Chapter 10
Coffee and Coincidence
Phoebe
I change my jumper twice before I catch myself doing it and stop.
It’s coffee. In a café. In a village where I’ve been living for less than a week.
With a man I’ve met exactly once, who brought me a welcome basket because my neighbour told him to.
This does not warrant outfit deliberation.
I pull the first jumper back on. The moss green one.
Warm, practical, says nothing about anything.
I leave before I can change my mind about that too.
The café with the blue door is called The Wren.
It sits halfway along the high street between the post office and a charity shop that appears to sell exclusively porcelain dogs, and the smell that hits me when I push through the door is enough to make me forgive the entire village for its eccentricities.
Fresh coffee. Real coffee. Something baking that involves cinnamon, butter, probably more sugar than any medical professional should endorse.
Roan is already here. He’s sitting at a table by the window with two mugs in front of him and an expression that suggests he’s been here for a while. He stands when he sees me, which is an old-fashioned gesture that shouldn’t be charming but is.
“I didn’t know how you take it,” he says, nodding at the mugs. “So I got one black and one with milk. Your choice.”
“Milk. Thank you.” I sit down and wrap my hands around the warm ceramic, suddenly conscious of the fact that this is a date. An actual date. My first since James, which is a thought I push away before it can settle.
“You look like you’re about to conduct a job interview,” Roan says.
“What?”
“You’re sitting very straight, and you’ve got that expression. The professional one. You had it when you opened the door yesterday, too, right before you saw the basket and relaxed.”
I feel heat creep up my neck. “I don’t have an expression.”
“You absolutely have an expression. It’s very competent. Slightly terrifying.” He takes a sip of the black coffee he’s claimed for himself. “I like it.”
I don’t know what to do with that, so I drink my coffee and look around the café instead.
It’s small and warm, mismatched furniture that somehow works together, watercolours of local landscapes on the walls.
A woman behind the counter with flour on her apron catches my eye and smiles like she knows exactly who I’m here with and has opinions about it.
“That’s June,” Roan says, following my gaze. “She owns the place. Makes everything from scratch. And yes, she’s already decided we’re together. By this afternoon, the whole village will have an opinion.”
“We’re having coffee.”
“In Mistwood, that’s practically an engagement.”
I laugh before I can help it, and something shifts in his face when I do. A softening around the eyes, a stillness that lasts half a second before his usual easy expression slides back into place. I wonder if he knows how much he gives away in those unguarded moments.
“So,” I say, settling into the conversation the way you settle into warm water. “You said your family’s been here a long time. What do you actually do?”
“Bit of everything. Land management, mostly. Estate work. My family owns a fair amount of property around here, and someone has to keep it from falling apart.” He turns his mug in his hands, and I notice the same rough calluses I saw yesterday.
“I also help with security. Fencing, boundary maintenance, that sort of thing. We get problems with wildlife sometimes.”
“What kind of wildlife?”
“The kind that doesn’t respect fences.” His tone is light, but there’s something careful underneath it, the same deflection I’ve noticed in other conversations.
The slight turn away from specifics, the redirect towards the general.
He does it so smoothly that if I weren’t trained to observe behaviour, I might not notice.
“And is that what you want to do?” I ask. “Or is it what’s expected of you?”
The question catches him off guard. I can see it in the way his hands are still on the mug, the brief tightening of his jaw. Then he smiles, and it’s different from his usual smile. Less performance, more real.
“That,” he says, “is a very good question.”
“You don’t have to answer it.”
“No, I want to.” He pauses, looking down at his coffee like the answer might be floating in it. “The honest answer is I don’t know. I’ve spent a long time defining myself by what I don’t want to do. I’m not sure I’ve ever worked out what I actually want.”
I take the opening. “What does your family expect you to do? You said they’ve been here a long time. There must be pressure.”
The openness leaves his face. It doesn’t happen gradually.
One moment he’s present, unguarded, closer to honest than I’ve seen him.
The next, the shutters drop and the easy smile slides back into place like armour, and I can physically feel the distance open between us even though neither of us has moved.
“Family stuff. Boring.” He picks up his coffee. “Tell me about London. What made you leave?”
The redirect is smooth enough that most people wouldn’t notice. But I spent five years in a practice with a partner who changed the subject every time I asked about our future, and I know what evasion looks like when it’s wearing a pleasant expression.
I let him change the subject. But I note it. Third time now. Three questions, three walls.
The admission sits between us, weightier than the casual setting warrants.
I recognise the shape of it because I’ve carried something similar.
The difference between running from something and running towards something, and the uncomfortable moment when you realise you’re not sure which one you’re doing.
“I understand that,” I say. “More than you’d think.”
He looks up. The café falls away. The coffee, the village outside the window, all of it.
Just his eyes on mine with that same unsettling intensity I felt at the cottage.
Something starts in my chest, spreads outward.
The disorienting sense of standing somewhere I’ve been before without knowing when.
Then June appears at our table with a plate of cinnamon rolls the size of my fist, and the moment dissolves into sugar and small talk.
We stay for over an hour. The conversation moves through easier territory: places we’ve travelled, books we’ve read, the particular nightmare of trying to weigh an uncooperative cat.
He tells a story about a farmer’s collie that got loose during a village fête and herded all the children into a pen.
I laugh so hard my coffee goes up my nose, which is mortifying and somehow makes everything easier.
He listens when I talk. Not the performative listening I got used to with James, the nodding and “mm-hmm” that meant he was waiting for his turn to speak.
Roan asks follow-up questions. He remembers details.
When I mention in passing that I miss having a garden, he files it away with a small nod that tells me he’ll come back to it later.
It’s disarming. It’s also, I’m beginning to suspect, deliberate. Not manipulative, exactly. More like a man who knows the value of attention and deploys it with precision. I wonder who taught him that.
When we finally leave, the morning has tipped into early afternoon.
The high street is busy with the modest Mistwood version of a lunch rush.
Roan holds the café door open for me, and as I pass through, his hand settles briefly on the small of my back.
Light. Barely there. Lasting no more than a second.
The touch is light, but the heat of it slides through me like a spark finding dry kindling.
I busy myself adjusting my bag strap because the flush climbing my neck isn’t embarrassment.
It’s want. Sudden, specific, entirely disproportionate to a hand on my back.
He walks me as far as the lane that leads to Ivy Cottage, hands back in his pockets, matching his stride to mine.
“This was good,” he says. Simply, without embellishment.
“It was.” I stop at the turning, the cottage visible at the end of the lane, and face him.
The sensible thing to do is say goodbye, go inside, and process the fact that I’ve just spent ninety minutes with a man who makes me feel slightly off-balance in a way I can’t account for. “Thank you for the coffee.”
“Any time.” He holds my gaze. Something tightens. I think he might lean in. I think I might let him. Then he smiles, slow and warm, and takes a step back. “See you around, Phoebe.”
He says my name like it means something. I watch him walk back towards the high street and tell myself the low pull in my stomach is caffeine. It’s a lie. I know it’s a lie. I go inside, close the door, and stand in my hallway with my body staying shamefully aware of him long after he is gone.
Roan Mistwood, it turns out, is everywhere.
Not in an alarming way. Not in a way I could point to and say, that man is following me.
More in the way that a small village compresses everyone into the same spaces at the same times, so that running into someone three days in a row is statistically unremarkable even if it feels like something else entirely.
* * *
The morning after the café, I walk to the post office for stamps, and he’s coming out of the hardware shop next door with a bag of something heavy slung over one shoulder.
He greets me with that easy smile and asks how I’m settling in, and we stand on the pavement talking for ten minutes about nothing in particular while the postmistress watches us through the window with undisguised interest.