Page 69 of Shatter

Aziza stands in the doorway, drying her hands on an apron dusted white to the hem.

She's small and round, with her dark hair piled up under a hairnet and flour on one cheek.

She doesn't wave or smile.

Instead, she stands there and waits.

Katie takes a breath, and I watch it shake all the way down.

Then she opens the truck door and walks across the empty street.

Aziza steps aside to let her in, and the door swings shut behind them.

I don't leave.

Tor would say I'm on gate duty in six hours and should be asleep.

I sit in the truck with the windows down and the humid dark pressing in, and I watch the bakery window.

For a while, there's nothing to see.

Aziza, moving back and forth past the glass.

Katie, standing stiff against the counter with her arms wrapped around her ribs.

Then Aziza sets a big steel bowl down in front of her and says something, and points.

She looks at the bowl for a long moment.

Then she pushes up the sleeves of her T-shirt and plunges both hands in.

I lean forward over the steering wheel.

Her shoulders are moving, a slow, steady rhythm, push and fold, push and fold.

Flour puffs up around her wrists in little clouds under the fluorescent light.

Her head bends over the bowl.

A strand of copper-and-blonde hair falls into her face, and she pushes it back with the inside of her wrist and leaves a streak of white across her forehead.

Aziza says something else.

She laughs.

I can't hear it through the glass and across the street, and I don't need to.

Her face opens up, eyes squeezed half shut and head tipped back, and for one second she isn't a woman hiding in a stranger's clothes under a stranger's name.

She's somebody I've never met.

I sit in the dark truck across the street and forget to breathe.

For seven weeks I watched her pour coffee at the Night Owl.

Seven weeks, and I never once saw her smile for real.

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