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She felt the old part of her light up. Just for a second. A small, sad, traitorous flicker, like a porch light somebody forgot to turn off in a house where nobody lived anymore.

She hated it. She hated that it was there at all.

She stared at the screen until the words stopped looking like words.

* * *

The bell over the door rang.

She knew before she looked up. She always knew. And she turned the phone face down on the table so fast it made a little slap against the wood, and she felt instantly, absurdly guilty, like she had been caught doing something wrong. She hadn’t done anything wrong. But it felt like tracking mud across a floor someone had just finished cleaning.

He came in the way he always came in. Unhurried. Snow on his shoulders. Travel mug in his hand. He went to the counter and Molly filled the mug without a word, and he turned to go, the way he did every morning.

He saw her.

She watched his face do what it did. That quiet, complete reading of whatever was in front of him. She tried to arrange her own face into Monday morning, into coffee and nothing wrong. She could feel herself not managing it.

He came over. He stood beside her table and looked down at her with those warm chestnut eyes, and she thought that she had never in her whole life been looked at so carefully.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey.”

His glance moved to the cinnamon roll in its parchment. To the phone lying face down. Back to her.

“You okay?”

It was such a simple question, and he asked it simply. No weight on it. No worry she would have to manage for him. No hint that her answer was going to cost her anything. He just wanted to know.

“I’m fine,” she said. “Just a Monday.”

He looked at her for one more moment. She held the smile.

He nodded once.

“Okay,” he said. And then, quieter: “If you need anything.”

“I know,” she said.

He believed her. She watched him believe her. He touched the back of her chair lightly as he passed, the same way Molly had touched the table, and then the bell rang and he was gone into the bright cold morning.

She watched him cross the street through the window. Watched him unlock the front door of Colter Hardware. Watched the lights flicker on inside.

She turned her phone back over.

wyd

hru

miss you

And all at once, sitting at her table with a coffee going cold and a cinnamon roll she hadn’t ordered, she understood what she was looking at.

Ryan had asked how she was in three letters. He didn’t want the answer. He wanted a reply. He wanted the door to open.

Shane had asked with his whole face, and then he had believed her, and then he had told her where to find him if she needed him, and he had left her alone to have her Monday without turning her Monday into something about him.

One of them missed having her.