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I read it over.

I don’t cross anything off.

I think about Margo, hand out in the cold hallway. I think about the flat white on the porch rail and the chai that was already right. I think about he texts, he shows up, he gives it a week, and a boy who’d seen the play before he ever met me, and a door I want, more than almost anything, to be able to close.

It’s not quite eleven. The shop closes at six. Beau comes after.

I have the whole strange day to get through first, and a list with one new line on it, and the lingering ghost of a drink I’ll never order — and underneath all of it, where I keep the things I don’t examine, the dangerous beginning of a thought I noticed on a sidewalk and have not been able to put back down:

that I am not, actually, dreading six o’clock.

I am, if I’m being honest, looking forward to it.

Chapter 13

Beau

Mormor leaves at five. I know because she texts me to say so, which she has never once done in three years, and which is about as subtle as a slapshot off the glass.

Mormor

Locking up at 5. Sloane’s closing alone tonight. The shop will be very quiet. Very private. Just saying.

Mormor

I bought more of the cinnamon she likes. It’s behind the counter.

Mormor

Don’t tell her I said anything.

I read it twice, once for the words and once for the meaning, and I put the phone in my pocket and walk down to Main with my hands jammed in my jacket and my breath showing, because it’s gone cold for real now, the first week of the season folding into the part of the year this town does best.

The shop’s lit when I get there. Closed sign turned, lights low, and through the glass I can see Sloane behind the counter with a stack of paper in front of her, and even from the sidewalk I can tell she’s organized it. There are sections. There is, I would bet money, a numbering system.

I knock.

She lets me in, relocks the door behind me — not making a thing of it, just turning the bolt, but I notice, because I notice everything about her lately.

“You brought paper,” I say.

“I brought a list.”

“You brought a numbered list.”

“It’s an arrangement with terms.” She walks back to the counter. “Terms go in lists. That’s what lists are for.” She picks up the top sheet, then looks at me over it, and there’s the look on her face, the thing she does before she’s decided whether you’re worth the effort. “Did you bring anything?”

“I brought myself.”

“That’s not a negotiating position, that’s just attendance.”

“I’m a strong closer. I don’t need notes.”

“Everyone who says that,” she says, “needs notes.”

She’s got two stools pulled up to the counter. I take the one across from her, which she’s positioned with the counter between us like a conference table, like a border, and I clock that too — the furniture is doing diplomacy.

There’s a coffee already poured for me. Black, no chai, because she remembers I drink it black, and the fact that she did does something small and stupid to me that I do not examine.