Page 124 of What We Become

“Got it.”

I pick up the coffee pot and get to work.

The first hour is muscle memory. Wipe the counter. Refill the sugars. Take orders, pour coffee, clear plates. My body knows the rhythm, and I let it carry me while my brain does what it’s been doing since the moment we left the cabin—scanning. Every face. Every voice. Every man who walks through that door gets a three-second assessment before I can stop myself.

Not him. Not him. Not him.

The bell jingles. A man in a baseball cap over floppy brown hair walks in.

My hand tightens on the coffee pot. He’s the right height. Right build. The cap is pulled low and I can’t see his face and for one horrible moment my entire body goes rigid and the air turns to glass around me. No, no, no, no⁠—

He pushes the cap up.

Wrong face. A little heavy around the jaw. Nothing like Jamie. Nothing like Stephen. Just a guy who wants breakfast and doesn’t know the woman holding his coffee almost dropped it because his hat was too low on his face.

“Morning,” he says. “Can I get the number three?”

“Coming right up.” My voice is steady. My hands are not. I set the coffee pot down before anyone notices the tremor and write his order on the pad with handwriting that looks like a seismograph.

In for four. Hold for four. Out for four.

Don’t punish yourself for the reflex.

By ten a.m., the rush is in full swing, and my body takes over. Pouring, plating, smiling, clearing. The rhythm of diner work is the same as breathing. You don’t think about it, you just do it, and the doing keeps you upright. A table of college kids orders milkshakes. An elderly couple splits a Reuben. A delivery driver eats a grilled cheese standing at the counter because he’s double-parked and doesn’t care.

Normal. All of it, aggressively, stubbornly normal.

Then someone laughs.

It comes from the booth near the back, the sound rolling out warm and easy and so specifically Jamie that my vision narrows to a pinpoint. I have to look. My body is a hunting dog and the sound is its whistle—spine up, skin prickling, every instinct gone cold and predatory.

I release a slow breath.

Just a college kid, maybe twenty or twenty-two. Two buddies with him, both laughing, but he—he laughs the way Jamie did, tipping his head back so you get the shape of his jaw, the tendon in his neck, that moment of perfect, boyish surprise at something genuinely funny.

It almost gets me. The sound, the flash of teeth, the echo of everything I used to love about Jamie—until I remember what’s real. I go still. My hands steady. My heart does not. I collect the empty plates from the counter and carry them to the back, ignoring Rosa’s worried eyes. The kitchen is the only place with walls thick enough to muffle memory, so I linger there, breathing in fry oil and bleach until the laugh fades back into background noise. Jamie is not here. Jamie doesn’t even exist, really. He’s Stephen. But the ghost of him is now installed in my auditory cortex, and I am never going to be unhaunted.

My phone buzzes in my apron pocket.

Knox:

How’s it going?

ME:

Fine. Normal. Nobody’s tried to murder me yet.

Three dots.

Knox:

Day’s still young. Don’t get cocky.

I snort. Put the phone away. Get back to work.

By eleven, I’ve stopped flinching at the bell. By noon, I’ve served forty-three people without incident. By one, my feet hurt and my back aches and I’ve remembered why I liked this job in the first place. It’s not the tips or the free food—it’s the noise. The constant, churning, reliable noise of people eating and talking and existing as though none of the evil shit I’ve seen and endured, or the vengeance I’ve taken part in, has even happened.

They don’t know. They don’t need to. And there’s a freedom in being nobody’s victim, nobody’s vigilante, nobody’s girlfriend. Just a waitress with a coffee pot and sore feet.