s reassessing something.
“And Teddy?—”
My head snaps toward her. I brace automatically. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Surely that counts for something.
She looks at me with that directness she had at the festival when I couldn’t figure out why I couldn’t look away.
“Do you want to go on a date with me?”
I blink.
That is not where I thought this was going.
Shelly chokes on something. Mary goes completely still. Quadri’s expression cycles through three distinct emotions in under a second.
I look at Dannica. Really look, the way I couldn’t let myself fully do before. She’s steady. Not performing steadiness—actually steady, in the way of someone who decided something and stopped second-guessing it. Like she already knows how this ends and is just being polite by asking.
“Yes,” I say.
The word catches on its way out of my mouth, but it’s definite. It’s true.
She nods once. “Good.”
I let out a breath, the tension loosening slowly from the shoulders down.
Yeah. That tracks.
The door swings shut behind us and the noise cuts off clean. It’s cooler out here, quieter. The kind of quiet that changes the size of everything.
“You don’t actually have to,” I say. “The date. If that was just?—”
She glances at me. “I know.”
I wait.
“I want to.”
My chest does something I choose not to examine too closely.
“You hike?” she asks.
I let out a quiet laugh. “Occasionally.”
“Good,” she says, like it’s settled.
I shake my head. I’m smiling anyway, which isn’t something I planned.
“All right,” I say. “It’s a date.”