Page 78 of Shatter

Hakon wipes his eyes with the heel of his hand, still grinning, and when he looks at me, every guard in his face is down, crinkles at the corners of his eyes I didn't know he had.

"Structural flaw." He loses it again, one hand braced on the fridge handle.

Ulf turns to Gunnar with the spatula still raised.

"Have you ever heard him do that?" His voice is hushed, like he's seen a ghost. "In all these years? Once?"

"Never." Gunnar shakes his head slowly, staring at Hakon. "I thought he was broken."

My face is burning.

I stare down into my coffee, and my mouth is doing something I can't control, stretching wide at the corners until my cheeks ache.

I'm smiling.

Not the Katie smile, closed-mouthed and polite.

A real one, big and helpless, and I can't make it stop.

* * *

He takes his coffee with one sugar and no cream.

He learns mine as well. Two sugars and enough cream to turn it the color of a paper bag.

Now, most mornings, there's a travel mug waiting for me on the dresser when I come out of the bathroom, already fixed, already warm.

He kisses me at the curb outside Zizi's before I get out of the truck, quick and careful, like a man afraid of taking too much.

I started kissing him back, and it makes me feel alive.

He sat there with his hands frozen on the steering wheel afterward, and I watched him in the side mirror all the way to the bakery door.

I learn he hums when he works.

I find him in the shop on a Saturday, bent over the engine of somebody's Harley with grease to his elbows, and I stop in the doorway and listen.

It's low and a little off-key, a slow, rocking tune with no words, and there's something old and cold about it.

Something from far away, and it isn't any song I know.

It isn't any song anybody in this building would know.

He stops the second he sees me, and his face shuts like a door.

"Hey." He wipes his hands on a rag. "Need something?"

"What was that?" I lean against the doorframe. "The song."

"Nothing." He turns back to the engine. "Something I heard somewhere."

I don't push.

I stand there a while longer and watch his hands move inside the engine, and after a few minutes, without looking at me, he starts humming it again.

* * *

On the last Friday of the second month, Aziza hands me my envelope.