Chapter 10:

🍙 🍙 🍙 🍙 🍙

Sloane called again on a Thursday. I was restocking the pastry case, sliding croissants into rows with the tongs, phone propped on the counter on speaker.

“He’s looking for you,” she said, skipping the preamble. “He’s been asking around the office. Everyone. Not just your department. He cornered the mailroom guy yesterday.”

“The mailroom guy doesn’t know where I live.”

“That’s what the mailroom guy said. Julian didn’t seem to care. He’s interrogating people like it’s a criminal investigation. Also, the whole office is a nightmare. He snaps at everyone, makes us redo things three times, keeps us late for no reason. I think he’s taking it out on us because he can’t take it out on you.”

𝖬orе 𝗇𝗼𝘃𝖾𝘭𝘴 о𝗻 g𝗮𝗹n𝗈v𝘦𝗅𝘀.𝗰о𝘮

I lined up the last croissant. “You didn’t give him anything.”

“Wren. Come on.”

“I had to ask.”

“I know. And no. Nobody has.”

That reassured me. I’d built something here. A small life with clean edges, and I wanted to keep it that way. Mornings at the shop, afternoons with my grandmother, evenings practicing my pour technique until Marjorie told me to go home. The rhythm was new and fragile, and I guarded it the way you guard sleep after weeks of insomnia.

But there was something else. A feeling I couldn’t pin down, a prickle at the back of my neck during my walks home. Once, I thought I saw a dark sedan parked across the street from the coffee shop, its engine idling. Another time, turning a corner, I caught movement in my peripheral vision that stopped the moment I looked. I told myself it was nothing. I half-believed it.

Then, on a Tuesday morning, it wasn’t nothing.

The bell above the door chimed. I was behind the counter, finishing an order, and I looked up with the automatic greeting already forming.

“Welcome, what would you like to—”

The words stopped. My hands stopped. The milk pitcher hung in the air, tilted at an angle, a thin white thread dripping onto the counter.

Julian stood in the doorway.

He looked wrong. That was the first thing I registered, before any emotion had time to surface. He looked physically wrong. The Julian I’d married was meticulous. Ironed shirts, clean jaw, shoes that reflected light. This man wore a wrinkled coat. His beard had grown out unevenly, patchy in places, as if he’d started shaving and given up halfway through. The skin under his eyes was dark and swollen. He’d lost weight, and it showed in his face, in the hollows at his temples, in the way his collar gapped at the neck.

He looked like someone who’d been sleeping badly and eating worse.

“Wren.”

His voice was rough. Not angry. Just worn down, the way a stone gets worn by water, and I hated that some part of me noticed this and felt something.

“Wren, come back to me.”

Behind him, Marjorie looked up from her novel. Two regulars at the window table exchanged a glance. The shop was small. There was nowhere for this conversation to hide.

“Wren, why did you block me?”

I set the pitcher down. Wiped the spilled milk with a rag. Took a breath.

“Julian, I already told you. We’re divorced. I resigned from your company. What’s the point of you looking for me?”

He swallowed. I could see the effort it cost him to keep his composure, the muscles in his throat working against whatever he wanted to say versus what he thought he should say.

“Our divorce was my fault. I misunderstood you and signed the papers impulsively.” He stepped closer to the counter. “I investigated the project situation. I accused you unjustly. I shouldn’t have assumed it was you. Forgive me. I recognize my mistake. Could you give me another chance?”

He said it all at once, like a speech he’d been rehearsing during the months it took him to find me. And maybe he had. Maybe he’d practiced this in his car, or in front of the bathroom mirror, or lying awake at 3 a.m. in the apartment where my keys still sat on the living room table.

I looked at him. Really looked. Past the beard and the dark circles to the man underneath.

The divorce had been final the moment he signed. During the thirty days before that, he could have called. He could have come to find me. He could have withdrawn the petition. He’d had every chance to choose me, and every time he’d chosen his pride.

“I can’t help you,” I said. “Can I get you a coffee, or are you leaving?”

His face crumbled. Not dramatically, not all at once. More like watching a wall develop a crack that spreads slowly in every direction.

He left without ordering.

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