Page 102 of The Boyfriend Algorithm

“Yes.”

“That’s cool. It’s good she found someone.” He sets the cup down. “You seem like a good guy. Steady.”

“Thank you.”

“So is it, uh—is it serious? You guys pretty serious?”

I look at him. Josh, who sat across from Ruby at dinner and checked his phone while she was talking. Who said the bakery was “hanging in there.” Who drifted away so gradually that by the time he left, he’d been gone for months.

Josh, who had something extraordinary and mistook it for ordinary.

I still strongly dislike him.

“We’re getting married,” I say.

The coffee cup stops halfway to his mouth.

The bakery is quiet. The espresso machine ticks. Outside, a car passes. Biscuit lifts her head from under the register, looks at Josh, puts her head back down.

“Married,” Josh repeats, eyebrows climbing.

“Yes.”

“You and Ruby.”

“Yes.”

He sets the cup down. Slowly. And I watch it happen—the recalculation. The moment where every assumption he carried into this bakery shifts under his feet. Ruby, who he left. Ruby, who he thought was “hanging in there.” Ruby, who he moved on from in eight months because he thought she was the safe, simple, easy chapter of his life, the one he could close without consequence.

Now she’s getting married. To someone who isn’t him. To someone who’s standing behind her counter in her apron, making her coffee, wearing her name.

“Wow,” he says. Quieter now. “Congratulations.”

“Thank you.”

He picks up the cup. Takes a sip that he doesn’t taste. Looks around the bakery one more time—at the new display case, the organized shelves, the apron, me.

“She deserves it,” he says. And for the first time since I’ve observed him, the words aren’t performed. They’re not the easy, trailing, half-finished sentences he uses to fill space. They’re real. Quiet. The sound of a man who just understood something too late.

“She deserves everything,” I say.

Josh finishes his coffee. Sets the cup on the counter. Nods once—at me, at the bakery, at whatever he’s leaving behind by walking out—and goes.

The bell chimes.

Ruby comes out of the kitchen thirty seconds later, phone in hand. “Was someone just here?”

“A customer.”

“What’d they order?”

“Black coffee.”

She looks at the cup on the counter. At the door. At me. “Everything okay?” she asks.

I pick up the cup, throw it away, and turn back to her. She’s standing in the kitchen doorway, pen behind her ear, flour on her apron, the ring I made her catching the light from the window.

“Everything’s perfect,” I say.