Chapter 19 Eden #2
“I saw the cop coming before you did. If I had been in here, there is a chance he would have recognized me. Maybe he would have turned around and walked out.”
“I had it under control.”
“He shouldn’t have touched you.”
I crossed my arms, masking the fact that I was squeezing myself for comfort. If I pressed hard enough, it almost felt like someone else’s arms.
His eyes softened, just a fraction. Barely anything, a glitch in his usual flat focus. “You hungry?”
I blinked. “What?”
“You didn’t eat lunch today,” he said. “I watched you.”
Of course he had. Heat crawled up my neck. Before I could come up with a lie, my stomach spoke for me, releasing a long, theatrical growl that echoed far too loudly in the empty café. I tried to fold my arms tighter, like I could shove the sound back inside.
“I can make something; it’s just been a busy day,” I said quickly. The words came out automatically, the way they did with customers. I can make something. I can fix this. I can handle it.
“No,” he said, “you’ve been on your feet all day.” He glanced at the clock. “You close in an hour?”
“Yeah?” It came out like a question, even though I knew my own schedule.
He nodded once, decided something I wasn’t privy to, and then… walked out. Just turned and left, bell over the door jingling like a laugh.
I stared at the empty doorway. “What the fuck,” I muttered. I threw my hands up at no one in particular, then dropped them and went back to my routine because that’s what you do when men disappear without explanation: you keep moving.
I started shutting things down in his absence.
Wiping counters that were already clean.
Re-wrapping the stack of pastries that didn’t sell.
I kept half an eye on the street, watching for the cop, for anyone lingering too long on the sidewalk, for headlights that slowed instead of passing by.
My brain – traitor that it is – started making lists.
Maybe I should get a bike. It would get me home faster at night. Give me some kind of edge if I needed to outrun someone, even if that someone was really my own fear.
I was still imagining myself pedaling like hell down the street when the bell over the door chimed again.
Halo stepped back inside, the night air following him, with two brown paper bags hooked in one hand.
He crossed the room like he’d never left and dropped the bags onto the nearest table. The smell hit first: basil and garlic and something rich and savory that made my empty stomach twist so hard, I had to catch the back of a chair.
Thai food.
Not just Thai food. Thai food from the place two blocks over. The one I went to on payday before everything went sideways. My favorite.
I hadn’t told him that.
My brain immediately tried to make it sinister. Had he gone through my trash? Surveillance? Phone records? But some quieter part of me suggested a simpler explanation: maybe he just watched. Really watched. Maybe this was the sort of thing he noticed for a living.
He unpacked the containers with the same efficient, almost military neatness as he did with everything else. One, then another, lids popping, steam unfurling into the air. Pad see ew. Green curry. Rice. Spring rolls. It felt too generous, like a feast.
He slid a container toward me along with a plastic fork. No ceremony, no “ta-da,” just a practical offering.
“Eat,” he said, settling into the chair across from me with his own portion.
I sat down because my knees had started to feel suspiciously unreliable and because saying no to hot food after the day I’d experienced felt like a kind of self-harm.
The first bite was almost painful. My body wasn’t used to being fed when it needed it. Half the time, I forgot to eat until I was lightheaded. The noodles were glossy and hot, the sauce too salty, exactly the way I liked it. My jaw worked slowly at first, like it had forgotten how.
We didn’t say much after that. It wasn’t awkward, exactly. Just… full.
The shop was nearly closed around us. The espresso machine slept, wiped clean and gleaming.
The chairs were still where they belonged, the chalkboard menu already smudging as the air cooled.
Outside, the street was sliding into dusk, the sky going the color of bruised peaches behind the buildings.
The lights inside cast everything in a gentle, golden wash that made the scuffed floors and chipped table edges look almost romantic instead of tired.
A cop might still be circling the block. Someone might still want me dead. Halo might still have blood under his fingernails from earlier, and I might still be one bad decision away from everything collapsing.
None of that went anywhere.
But there, at that little two-top by the window, the danger felt… paused. Like someone had gently laid a hand over its mouth.
Between bites of pad see ew and sips of lukewarm coffee, gone sour at the edges, something shifted. Not big. Not cinematic. Just… a tiny rearranging inside my chest.
Halo ate like a man who’d learned to do it fast and quiet.
No slurping, no clinking, no wasted motion.
He kept his shoulders turned slightly toward the door, profile angled toward the street, eyes tracking movement outside in little flicks.
But every few minutes, his gaze would land on my face, just long enough to make sure I was still there, still eating.
That did something simple and complicated to me at the same time.
It had been a long time since anyone made sure I ate.
Not in the you-should-really-eat-more way, not in the “girl’s gotta keep her strength up” way, tossed like a joke. I mean really noticed. Clocked the absence of a meal and then did something about it. Not with a lecture. With a takeout bag.
We could have been any two people in any city. Just coworkers closing up shop, sharing dinner. To someone walking by, that’s what we were: a girl and a man split by a small table and two sweating plastic containers. Nothing about us said “murder” or “threat” or “witness protection on a shoestring.”
There was something comforting in that. In being boring, even from the outside.
He broke a spring roll in half and nudged the bigger piece toward me without looking.
“You’re staring,” he said.
I startled. “What? No, I’m— I’m just thinking.”
“Eat,” he repeated, but there was no bite to it. Just that low steadiness, like it was a thing he’d decided he was responsible for now: my pulse, my location, my caloric intake.
I took another bite, partly out of defiance, partly because the food was good and hot and my body wanted it desperately.
The danger hadn’t gone anywhere. The fear sat there too, a quiet knot under my ribs, reminding me of the cop, of the men who died, of the fact that the man across from me was capable of turning into a weapon faster than I could say his name.
But laid over the top of that was this small, stupid, ordinary thing: hot noodles in a white box, condensation beading on the lid, my plastic fork scraping the bottom as I chased the last bites.
His forearm on the table, tan line where a watch used to be.
The hum of the refrigerator. The way the lights reflected in the window and made it harder to see the street, easier to see us.
For the first time in a long time, my body wasn’t locked in fight-or-flight. It was just… there. Heavy in the chair. Full in the belly. Warm behind the breastbone.
I found myself praying, in a weird, sideways way. Not to be saved or rescued or avenged. Just a quiet, wordless request: more of this, please. More of these small, human-sized mercies.
If there was a god out there watching — from the rooftop, from the clouds, from the reflection in the café window — he wasn’t in a church or a stained-glass anything.
He was in the way the steam curled off my noodles.
In the way Halo remembered I hadn’t eaten.
In the way the door stayed shut and the cop did not walk back in.
In the way I didn’t feel entirely alone.
I scraped the last of the food from the container and sat back, palms flat on my thighs, feeling the weight of the meal settle into me like a stone in a jar of water.
For now, in that small pocket of time, with the sky darkening and my coffee gone cold and curry clinging to the air, it was quiet.
It was safe enough.
And it was not entirely lonely.
For now, that was enough.