𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑩𝒓𝒐𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒓

December 15. 107 days left.

There was a new girl working the counter.

He'd noticed her last Thursday, red hair, freckles, maybe nineteen, the kind of nervous energy that suggested her first week. She'd been wiping the same section of counter for three minutes. She was also, Fayiz realized with a slow and uncomfortable awareness, staring at him.

Her name was Saoirse. He knew this because she'd introduced herself on Thursday by saying "Hi, I'm Saoirse like inertia but Irish" and then turned the exact colour of a fire hydrant and walked into the kitchen door. Dottie had watched this happen with the expression of someone who had seen everything and was tired of all of it.

Today, Saoirse brought his coffee before he'd ordered it. Set it down with both hands. Made eye contact for a quarter of a second, which was apparently the maximum her nervous system could sustain, and then retreated to the counter where she resumed wiping the same section she'd been wiping since he arrived.

Fayiz stared at the menu. He'd memorized the menu by breakfast four and it hadn't changed since 1987 but he stared at it like it contained the secrets of the universe because looking at the menu was better than looking at a nineteen-year-old who was looking at him.

Mollie arrived at 8:02. Two minutes late, for her, which meant the usual negotiation at the corner, the one she thought he didn't notice. He noticed.

She unwound her scarf slowly, the same way every time, three loops and then folded twice, and he'd drawn this from memory last week without meaning to... the scarf in a coil on the seat beside her, and had thrown the sketch away and then retrieved it from the bin and put it in the drawer with the others.

Saoirse came to take their order. Up close she was even younger than he'd thought, and her face was already colouring, a flush that started at her collarbone and climbed.

"Hi," Saoirse said. To Fayiz. Exclusively to Fayiz. "What can I... the usual? I mean. Do you have a usual? You probably do. I've seen you..." She stopped herself. The flush reached her ears. "Pancakes?"

"Pancakes," he said. "Please."

Saoirse wrote it down. Wrote something else. Crossed it out. Wrote pancakes again in bigger letters, as if the first attempt hadn't been legible enough for the kitchen.

"Toast and tea," Mollie said.

Saoirse left without looking at Mollie once.

There was a silence.

Mollie tilted her head.

"Well," she said.

"Don't."

"I didn't say anything."

"You were about to."

"I was going to say," Mollie said, leaning back, folding her arms, looking absolutely delighted in a way he'd never seen before, "that she wrote pancakes twice."

"She was being thorough."

"She was being distracted. By your..." She waved a hand in his general direction. "Whole... situation."

"My situation."

"The hair. The jaw. The paint-stained tortured-artist thing. You know what you look like, Fayiz. Don't play dumb."

He opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. Nothing useful came out, and Mollie was smiling now, the real one, the one that lived behind the wall and only came out when she'd ambushed someone and they hadn't seen it coming. He was being teased. Properly teased. By a woman who three weeks ago wouldn't make eye contact and was now cataloguing his jawline across a diner table.

"She's a teenager," he said.

"She's a teenager with a crush and you're being very noble about it and that's making it worse. Trust me. The noble thing is catnip."

"How would you know?"

She looked at him. The smile stayed but something behind it shifted... a flicker, a half-second adjustment, like a camera changing focus.

"I had a well-rounded youth," she said. And drank her tea.

He filed that away. He didn't know what it meant yet, but he knew it meant something, the way a brushstroke that looked wrong at close range made sense when you stepped back.

Saoirse brought the food. Set Fayiz's plate down with the reverence of someone handling a religious artifact. Set Mollie's down like a frisbee. Left at speed.

Mollie watched her go.

"Poor thing," she said. But she was still smiling.

"You're enjoying this."

"I'm observing. There's a difference."

"You're enjoying this."

She turned back to him, and the smile was still there. "Fine. I'm enjoying this. You're very entertaining when you're uncomfortable."

"I'm not uncomfortable. I'm..." He searched for the word, the exact one, because she'd notice if he got it wrong. "Witnessing."

"Witnessing."

"Someone is having feelings near me. I'm not responsible for them. I'm just... here."

"That's very Buddhist of you."

"That's very single of me."

She laughed. The short one, the one she still tried to hide, the snort that escaped before she could catch it. He caught it anyway. Filed it away with the others.

"She'll recover," Mollie said. "Teenagers are resilient. They have to be. Everything's catastrophic at that age."

"You sound like you speak from experience."

"I had a well-rounded youth. I told you."

"You said that. You didn't explain it."

She stirred her tea. The ring on her finger caught the light. "Some things are better left unexplained."

"Some things. Not all."

She looked at him then. The teasing edge was gone, replaced by something more careful, more calibrated. He held her gaze because he'd learned that looking away first made her think she'd said too much. She hadn't. Not yet. But maybe.

"You're very patient, you know that?"

"I'm Indian. We're good at waiting."

"That's not..." She shook her head, and the almost-smile came back, softer now. "That's not a cultural thing. That's just you."

"Is that bad?"

She was quiet for a moment. The jukebox had cycled to something slow, something with a saxophone that had no business being played before noon. Dottie passed their booth and refilled water without being asked, without comment, the way she'd been doing for weeks, and would probably keep doing without being asked.

"No," Mollie said finally. Quietly. "It's not bad."

The silence did what it always did between them: settled, stretched, became something they were both inside together. Not the empty kind. The other kind. The kind you didn't want to break but sometimes had to, because there were things that needed saying, or at least approaching.

"So," Fayiz said. "Christmas."

The word landed like a stone in still water. He saw it hit. Saw the ripple.

"What about it."

"You said you're not doing anything."

"I'm not."

"That's not what I asked."

She looked at him. The wall was up, he could see it sliding into place, the funeral-home face, the one that said I'm fine, this is fine, nothing to see here, move along. But he'd been watching her for weeks now. He knew the difference between her armour and her face. The armour was smooth, practiced, polished by years of use. Her face, underneath, was where the real things lived.

"What did you ask?"

"I didn't ask anything. I just said the word. You reacted to it."

She went still. Her right hand found the ring on her left index finger, the silver one, the one she twisted when she was about to say something honest and then decided against it. One rotation. Two.

"Christmas is..." She stopped. Started again. "It's a lot, okay? It's a lot of everything. Lights and music and people being happy in a way that feels like pretending. And you're supposed to participate. You're supposed to want to participate. And if you don't, there's something wrong with you."

"There's nothing wrong with you."

"You don't know that."

"I know you show up," he said it simply. "Every Tuesday and Thursday. I know you remember that I cut my pancakes into triangles. I know you noticed that I'm patient. I know you..."

"Stop." It was neither harsh, nor a wall. It was... just a word, placed between them like a hand held up. "You're going to make me cry and I don't do that in public."

In public. He noted the qualifier. Kept it to himself.

"Dottie's the only witness," he said. "She's seen worse."

She made a sound: half laugh, half something else, something that caught in her throat and came out wrong and right all at once. "God, you're..."

"I'm what?"

She looked at him. Not the way she looked at people across the counter at work, assessing, cataloguing, filing away for later. This was different. This was the look she'd given Theodore when he'd curled into her chest at the diner that first time. Unguarded. Unprepared. The look of someone who had forgotten, for a moment, to be careful. "You're not what I expected."

"Well. Neither are you."

"What did you expect?"

He didn't answer immediately. He watched her the way he watched a canvas before committing paint.

"I expected someone who would keep it tidy," he said. "Polite. Efficient. In and out. No footprints."

"And instead?"

"Instead you leave fingerprints on everything."

Three seconds. Four. She held his gaze the whole time, and he watched something move behind her eyes, some decision being made, some door opening just a crack. Then she looked down at her tea, and when she spoke again, her voice was different. Not the armour. Not the wall. Something underneath. Something that sounded like it hadn't been used in a while.

"Charlie used to make a thing of it. Christmas."

The name came out carefully, like something she'd been keeping in a drawer. It landed between them like a coin in a fountain. A wish. A weight. He didn't move. He didn't speak. He just waited, the way you wait for a painting to tell you what it needs next.

She turned the ring. Once. Twice.

"He used to put tinsel on everything. The toaster. The telly. The dog's collar. He'd wrap presents in newspaper because he said proper wrapping paper was a con. He'd put on a Christmas jumper in October and refuse to take it off until February."

She paused. Her jaw tightened, just slightly, the way it did when she was holding something back.

"He was also impossible. Loud when you wanted quiet. Optimistic when you wanted to sit in something and let it be sad. He never let anything stay broken long enough to understand it. I used to get so angry at him for that."

Fayiz watched her eyes go somewhere else. Not left... that was her thinking direction, the place she looked when she was calculating. This was further. Somewhere he couldn't follow. And her face did a thing he'd never seen: the mask dissolved, and underneath it was something young and open and completely unprotected.

It lasted two seconds. Maybe three. Then she blinked, and it was gone, and she was looking at her cup again, and he understood she'd given him something she didn't give to anyone.

He let the silence do its work. Let it fill the booth. Let it be enough.