5:12 a.m., and the ceiling above the mattress does that thing where it turns into a screen if I look at it long enough — pipe stain, water damage, a shape that could be Florida if I squint, could be a fist if I don't.
I don't sleep. I make a list instead, because a list is a thing I can do with my hands even when my hands are just lying flat on top of a sheet.
Nine reasons not to go back.
One, he asked who sent me, like I'm an asset, like I'm a wire, and that is not a question a person asks another person unless there's a version of this where I end up on the wrong side of a conversation I don't fully understand.
Two, I have a client — a former client — whose fourteen hundred dollars is never coming, and I have actual work I could be doing instead of sitting in a cafe getting interrogated by a man with a reset nose.
Three, the room went silent around us yesterday in a way that wasn't customer silence. It was congregation silence. Church silence. Everybody already knowing the sermon and bracing for it anyway.
Four through nine I lose somewhere in there, the way I lose count of exits when I'm scared, uno, due, tre, and then just static, my father's ghost math falling apart under its own weight.
I'm on Atwells by 7:45. Clean hair — I washed it at eleven last night for no reason I want to examine, and dried it instead of leaving it to air-dry into the frizz I usually don't fight. Shirt with actual buttons, not the paint-flecked henley I sleep half my life in. I catch my reflection in the window of the shoe repair place next to the Bellini and I hate her a little, the woman in the glass who dressed for a man who called her a lie to her face yesterday morning and meant it as a compliment to himself, not an insult to her.
I go in anyway.
---
The grinder throws its burr on the fourth pull, right on schedule, and dies with a shriek that sounds like something small being stepped on.
Gennaro swears at it in dialect, something low and fast that I've heard often enough to recognize the shape of without knowing the words, and cuffs the side of the machine with the flat of his hand like it's a mule that's decided not to move.
"Every morning," he says, to nobody, to me, to God. "Thirty-six years I own this place and every morning this thing decides today's the day it dies for real."
"It never does, though."
"No." He looks at me over the counter, and there's something assessing in it that wasn't there in May when I was just the girl who fixed his menu board. "It just makes noise about it."
I take my seat. Second table from the window. And there's already a coffee sitting there, waiting, sugar stirred in — I can tell by the faint ring of it not quite dissolved at the bottom, the way sugar does when somebody's impatient with the spoon.
I don't drink it.
I look up instead, and he's already there, which he isn't supposed to be, not for another twenty minutes by the only schedule I've ever clocked him keeping, and something in my chest drops the way an elevator drops when the cable's been cut, fast and sickening and over before I can brace for it.
Back to the wall. Tie already gone. Watching me not drink the coffee like it's the most interesting thing that's happened to him all week.
The whole room feels it the second his chair scrapes back an inch, resettling — not moving, just resettling, the small correction of a big man deciding to be still — and I swear the noise of the place drops a register. Spoon against saucer somewhere near the counter goes quieter. Gennaro's radio, tuned low to a Providence AM station, seems to recede into the walls.
Bruno's already installed at his table by the door, sfogliatella number one going, and he doesn't look up either, but I can feel him listening the way you feel a draft before you feel cold.
---
"You came back," Dominic says. Not a question. He says most things that aren't questions.
"I have a table here. Paid for in advance. Fifteen months' worth."
"I remember." Of course he remembers. He remembers everything, that's already the whole shape of him as far as I can tell — a man who accounts for things.
Bruno gets up, ambles past with the second sfogliatella already half gone, crumbs on the bowling shirt, and stops at my table like he's forgotten something in his pocket.
"You're not police," he says. Kindly. Like he's doing me a favor. "Right? Because if you are, best thing you can do for yourself is say so now. Guessing takes longer. Guessing costs more." He pats the back of my chair once, the way you'd pat a dog you liked but didn't fully trust, and moves on toward the counter for a third something.
"I'm not police," I say, to the room generally, because Bruno's already gone and Dominic's the only one left to hear it and he's not asking.
"I know," Dominic says. "I checked."
The way he says it — flat, administrative, like a line item — makes my scar go cold before the rest of me catches up, the old two-inch line on my left forearm firing its early warning a full beat before my brain finishes parsing the sentence. He checked. Of course he checked. I am, apparently, a thing that gets checked.
"You checked," I repeat.
"Where do you live."
"Excuse me?"
"Where. Do you live."
He asks it at a normal volume, the volume you'd use to ask someone to pass the sugar, except we're four tables apart and everyone in this narrow room can hear every word of it, and I understand — slowly, the way you understand water's cold only after you're already in it — that this is the interrogation. This is what yesterday was building to. Not private. Not soft. Conducted in the open, for an audience, because the audience is the point.
"Doyle Avenue," I say. Because lying to him feels like it would cost more than the truth, the way Bruno said. "Small place. One bedroom. Bathtub's in the kitchen, if you're taking notes."
Something flickers at the corner of his mouth that isn't quite a smile. "Who do you work for."
"Myself. Freelance. Graphic design, mostly packaging. Labels, logos, menu boards." I nod at the chalk board over the counter, the one with my handwriting still on it fifteen months later. "That one's mine."
"I know," he says again, and it lands the same way as before, cold and factual, and I hate how much I want to ask him what else he knows, because some sick, starved part of me wants the list to be long.
"Why does a woman with no money spend four hours a day in a cafe."
That one goes through me different. Not because it's cruel — it's not cruel, exactly, it's just true, and true things said out loud in front of strangers hit somewhere lower than cruelty does. I feel the heat start at the back of my neck, thirty seconds ahead of my face like always, and I make myself hold his eyes instead of looking at the table.
"Because the coffee's free," I say, "and the company's terrible, and I like both those things more than I like being anywhere else."
Gennaro, behind the counter, makes a sound that might be a laugh choked down into a cough.
Dominic doesn't laugh. But he doesn't not, either — something settles in his face, some recalibration, like a man realizing the ledger he thought didn't balance actually does, just not the way he expected.
---
"My turn," I say, before I can lose the nerve for it, and I hear my own voice come out steadier than I have any right to expect, given that my stomach's doing the elevator-drop thing again, given that my toes are curling hard enough inside my shoes to hurt.
"You don't get a turn."
"You've had four questions. I've had zero. That's not a conversation, that's processing."
Something crosses his face — surprise, maybe, or its cousin — and he doesn't say no.
"Why does a man with an office," I say, "sit in a cafe that has a sign on the wall that says no business conducted on premises, twelve tables, one grinder that's been broken since March, and never once uses his phone. Six months. Every day, near enough, isn't that what you said?"
The room's silence changes texture. I feel it before I understand it — Gennaro's spoon goes still against the saucer he's drying, doesn't even finish the motion, just stops, held. Bruno, three tables away, has gone completely motionless, cannoli halfway to his mouth for the second time in two days, like he's watching a rerun of a show he already knows doesn't end well.
Dominic doesn't answer.
He looks at me for a long moment — long enough that I start counting without meaning to, uno, due, tre, and losing it same as always right around where the fear and the something-else get tangled — and then he reaches out and taps the table once, near my left wrist, where my sleeve's ridden up an inch.
"That scar," he says. "How'd you get it."
Cold water down my spine, the actual physical sensation of it, my whole arm gone tight and pins-and-needles before my brain's caught up to why. Two inches, pale, faded to the color of old rope. January, five years ago. A thing I don't let myself think about past seven in the morning, and it's not even eight yet.
"Picture frame," I say. "It broke."
"Frames don't break on their own."
"No," I say. "They don't."
And I don't say anything else, and he doesn't push, and that — that nothing, that held silence between two people who both understand exactly what isn't being said — is somehow the first fully honest exchange we've had. Not a question and an answer. A door, and both of us choosing, separately, not to open it.
---
The bell over the door goes. I clock it without meaning to, the old habit, cataloguing every entrance the way my father cataloged exits — and it's the tracksuit guy from yesterday, except today he's not talking, today he's at the counter asking Gennaro for a pack of cigarettes Gennaro doesn't sell, which anyone with eyes can see is a pretext, a reason to stand there for ninety seconds and watch.
Gianni — I don't know his name yet, won't for weeks, but I file the shaved head and the Cuban link and the visible, ugly arithmetic happening behind his eyes as he watches Dominic and me not-quite-talking across four tables — leaves without buying anything. The door goes again. Bell dies.
I bite the inside of my cheek. It's a Trevor habit, this one, older than the picture frame — fill the silence, fill it, don't let it sit there and become a verdict — and I catch myself doing it and stop, and taste copper where I've bitten too hard, and think: good. Let it be quiet. Let him be the one who has to live in it.
---
"Go home," Dominic says, finally. Not unkind. Final, the way a door is final. "Don't come back."
"I'll be here at seven-forty tomorrow."
Something moves in his face — not quite a smile, more the shadow one throws before it arrives — and he leans back in his chair, the whole enormous unhurried weight of him resettling, and says:
"Second table from the window. Monday through Saturday, seven-forty to noon. Never Sundays." A pause, precise as a metronome. "In February you wore a green coat. You move your chair four inches left when the sun comes round the window, usually a little after ten."
The room goes very still around me, the good kind of still, the kind before a held breath, and I feel the blood leave my face and then come back too fast, hot, a flush with no thirty-second head start this time because there's no bracing for this, there was no way to brace for this.
He reaches into his jacket — unhurried, the way he does everything — and sets a small black notebook on the table between us. Just for a second. Just long enough for me to see it: leather worn soft at the spine, a rubber band holding it shut, and when it falls open a half-inch under its own weight I see handwriting pressed so hard into the page it's embossed through to the next one, dates in a column down the left margin, and my name — not written out, just M.F., but I know, I know the way you know your own face in a photograph you didn't take — next to a scatter of times. 7:40. 7:52. 10:15. A little cross-hatch mark I don't understand yet.
He closes it. Puts it away. Doesn't explain, doesn't apologize, doesn't do anything except pick his cup back up like the conversation's over, like he's just told me the weather.
I don't say anything. There isn't anything to say that wouldn't be smaller than what just happened.
---
I walk home the long way, past the shoe repair place, past the bakery whose name I still can't pronounce right, and Doyle Avenue takes longer than eleven minutes for once because I'm not counting doorways, I've forgotten to, uno lost somewhere before I even leave Atwells.
I stand in my stairwell with my keys already in my hand and I don't put them in the lock right away.
I wait for the fear. I go looking for it, actually, the way you press a bruise to check if it still hurts — a man has a book with my name in it, my habits itemized in his own hand, six months of me collected like evidence, and every single thing I know about my own life should be telling me to be afraid of that, should be screaming it, Trevor's old voice ought to be right here in my ear telling me what this means, what men who keep books mean by keeping them.
It doesn't come.
What comes instead, standing here with the hallway light buzzing yellow overhead and my keys warm in my palm, is something closer to being full. Like I ate something I didn't know I was starving for. Six months of somebody watching me as carefully as I've been watching him — the green coat, the four inches of chair, the exact minute I sit down — and it isn't a violation, it lands nowhere near violation, it lands somewhere warmer and worse and I don't have a word for it that doesn't sound insane out loud.
I've spent four years being told I take up too much room and not enough of the right kind. And there's a man five months into a habit at a marble counter who has apparently spent that whole time writing down exactly where I put my chair.
I let myself feel it, standing there. Not afraid.
Fed.
