Page 31 of Soft Serve

I lie there for a moment with that thought and the early morning light coming through the curtains I've never bothered to adjust, and I feel something that takes me a moment to identify because it has been absent long enough that I've stopped expecting it.

Uncomplicated. I feel uncomplicated, but it doesn't last.

My phone has been busy overnight, which it does when something is circulating that my team considers a problem. Twelve notifications. Four missed calls. A message from my assistant that reads simply, with the efficiency of someone who has learned to communicate urgency without inflection. Photos are out, and it ends there.

I sit up.

The photos are not dramatic. That almost makes it worse. Someone at the bonfire, a tourist probably, a phone angled at the right moment, catching us walking back from the path together. Close but not touching. The firelight on her face. The lack of space between us apparently reads clearly enough to a stranger with a camera.

The caption on the largest circulating version reads, WHITAKER CEO AND SMALL TOWN ICE CREAM OWNER, HEARTS BEND, TEXAS, and underneath it, less neutrally, CAMPAIGN OR SOMETHING MORE?

There are three messages from Eleanor that I didn't open, one from the PR team with a draft statement attached that I read once and closed.

August:

Handle this today.

I shower, dress, and drive to Soft Serve in the quiet early morning of a town that doesn't yet know the day has changed, and I think about what handling it means.

The PR statement is clean, corporate, and says nothing. It positions the photos as campaign documentation, frames the partnership in business language, and makes no reference to anything that cannot be quantified. It is exactly what the board wants, and it will do exactly what the board wants, but something in my chest rejects it before I've finished reading it a second time.

Because the photos aren't campaign documentation.

Because last night was not a campaign beat.

Because Paloma walked back from that dock with her chin up and her eyes clear and the full knowledge of what she'd chosen. She deserves better than being laundered through corporate language by a team that has never met her.

By the time I pull up outside Soft Serve, I've made my decision. Not carefully, not strategically, and not with the measured consideration I was raised to apply to every decision that carries my name.

I had just decided.

The way she does things.

Millie is unlocking the front when I arrive, backpack on, coffee in hand, and she looks at me over her shoulder with an expression that tells me she's already seen the photos and has opinions she's choosing not to voice.

"She's in the kitchen," she says.

"Thank you," I say.

"Charles," she says, and something in her tone makes me stop.

She looks at me steadily, this young woman who has known Paloma since childhood and loves her with the ferocity of someone who has watched her carry too much alone for too long.

"She doesn't break easily," Millie says. "But she does break."

I hold her gaze. "I know."

She studies me for a moment, then nods and pushes the door open.

Paloma is at the prep counter when I come through, working the morning base with the focused attention I've come to understand is both genuine and armor, the physical rhythm of the work holding everything else at a manageable distance.

She looks up when I come in.

Something moves across her face, warm and private, the echo of last night in it, and I feel it land in my chest before she schools it back into the composed morning version of herself.

"You're early," she says.

"I need to tell you something," I say.