Page 11 of Soft Serve

I'm reaching for the next ingredient when the back door opens, and Rosie comes in seven minutes early, which she does when she suspects something is happening and doesn't want to miss it.

She takes one look at my face, then at the document on the counter.

"Is that from him?" she asks.

"Good morning, Rosie."

"It is, isn't it?" She hangs up her bag and starts washing her hands. "Millie texted me last night. She said he was…, and I'm quoting her directly…, almost aggressively handsome."

"Millie is thirty-two," I say.

"And correct," Rosie says pleasantly.

I point at the prep schedule on the wall. "Strawberry shortcake base needs starting. Can you focus?"

"I can do both," she says, pulling the recipe card without looking at me, which means she's smiling and doesn't want me to see it. "Are you going to read it?"

"I read it last night."

"Are you going to read it again?"

"I'm going to have my lawyer read it," I say. "That's the appropriate response to a business proposition from a man I've known for eight hours."

"Sure," Rosie says.

"It is."

"I didn't say it wasn't."

She starts her prep, and we work in the comfortable parallel silence that comes from two years of sharing a kitchen, and I almost relax into it before she says, very casually, "Millie also said he stayed on the customer side of the counter the whole time even though you didn't ask him to."

I keep my eyes on my work. "Millie wasn't here."

"She saw through the window on her way to her car."

"Of course she did."

"She said it seemed intentional."

"Rosie."

"I'm just reporting."

"Report less," I suggest.

She laughs, soft and brief, and then lets it go, and I'm grateful for that because I don't have a good answer to the observation, and we both know it.

The morning builds slowly around us. We start and set batches, while the front opens at nine, where the first few regulars are filtering in. Mrs. Calder is at her usual stool, and orders her usual, and Theo stops in before. Theo opens the hardware store, leaving with two scoops in a cup because he claims cones are inefficient, which is wrong, but I've stopped arguing it.

This is what I built. This is what I'm protecting.

I'm mid-conversation with a tourist family when the bell rings, and I know before I look up who it is.

The quality of the room shifts. Not dramatically, just slightly, the way a familiar song sounds different when someone unexpected is listening.

Charles Whitaker stands just inside the door in the morning light, sleeves already rolled, looking around the shop with the same attention he brought to it yesterday.

His eyes find mine across the room. Something in my chest does something I immediately classify as wariness. It isn't wariness.