Page 74 of Shatter

"Philly." I keep my eyes on the ceiling. "Outside Philly. Delaware County."

She doesn't say anything.

She lies back down, slowly, and the mattress creaks under her.

I think it's the end of it.

Then her voice comes through the dark, low and completely sure.

"Liar." She says it gently, the way a woman says it to somebody she's decided to wait for.

Then she turns over, her back to me, and goes to sleep.

My throat burns, raw and tight, like I've swallowed something too hot.

I lie there awake until the window goes gray.

CHAPTER NINE

Anni

Butter has to be cold.

It's the first rule Aziza taught me, standing beside me at the steel table at four in the morning with her arms folded and flour on her cheek.

Cold butter, warm hands.

Overwork it, and the layers weld together into a croissant as dense as a hockey puck.

Eight weeks later, I can laminate a block of dough in my sleep.

Some mornings, I think I do.

The alarm goes off at three-fifteen.

When I roll out from under Hakon's arm, he grunts and lets go without waking all the way up.

He's still on top of the covers.

Every night for eight weeks, he's stayed on top of the covers, one arm draped over me, the blanket between us like a promise he keeps without saying it out loud.

He never did tell me where he's really from, and I haven't asked again.

Some nights, right on the edge of sleep, a word slips out of him I don't understand, and I lie awake holding on to it.

By three-forty, I'm in the truck with a travel mug in my hands and my hair twisted up under a bandana, and he's driving with one wrist hooked over the wheel and his eyes half shut.

By three-fifty, I'm unlocking the back door of Zizi's Treats with my own key.

My own key.

Aziza gave it to me on the Friday of my second week, pressed it into my palm along with my pay envelope and closed my fingers over both, and walked away before I could say anything.

I stood in the walk-in afterward, the little one behind the ovens, and cried into a sheet pan of chilling dough until my nose ran.

Then I washed my face in the bathroom sink and went back out and rolled sixty cinnamon rolls, and she never said a word about my red eyes.

Aziza doesn't say much about anything.