Delilah
The thing about Jasper is that he never announces anything. He simply starts doing it, and by the third morning it’s become the way things have always been.
He’s been staying at my place every night and comes into work with me every morning, and this morning is no different.
The dairy crates are still stacked on the step where the dairy delivery leaves them, and by the time I've untied my apron strings and retied them properly, the crates are inside by the fridge and Jasper is holding the door open with his hip while Lucifer conducts a full security inspection of his boots.
"He’s beginning to like you," I tell him.
"He liked Eduard straight away." He mutters, nudging the last crate through with his foot. "I thought we had an understanding," he says to the cat.
Duchess has taken to sitting on the high shelf directly above wherever he stands, which I have chosen to interpret as approval.
He knows where the spare filters live. He knows which cupboard door sticks and lifts it half an inch before he pulls, the way I do, the way I never told him to.
Yesterday he came back from somewhere with a new washer for the tap in the back kitchen, the one that has been dripping since Christmas.
Then he fitted it while I was proving dough, and when I turned around it had stopped dripping and he had already moved on to something else entirely.
My love language is feeding people. His is fixing things before I remember to mention it.
The oven timer goes off at ten past eight and, for the first time in living memory, I am standing directly in front of it when it does. The cinnamon buns come out the exact color they're supposed to be. I set the tray down and look at it with the reverence of a woman witnessing a rare bird.
"They look good." He drinks his coffee. "It's a very restrained thought. I'm proud of it."
Old Bill arrives at nine on the dot with his paper folded under his arm, and I have his Danish down before he's finished lowering himself into his chair.
Sammie comes through at twenty past with her coat already part way off and Lilah in her pram and her coat already half off.
Eduard follows two minutes later, takes his corner table, and Lucifer abandons his post at the till to go and sit on the laminated reserved sign as though he has been personally waiting all night.
Somewhere in the middle of it I look up and find that Mrs. Aldridge has recruited Jasper to carry her pastry box to the car, which he does without any visible sign that he has been asked, and that Bill has begun addressing him directly on matters of national importance.
It's such a small thing. I remember the first time he ever came into the café, he spoke to Eduard in Russian and left.
Never even stayed for coffee. Now he's here first thing every morning fixing taps and being useful, and the whole room has absorbed him so completely that I'd bet money not one of these people could tell you when it happened.
I know when it happened. It happened the night he walked me home.
Lilah settles the argument at ten, in her own way.
Sammie has her against her shoulder doing the bounce that usually works, and Lilah is building toward something operatic, going red around the ears in a way that means the next ten minutes belong to her.
I come out from behind the counter, drying my hands on my apron, and say something completely idiotic in the voice I only use with her.
She stops. Turns her head. Reaches for me with both arms and a very serious expression. When Sammie hands her over, she pushes her face into the side of my neck and grabs a fistful of my hair like she's claiming property.
The whole café goes soft at the edges.
"Well," says Sammie, wounded. "That's lovely. Nine hours of labor.Nine, very long, hours of labor."
"She has excellent taste." I turn a slow circle with a baby attached to me, patting her back, and Lilah lets out one enormous sigh directly into my collarbone and passes out cold.
Over by the corner table, Eduard says something quiet in Russian.
"He says she's got the right idea," Sammie translates having picked up a few regular words since living with Eduard. "He also says something rude about Jasper that I'm choosing not to repeat in front of the baby."
I glance across before I can stop myself.
Jasper is leaning at the end of the counter with the mug in both hands, and he isn't looking at Eduard at all.
He's looking at me, and at the four-month-old drooling into my apron, and there's an expression on his face I have never seen there before.
It's gone by the time I've registered it, packed away behind the usual careful nothing, but heat crawls all the way up my throat and I have to turn around and pretend the pastry case needs rearranging.
It doesn't. I rearrange it anyway, one handed.
The rush breaks around eleven, and that's when Bill hits his newspaper hard enough with the back of his hand to make Cookie sit up.
"Here," he says. "Delilah. Sammie. Look at this."
He's holding the front page out at arm's length, the way he does when his glasses are on his head, which they are.
The headline runs across the top in the biggest type they've used since the flooding two winters ago.
Man charged over park attacks.
There's a photograph of the north path under the lamps, and below it a smaller one of an apartment building I don't recognize, with a police van parked in front of the roller door and a mural of a wave painted across it.
I read it twice. Charged in connection with four assaults.
Officers attended an address in the city on Thursday night following an anonymous call.
Items recovered at the property have been linked to attacks going back to January.
A senior officer thanks the public and says he wants to reassure women in the area.
A neighbor says he kept himself to himself.
"They got him," Bill says. There's a rasp in his voice that wasn't there a second ago. "Four of them. Four." He puts the paper flat on the table and smooths it with his palm, twice, like he's settling something down. "I told you. Didn't I tell you?"
"You told me," I say.
"And you rolled your eyes at me."
"I did roll my eyes at you." My own voice sounds fine. It comes out steady and warm and completely normal, and I have no idea how, because the floor has quietly moved about an inch to the left. "You were right, Bill. Write it down, put the date on it."
Sammie has come around to read over his shoulder with her hand pressed flat against her chest.
I look up.
Jasper is already looking at me.
He hasn't moved. He's exactly where he was, at the end of the counter with the mug in both hands and one ankle crossed over the other, and his face is doing absolutely nothing at all.
He holds my eyes for a second longer than a man with no opinion would, and then he takes a drink of his coffee and glances down at Lemur, and that's it. That's all of it.
Thursday night.
Half past three on Friday morning he was standing outside my door with his knuckles going white on the frame, and he ate an entire quarter of an apple loaf standing at my kitchen table without tasting a single bite of it, and then he held me for so long that the clock got loud.
An anonymous call.
Something moves through me that I don't examine too closely, standing there in the middle of the café with somebody else's sleeping baby on my shoulder and cinnamon on my hands.
There's no question I could ask him here.
There's probably no question I could ask him anywhere, and I don't want to.
I've known it since he stood in this room and told me a man had been following me for four months and said it in the same voice he uses to tell me my cake is burnt.
Bill folds the paper and taps it once.
"You can start running again," he announces, magnanimous.
"Can I?"
"With company," he adds, and looks pointedly, and with no subtlety whatsoever, past my shoulder at the end of the counter.
"I'll take her out," Jasper says.
"Good," Bill says with a nod. "We have to protect our girls," he adds with a nod.
"I'm right here," I say, to nobody, and go and put a fresh cinnamon bun in front of Bill that he didn’t order and doesn’t pay for.
Kimmie comes over at half twelve with a lighting invoice she wants me to look at for reasons neither of us understand.
She looks disappointed when there’s no burnt cake on offer today.
Frowning, she accepts the cinnamon roll instead.
She pulls a face of pure satisfaction on the first bite and tells me, around a mouthful of pastry, that it’s the best she’s ever had.
"The opening is now the second Saturday in May," she tells me. "Would you consider making some of these for it?" She takes another bite. "I just want something for the guests to eat if they’re hungry and these would be perfect."
I double check with Sammie and agree. Kimmie leaves just as Natan enters, his eyes roving over her as she smiles and thanks him for opening the door for her.
I close up at six. The fog is back, softer, coming in off the water and settling around the streetlights. I walk home the long way because it's beautiful and because my head is full.
Dinner is supposed to be chicken.
I put it in the oven at seven, sit down on the rug with the laptop to price up trays for the gallery opening, and it is somewhere in the middle of comparing two identical brands of parchment paper that I realize the smoke alarm has been going for a while and that the noise at the door isn't part of it.
Jasper lets himself in as I'm standing on a kitchen chair swatting a tea towel at the ceiling.
He takes in the whole scene from the doorway. The chair, the towel, the oven door hanging open, me in leggings and an ancient sweatshirt with my hair pinned up by a pencil, and the thing on the baking tray that has stopped being chicken and become archaeology.