Page 38 of Soft Serve

Behind me, the door opens a moment later, and when he takes his place at the cone station, there's a quality to the room that wasn't there this morning, something that has settled rather than resolved, something that feels less like a standoff and more like a beginning.

Mrs. Calder looks between us from her stool.

She sips her coffee.

She says nothing.

Which in Hearts Bend means she's already decided, and the verdict is fine, and we can all get back to work now.

So we do.

Chapter 12

Paloma

The kitchen at home looks different with someone else in it.

Not wrong. Just different, the way a familiar song sounds different in a new room, the same notes carrying differently against different walls. Charles stands at my counter with his jacket over the chair that has never known a jacket, his sleeves rolled up, looking at the magnets on my fridge with the focused attention he brings to everything, and I'm leaning in the doorway watching him do it and not pretending I'm not.

"They're stupid," I say.

"They're yours," he says without turning around.

Something in my chest does the thing it's been doing around him all week, the small warm shift of a thing settling into a place it fits.

I push off the doorway and move to the counter, pulling two glasses from the cabinet, filling them with water because it's late and we've both been on our feet since before sunrise, and what either of us needs is water and sleep, not whatever this evening is quietly becoming.

I hand him a glass.

He takes it, and our fingers don't brush, and I notice the not-brushing the way you notice the space where something used to be.

"You've never been here before," I say. Stating it, not asking.

"No," he says.

"It's different from the shop."

He looks around the kitchen, at the mismatched mugs on the open shelf, the recipe cards tucked into the frame of the window above the sink, the small photograph of Grandma Faith propped against the backsplash tile that I brought home from the shop one evening and never brought back.

"It's more you," he says.

I look at the kitchen through his eyes for a moment, this space I've inhabited so completely that I've stopped seeing it, and I try to understand what he means.

"The shop is hers too," I say.

"I know," he says. "But this is just yours."

The distinction lands somewhere precise.

I move to the small table by the window and sit, and he takes the chair across from me, and the kitchen settles around us with the quiet of a late evening in a house that is used to being still.

"Tell me something," I say.

He looks at me. "What kind of something?"

"Something true," I say. "Something you didn't prepare."

He's quiet for a moment, turning the glass slowly in his hands, and I watch him decide whether to give me the managed version or the real one.