Page 5 of Fall Into Me

“Oh, she’s doing good.” Mags took her regular seat right in the middle of the café. Most people craved the corners, or at the very least a wall to press their backs against. Not Mags.

“We meant to catch up the other day, but she never got back to me.” I walked around the counter and set down her coffee and a cookie. We’d been doing that since I got back to town, playinga never-ending game of phone tag that resulted in a total of zero catch-ups.

“She had an unexpected visitor.” There was a twinkle so bright in her eyes when she said the word “visitor” that I sort of wondered if the only person who hadn’t expected them was Delilah.

“Oh?” I said it as casually as possible, but no one grew up in a small town and didn’t develop a small taste for a little gossip. “Any ideas who?”

“Dylan Mason.”

My sudden intake of breath was so aggressive I immediately began choking on my own saliva. My dad was there in a heartbeat, coffee in one hand and smacking my back with incredible amounts of force with the other.

“Ow,”I rasped, desperately waving him off in an effort to protect the integrity of my bones. “Dad, you’re going to break a rib. Did you sayDylan Mason?”

“The very same.”

“The one that, you know…” Holy shit, I really needed to call Delilah.

“Mm-hmm.” Mags nodded her head, eyes still twinkling as she took a sip of her coffee and let out a grateful hum. “No one makes coffee like you, Cali.”

“Keep your eyes on your cookie. This one’s drooling.” I pointed at my dad before ushering him out the door. “I’ll see you tonight. Drive safe and be safe, please.”

“Always do, always am.” With a final kiss to the top of my head, he walked out the door, and I couldn’t help the pressure that filled my chest. My dad was a firefighter, and it had always been my claim to fame when I was a kid growing up but the feeling of waiting with bated breath for him to walk through the front door every night hadn’t ever shifted. Lodged in my heart like shrapnel.

Owning the café and being one of two employees, I was constantly run off my feet in a really non-aggressive way. Especially considering that Sammy and I only worked together on Saturdays.

I didn’t have to worry about forgetting orders or customers growing disgruntled over a lack of available seating. The stream of people was reliable—just enough to keep me moving, yet never too overwhelming.

An empty seat? Filled within minutes.

A stack of dockets cleared? Time to put cookies in the oven or take them out.

The rhythm was predictable: walk out front, hand off cookies, take the next order, prep a sandwich.

So, no. I hadn’t pictured my life in detail, but I knew it wasn’t supposed to look like this.

And you know what? That was okay. Because now I knew what my dayswouldlook like. I knew the people who would fill them. The first person to walk through my coffee shop door. The second. The third.

I knew the cookie recipe by heart—reliable, unchanging. Just like the life I’d built here. It wasn’t splattered with the laughter I’d dreamed of. The peace that settled after was fleeting, but the thin clouds above left enough light to get by.

It was four fifteen p.m., and, just like the day before, I started to close the café. The bell on the door rang, which was jarring for two reasons.

In the last year and a half, the bell had never rung at four fifteen p.m. The second was that in the brief moment when the street outside could be heard from the inside of the café, a chorus of voices trickled in.

The street in front of my café was usually quiet. The school run was done, and Mrs. Dellante had walked by with her five Pomeranians, stopping for almost exactly fifty seconds whilethey drank out of the dog bowl out front. That was why the chattering didn’t make sense, because it hadn’t existed before. Never at this time or on this street.

I leaned around the doorframe that led into the kitchen and noticed first the cars that had parked on the street. It would be a pretty good bet that I knew almost all the cars in all of Darling. A weird thing for me to have in my arsenal of things that may potentially impress you, but I saw them drive by my window every day. Sometimes several times a day, and I’d never seen these ones before.

Work trucks lined the street all with one thing in common: they all had ‘Mackenzie Co.’ on the side. The same logo was on the back of the shirts of the huddle of men that had congregated out front. It seemed stupid to me at that moment that the very last thing I noticed was the man, the strikinglybigman, standing in the middle of my café.

I hadn’t really thought about what would happen if this exact moment came to be. I think I did a lot to actively avoid it entirely, but it struck me as strange that so much and so little had changed about the person standing in front of me.

Was hebigger? Was thatpossible? Had he spent the last two years tracking down the exact location he more than likely already knew I’d be at?

I found all the above all at once too hard to comprehend because I had stopped waiting for Fane Mackenzie to show up at my door a very long time ago.

I wanted to blink and for him to disappear entirely.

“Calista.”

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