Page 122 of The Overtime Persuasive

The fourth only made it as far as I before I erased it.

Here’s my problem. Loving someone in the privacy of my apartment, with only a cat and a sound system, costs me nothing. Walking into an arena full of strangers and telling him requires an entirely different currency.

One I’ve never been especially good at spending.

The bell above the door rescues me from my own spiral.

“Eva Barlow?” A man in a Baltimore Ravens hoodie steps inside, holding the door for the woman behind him. “I’m Caleb. Mrs. Green’s nephew.”

“Caleb, hi.” I come around the counter, grateful to have something to do with my hands instead of refreshing my phone. “Thank you for driving down.”

A woman beside him steps forward in a bright yellow scarf, but her attention has already moved past me toward the café.

“Is that the machine?” Her entire face lights up. “Caleb, look at it. It’s gorgeous.”

“It was barely used,” I say.

“He’s been talking about this machine for a week.” She loops her arm through his. “I had to hear about the boiler pressure at dinner.”

“And this is Priya,” he chuckles. “My wife, who should understand that boiler pressure is genuinely impressive.”

Laughing, I lead them into the café, where Caleb approaches the espresso machine with the reverence some people reserve for classic cars and newborn babies.

“We open in three weeks,” he tells me, crouching to examine something beneath it. “The supplier we ordered from put us on back order until spring. This saves us months.”

“Three weeks?” I repeat. “That’s fast.”

“Everything about opening this place has been fast.” Priya pulls out one of the café chairs and sits while Caleb continues his inspection. “Signed the lease in June. Opening in October. I keep waiting for something to go catastrophically wrong.”

“Nothing is going to go wrong,” Caleb says without looking up.

“The walk-in freezer did.” Priya turns to me. “Our walk-in freezer flooded four days before our wedding.”

Caleb winces. “It was one freezer.”

“It was the size of a small bedroom, Caleb. That is not one freezer. That is an indoor flooding situation of huge enormity.”

He presses his lips together, clearly fighting a smile.

“Best part? He was supposed to meet me for our cake tasting,” she continues. “Instead, I spent the entire appointment eating buttercream alone while he was on the phone with a refrigeration repairman named Gary.”

“Be fair,” Caleb chuckles. “The lemon buttercream was never a serious contender.”

Priya narrows her eyes at him. “We agreed never to speak of the lemon buttercream again.”

Caleb’s mouth twitches as he returns his attention to the machine.

I start winding the cord around my hand, but something in my chest has gone strangely tight.

Priya looks back at me. Some of the humor leaves her expression.

“I knew he was trying to get there,” she says. “But after the first hour, that stopped feeling like the same thing. However, he showed up eventually. Two hours late, his tie hanging out of his pocket, smelling like a refrigeration van.” Her smile returns, quieter this time. “But that man sat down and ate six kinds of cold buttercream while telling me every single one was the best cake he’d ever tasted.”

Caleb straightens, and Priya reaches over to brush a streak of dust from the front of his hoodie. The gesture is absentminded, familiar. Something her hand has probably done a thousand times.

“So that fixed everything?” I ask.

“Oh, absolutely not.” She laughs.