33. Karissa
Chapter thirty-three
Karissa
Isent that photo four days ago and I still don't know why.
"You've had that face on for days now," he says.
"What face."
"The one where you're doing math in your head and the answer keeps changing."
I put the phone in my apron pocket and go back to the register. He's not wrong. That's the problem with Marcus. He's never wrong, and he never lets me forget it either.
Theo corners me at closing. He waits until the last customer leaves and the sign flips to "Closed" before he says anything, which means he's been planning it.
"Diego dropped the delivery himself this morning," he says. "Didn't send the guy."
"I noticed."
"He asked about you. Not the bakery. You."
I wipe down the counter I already wiped down. "People ask about me all the time."
"Not like that." Theo hops up onto the stool by the register, the one that wobbles, the one I keep meaning to fix. "You've been weird for a few days now."
"I've been busy."
"You've been weird," he says again, patient, like he's talking to someone slower than him. "You check your phone and then you look disappointed it's not him."
I don't have an answer for that, so I keep wiping the counter.
"He hasn't called," Theo says. "He hasn't shown up. He hasn't sent flowers or fixed anything or done any of the stuff that got you mad in the first place."
"I know."
"That's the thing that's bugging you, isn't it. Not that he did something. That he's not doing anything."
I stop wiping. Look at him. Sixteen years old and he sees it cleaner than I can.
"I don't know what I want him to do," I say.
"I think you do." He shrugs, the particular shrug he does when he's said the true thing and doesn't need to say more. "You just don't want it to be that easy."
He goes upstairs before I can argue with him, which is its own kind of mercy.
The new oven hums behind me while I close out the register. It's a good oven. I bought it myself, financed it myself, watched the delivery guys wheel it in without anyone's help but my own. I should feel like I got my life back.
Some nights I do.
Tonight, I keep thinking about a stalled elevator, and how honest a person can be in the dark when there's nowhere else to look.
***
Eleanor shows up on a Tuesday, unannounced, the way her son used to before either of us knew what we were doing to each other.
She doesn't buy anything. She sits at the corner table with her hands folded and waits until I bring her a coffee, because she knows I will, because some habits don't care who broke your heart.
"He hasn't called you," she says. Not a question.
"No."
"Good." She says it like she means it. "He'd only get it wrong again if he tried too soon."
I sit down across from her. I didn't plan to. My feet just made the decision without asking me.
"I keep waiting for the part where I stop thinking about him," I say.
"You won't." She says this plainly, the way she says most things, like weather. "I didn't stop thinking about his father for years after I should have. Different reasons. Same ache."
"That's not comforting."
"It wasn't meant to be." She turns her cup a quarter turn, doesn't drink from it. "I'm not here to sell you on my son. He has to earn that on his own, or it means nothing."
"Then why are you here?"
"Because I watched him for thirty-nine years confuse love with ownership, and for the first time in his life, I think he's finally seeing the difference.
" She looks at me directly. "That doesn't fix what he did to you.
It doesn't erase the report on your mother, or the three days he kept it from you. But it's not nothing, Karissa."
"A man who's spent his whole life fixing things by force, learning to just stand there," she says. "Let something be someone else's to handle. That's not small for him."
"He bought out a loan shark's debt behind my back."
"Yes."
"He had my mother investigated."
"Yes."
"None of that goes away because he's quiet now."
"No," Eleanor agrees. "It doesn't. But you're allowed to notice the quiet anyway."
I don't say anything to that. I don't have anything ready.
"He came to Theo's game Saturday," she says. "Sat in the back. Didn't approach either of you. Left before it ended so you wouldn't have to see him and decide what to do about it."
I didn't know that. My chest does something complicated, something I don't have a clean word for.
"I'm not telling you to forgive him," Eleanor says. "I'm telling you that the version of him standing still, letting you be angry without trying to manage it. I've never seen that man before. Not once. Not in thirty-nine years."
She finishes her coffee. Stands. Straightens her coat the way she probably straightened it before every difficult conversation she's ever had.
"For what it's worth," she says at the door, "my son loves you the way he's never loved anything he could control. That terrifies him more than losing you does. I think that's why he's finally doing this right."
Then she's gone, and I'm alone with the ovens and a coffee cup that isn't mine to clean up, and I clean it up anyway.
I close the bakery slow that night. Wipe every surface twice. Check the walk-in temperature three times when once would do.
I think about what Theo said. That it's not what Noah's doing that's bothering me. It's that he's not doing anything, and some old, tired part of me built its whole identity on nobody coming.
I think about four days of silence that isn't punishment.
It's restraint. Those aren't the same thing, and some part of me, the part that grew up disputing fraudulent charges alone at twenty-one, the part that learned love and rescue are the same knife, doesn't know what to do with a man who finally learned to keep his hands still.
I think about a stalled elevator and a graveyard and a red light where he held my hand and didn't let go.
I think he is trying to become someone who trusts me to handle what's mine. That is the exact thing I told him I needed, back when I still believed he was capable of hearing it.
Maybe he heard it. Maybe it just took him this long to listen.
I don't decide anything. Not really. Not the big kind of decision, the kind with an ending attached.
But I stand in my own bakery, in the dark, with the new oven ticking as it cools, and something in my chest loosens half an inch. Not forgiveness. Not yet. Something smaller and more honest than that.
Room. I make room.
My phone buzzes at 11:00 p.m. Not a photo this time.
Just three words, no punctuation, no strategy behind them that I can find.
I miss you.
I stare at it long enough that the screen dims and I have to touch it again to bring the words back.
I don't answer. Not tonight.
But I don't turn it face down either.