“Your face,” she says, still laughing. “You look like you’ve never heard someone laugh before.”
“Not like that.” The words come out before I can stop them. “Not from you. Not in a while.”
Her laughter fades but the smile stays. Softer now. Something tender around the edges.
“I’m trying,” she says. “To be okay. To let myself be okay.”
“I know you are.”
“It’s hard. I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop. For something to go wrong.” She looks around the bakery, her bakery, walls painted a warm cream, display cases gleaming, the blue door bright in the afternoon light. “This is too good. It doesn’t feel like it’s allowed to be mine.”
“It’s allowed.”
“Is it?” She meets my eyes. “Is happiness allowed when people you love don’t know where you are? When you left them without saying goodbye? When you’re standing in a bakery a U.S. Marshal built you while wearing a dead woman’s name and pretending you don’t want to make cookies that’ll make you cry into the mixer?”
I set down the receipt paper. Cross to where she’s standing behind the counter.
“Stevie.” I wait until she’s looking at me fully. “You didn’t choose to leave. You did what you had to do to stay alive. And being happy now, letting yourself build something good, that’s not a betrayal. That’s survival.”
“What if I can’t tell the difference anymore?”
“Then you keep going anyway. And you let people help you figure it out.”
She’s quiet for a moment. Processing. “People,” she repeats. “Or you specifically?”
“Me specifically. If you’ll let me.”
The words hang in the air between us. Heavy and honest.
She doesn’t look away. “Okay,” she whispers. “Okay.”
That afternoon, she makes her first test batch.
Not peanut butter chocolate chip. Not amaretti. Sugar cookies, simple, uncomplicated, tied to no one but herself.
I sit on a stool at the counter and watch her work.
There’s something almost hypnotic about it. The way her hands move through the motions, muscle memory taking over, her body knowing what to do even when her mind is elsewhere.
She measures by feel more than sight, adjusting amounts based on some internal calculation I couldn’t begin to understand.
“You’re staring,” she says without looking up.
“I’m observing.”
“That’s a fancy word for staring.”
“I’m a federal marshal. We’re trained in observation.”
She glances at me, a smirk playing at her lips. “Is that what they call it? Because from where I’m standing, it looks like you’re watching me make cookies like it’s the most interesting thing you’ve ever seen.”
“Maybe it is.”
The smirk fades into something softer. “Careful,” she says quietly. “You’re supposed to leave in four days. Watching me like that is a bad idea.”
“I know.”
“So stop.”
