22. Lucy
LUCY
NOW
By the time I got home from Matt’s, Dottie had reached the portion of her evening where starvation, neglect, and personal betrayal had all become indistinguishable.
She stood in the center of my apartment with her leash already in her mouth. Not near the hook by the door. Not waiting politely beside her winter coat. In the center of the room, directly beneath the pendant light, as if she had arranged herself for maximum emotional impact.
She adjusted her grip on the leash and gave it one sharp, offended shake.
I sighed and dropped my keys into the ceramic bowl beside the door. “Fine.”
I changed out of my work clothes quickly. Dottie watched from the hallway while I traded trousers for leggings, wedges for boots, and professional composure for a long wool coat that still smelled faintly like fryer oil and snow.
Matt’s had clung to me.
So had Marion Burns’s hug.
That was the harder thing to admit. Not Ty standing too close beneath the red awning. Not his hands at my coat. Not the low rasp of his voice near my hair when he had asked me to come home with him like I was still someone he was allowed to want out loud.
I could lock that away. Probably. Eventually.
The thing I could not seem to put anywhere useful was his family.
Marion’s hands careful around my shoulders.
Ruth fussing with my collar like fragile bones were a medical emergency.
Hal asking about my drawing as if the question had been waiting in him for years.
Fraser paying for dinner without making it a discussion.
The whole Burns family folding me back into their noise with a terrifying lack of ceremony.
As if losing them had not been one of the quieter griefs I had never bothered naming because there had been no place to put it where it did not make me feel foolish.
Dottie bumped her head against my shin.
I looked down. “I’m coming.”
The apartment hallway was warm and quiet, muted by carpet and closed doors and the faint hum of old warehouse heating trying its best against a Minnesota winter. Downstairs, the lobby windows had already started gathering fog at the edges. Outside, the world had softened under fresh snow.
Not heavy snow. Not enough to stop traffic or make people dramatic. Just a clean, steady fall that had dusted the parked cars along the curb and turned the sidewalks into narrow white ribbons beneath the streetlamps.
The little park down the street from my building sat tucked between two renovated warehouses and an old brick storefront that had become a bookstore-cafe sometime before I moved back to Northbend.
In summer, people brought lunch there and sat on the low stone walls beneath the trees.
Now the benches were buried under smooth caps of snow, the bare branches strung with warm lights the city had never bothered taking down after the holidays.
The last of the winter sunset lingered low behind the buildings, a thin wash of rose-gold fading into blue. It caught on the snow and made everything look softer than it had any right to be.
Dottie trotted ahead of me with absolute confidence, nose low, ears swinging. She loved this park because several local dogs had apparently been leaving complex political statements near the young maple trees, and Dottie took civic engagement seriously.
My phone buzzed in my coat pocket.
I ignored it.
Dottie shoved her face into a snowbank.
The phone buzzed again.
Then again.
I stopped beneath one of the trees and pulled it out with the resignation of a woman who already knew exactly which two people had decided peace was unnecessary.
Group Name: Girls Only
Bea: Does anyone know if Arlo still has that whipped goat cheese avocado toast on the brunch menu?
Freya: He better. I have emotionally committed to it.
Bea: Please tell me he does because pregnancy has turned me into a food monster.
Freya: Excellent. Eleven?
Works for me.
Bea: Great. Also... Shortcake?
No.
Freya: Oh, I was wondering when we were getting to that.
Bea: That man called you Shortcake.
That nickname should have died in high school.
Freya: Apparently Buzz didn’t get the memo.
He’s annoying.
Bea: Interesting. Because he looked pretty happy saying it.
He looks happy eating arena popcorn off the floor. I wouldn’t build a thesis around his facial expressions.
Freya: I’ve watched men tear ACLs with less obvious pain than the look on that man’s face every time you walk away.
You two are insufferable.
I stared at the screen. A tiny puff of laughter escaped me before I could stop it, immediately visible in the cold air. Dottie looked up from the snowbank. “What?” I asked her. “She’s dramatic.”
Dottie blinked.
Freya: And yet... we’re right.
You are not right. You are bored.
Bea: I am pregnant, engaged, and currently watching Alois try to decide whether a labeled moving box that says kitchen is too vague.
Freya: Wait. What did he want it to say?
Bea: Plates. Small plates. Bowls. Mugs. Mugs Bea likes. Mugs Bea will murder me over if broken.
Please tell Alois I respect his process.
Bea: He does not need encouragement.
I smiled despite myself and started walking again.
The park path curved past a low stone wall and a narrow stretch of untouched snow.
Beyond the trees, downtown Northbend glowed in warm squares of window light.
Somewhere several blocks away, Talon Arena rose against the darkening sky, steel and glass and history, still too visible from almost everywhere that mattered.
Bea: Back to the issue.
There is no issue.
Bea: He called you Shortcake in front of God, children, volunteers, and my clipboard.
Freya: Your eye twitched. Tiny twitch. Very elegant. Very emotionally repressed.
There had been a time when my phone lighting up after a long day meant work. Dad. Calendar alerts. Crisis management. A reminder that someone needed something from me because I was useful, organized, competent, available.
Lately, it meant Bea complaining about hockey men. Freya sending voice notes from the training room. Lo texting me a picture of something she baked with the caption, Come over before your father finds it. Arlo demanding I stop by North Line because he had “accidentally” made too much soup.
Bea: Also, I’m inviting Lo tomorrow.
Freya: Excellent. Adult supervision.
Lo is not adult supervision. Lo is beautifully dressed emotional chaos.
Bea: She is also the only person who can make Arlo give us the good igloo without complaint.
The wind moved lightly through the bare branches overhead, sending a fine dusting of snow from one limb to the ground. Dottie paused to watch it fall, her ears lifted as if the sky had personally addressed her.
Bea: Lo says she would be delighted and that she has been craving North Line’s cinnamon rolls.
Freya: I trust her taste.
Lo craves cinnamon rolls every day.
Freya: Are we telling Lo about Shortcake before or during brunch?
Neither.
Bea: During.
Freya: Definitely during.
I hate you both.
Freya: Sure you do.
Across the park, an older couple walked slowly beneath the lights, mittened hands linked between them.
The woman wore a red scarf tucked into a cream coat.
The man leaned slightly toward her every time she spoke, as if whatever she said deserved his full attention even after what looked like decades of hearing her voice.
Dottie tugged me sharply toward a tree, saving me from becoming sentimental in public.
“Thank you,” I told her. “Excellent timing.”
Bea: Lucy needs therapy.
Lucy needs better friends.
Freya: Too late. We’re emotionally invested now.
Bea: Eleven. North Line. Don’t be late.
Then my screen changed. Bea changed the group name.
Group Name: SHORTCAKE SUPPORT GROUP
I stared at it. The little park remained quiet around me.
Snow gathered along the shoulders of my coat.
The sunset thinned farther behind the warehouses until the sky looked bruised at the edges, blue folding into violet, the last gold trapped in the upper windows of the buildings across the street.
Freya: Beautiful.
I’m deleting this chat.
Freya: No, you aren’t.
Bea: You love us.
I tolerate you.
Freya: That’s Lucy for “I’d be lost without you.”
Bea: See you at brunch.
Goodnight.
Freya: Goodnight, Shortcake.
Bea: Love you, Shortcake.
Shut up. Both of you.
I locked my phone and shoved it into my pocket. Dottie had finished her investigation and now sat in the snow beside my boot, looking up at me like she had been waiting for me to conclude whatever deeply inferior human activity had interrupted her evening.
The group name was harassment. Bea and Freya were menaces.
Lo would only make it worse tomorrow because she had never once met an emotional boundary she could not soften with charm and perfectly timed pastry.
Arlo would probably overfeed us and pretend he had not built an entire rooftop dining experience designed to make people feel safe enough to tell the truth.
All of that was reason enough to dread brunch.
And still, as I turned back toward my apartment with Dottie trotting beside me and snow falling quietly over Northbend, something inside me felt less alone than it had when I stepped out of the building.
By the time I reached rooftop igloo three, brunch had already developed factions.
Bea was fighting a poached egg.
Freya was stealing potatoes with the silent commitment of a woman who believed possession was a flexible concept.
Lo sat between them in cream cashmere, gold earrings, and sunglasses pushed into her glossy hair, looking entirely too elegant for a transparent heated dome currently filled with pastry crumbs, mimosa glasses, and one deeply suspicious breakfast protein.
“No,” Bea said, pointing her fork at the egg on her side plate. “I don’t trust it.”
“It is an egg,” Freya said.
“It is pretending to be cooked.”
“It is poached.”
“Exactly. Ambiguous.”
I stood in the open doorway of the igloo for one full second with cold air curling around my legs and considered backing out slowly.
Freya spotted me first. Her entire face lit. “There she is.”
Bea’s head snapped up. “Finally.”