5. Silas
Chapter five
Silas
The restlessness is there before I open my eyes.
I lie there for exactly as long as it takes to confirm that sleep is finished, and then I get up.
Coffee doesn’t help. I stand at the kitchen window with the mug and watch the street below: delivery truck, woman with a dog on a retractable leash he’s choking himself with, a kid on a bike taking the corner too fast. I’ve been restless, and I know why.
I know what it’s attached to. I walked out of a bookshop three days ago with a tome I’ll never read and the nagging sensation of a conversation that hadn’t finished.
The feeling has idled under everything since—soft enough to ignore during the parts of the day that require full attention, loud enough to resurface the moment those parts end.
I still can’t believe I stalked her at her coffee shop yesterday.
I knew it was the one she frequents the same way I know most things about the blocks surrounding The Last Chapter, because I looked into the trash can behind her counter and saw The Beanery cups.
No sixth sense required. I stayed after she opened until the first customer came through the door.
Was I obvious? I’m completely out of my league.
I have a lot of work to do this morning. The contract sitting on the kitchen table needs my sign-off. I read the first paragraph twice, absorb nothing, and put it face-down.
I give up, leave my apartment, and go downstairs to the warehouse.
Everything is moving when I arrive on the floor, two trucks at the loading dock, the forklift on its first pass of the yard, the delivery vans lined up and waiting for their routes.
The smell of the place hits: exhaust, solvent-clean air from the commercial side of the operation, the oily smell of asphalt coming through the open dock doors.
It should calm me. It’s typically how I ease into my day.
Not today.
I do the floor walk, check the pressing equipment on the commercial side, run my eye over the conveyor system, look at the day’s delivery manifests.
Everything is where it should be. Marta has compensated for the two-person shortage on the cleaning floor without making a thing of it, which is why she’s been running that floor since before most of the equipment was installed.
The work is there, and I do it.
Halfway through the second manifest, I’m thinking about Norah again. I have to keep dragging my attention back to the dispatch board. The memory surfaces without announcing itself.
The back room of The Last Chapter. The small table and mismatched mugs.
How she gave me one with the saying I have neither the time nor the crayons to explain this to you, and I’m still deciding whether that was on purpose.
She asked straight and listened straight, both of which in my experience are rarer than they sound.
Most people package their real questions in so much politeness you can barely find them. She just asked.
It’s not only the conversation, though the conversation was unexpected enough. I keep seeing her in that flowy skirt and the curve of her hips when she reached past me for a book. I caught her scent at close range, warm and clean, and my wolf went alert.
I noticed it.
I’ve been noticing it for three days.
This is not something I planned for. My wolf doesn’t usually have opinions about human women that go beyond mild indifference.
She is the exception to that in a way I haven’t entirely accounted for yet.
I continue to stare at the dispatch board in my family’s warehouse, thinking about the way a human woman smells. No wonder I’m distracted.
I put the manifest down and pick up the next one.
The forklift comes around the corner with a loaded pallet, and I step clear. The operator nods as he passes. I go back to the manifest and read it properly this time, line by line.
It lasts about four minutes.
Then I’m looking at the same line again, thinking about a woman three miles away in a shop that’s been open for an hour and a half.
I flip to the next page.
Logan finds me at the dispatch board near the loading dock after noon.
He doesn’t say anything right away. He stands beside me and looks at the board while I mark off two completed routes, move a van assignment and don’t acknowledge what he’s doing before he says a word.
“Routes look good.”
“Marta reorganized the accounts. Saved forty minutes on the north side run.”
“I saw that. You were in town early on Friday.”
He already has the answer and is telling me. A Logan move so characteristic it barely registers anymore.
“Had something to take care of,” I say.
“The Beanery,” he says.
I look at him. His expression offers nothing. Logan has the face of a man who learned early that showing what you’re thinking is a resource expenditure he can’t always afford. It makes him good at running this family, if occasionally exhausting as a big brother.
“You keeping track of my morning coffee now?” I ask.
“I keep track of things that might affect this family.”
I mark off another route. “Where I buy coffee doesn’t affect this family.”
Logan doesn’t respond to that. His non-response hits exactly where they always hit, with more weight than most people’s actual answers.
Henry’s voice comes from behind us before I can decide whether to push it.
“A coffee shop and a bookstore?”
He crosses the loading dock toward us with a wrench in one hand, clearly enjoying himself. As the youngest, Henry is the ’free to be you and me’ kind of sibling, and Logan and I roll with it.
He sets the wrench on the workbench by the dock door and leans back, looking between Logan and me with the cheerful invested energy of a man who has no stake in the outcome and is therefore entirely free to enjoy it.
“That’s a whole morning,” he says. “That’s practically a lifestyle.”
“Don’t you have electrical work to finish?” I ask.
“Finished already,” he says easily. “What’s her name?”
Logan’s attention moves to me, patient. Waiting.
I exhale. “Norah.”
Henry’s grin arrives completely and immediately, the way his grins do, without the management that Logan and I put on our faces as a matter of routine. “Norah,” he repeats. “Old-fashioned. I like it.”
“It’s a name,” I say.
“Sounds like you didn’t happen upon her by accident this morning,” says Logan.
Henry looks at Logan. “Was there ever a question about that?”
“Not really,” Logan says.
I put the marker down and turn to face them both, because this conversation is happening whether or not I facilitate it, and the dispatch board is not where I want to conduct it from. “I met someone. She runs the bookshop on Norwood. It’s not complicated.”
Henry tilts his head. “You’ve driven past that shop for three years.”
“Correct.”
“And now it requires two visits in one week.”
“It required a book the first time. This morning was coffee.”
“At the shop next door to the bookshop,” Henry says.
“At the coffee shop next door to the bookshop where I got my coffee,” I confirm.
Henry does the math and arrives at a result he finds suspicious. “But you always get your coffee from the place on Merchant. By the dry cleaner on the east route. You’ve gotten coffee there for years.”
I don’t say anything.
Henry’s expression goes from interested to delighted, a huge grin spreading across his open face. “Oh. Oh, that’s good.”
Logan picks up the clipboard from the workbench and looks at the remaining routes. Apparently, he’s heard enough. “Keep your head clear,” he says, in a tone that sits below a direct order without pretending to be anything else. “Briggs account review is Tuesday. I need you on that.”
“I’m on it,” I say.
Logan doesn’t give warnings casually. He said what he needed to say, and now it’s on me.
He nods once and moves off down the dock, reading the clipboard, finished with me.
I watch him go.
That’s the thing about Logan. He doesn’t need to wait and see how his words affect me because he already knows. He calculated it before he said it. The keep your head clear wasn’t a warning, it was a placement marker, now cleanly in the record so that whatever happens next, he said it.
I’ve never decided whether I find it impressive or exhausting. Or devious.
Today it’s all three.
Henry watches him go, then looks at me, his grin fading. “She good people?”
Simple question. Henry means it simply. Underneath the easy grin there’s a directness that surfaces when it matters, and people who don’t know him well tend to miss it.
“Yeah,” I say. “She’s good people.”
He nods, satisfied. “Then stop standing around the dispatch board thinking about her and go do something about it.” He picks up his wrench and heads back into the warehouse, whistling off-key.
I turn back to the board.
I get through the rest of the afternoon, but my concentration isn’t worth much. It moves around me. The work is there, but I’m three miles away.
The warehouse empties in the slow incremental way it does at the end of every day. Equipment shuts down in sequence. Voices move toward the parking lot. The dock doors come down with their heavy final sound. I lock the dispatch office and walk out through the side door.
The evening air has dropped maybe three degrees since the afternoon. In July that qualifies as a concession. The sun is low enough to throw long shadows across the parking lot.
I get in my truck and sit with my hands on the wheel. I don’t turn the key. For a moment the only sound is the parking lot around me: a van door somewhere, someone calling across the yard, the outer blocks of Larkin beyond the fence line.
Two visits. Two conversations. A tome of a book I didn’t need and a cup of tea I don’t recall asking for. My wolf has decided. I’m the one still pretending otherwise.
The key turns. The engine roars to life.
I pull out of the lot and into the amber evening, and I don’t make a conscious decision about the route so much as I notice, six minutes later, that I’m on Norwood Street, moving past the drab brown door and the small shingle above it at a speed that qualifies as stalker-esque.
The shop is dark. She’s gone.
Tomorrow is Saturday. The Last Chapter is open on Saturdays. I know that because I checked.
I keep driving.
But I noted it. I came this way even though I didn’t need to.
That is enough of that.
Wolves know their mates before their minds do. I know this. I’ve known it my whole life. I’m not ready to call Norah mine when she doesn’t know any of this yet.