Meet Me at Midnight Café — Chapter 2

The kitchen truce lasted exactly two days before the first real argument, which was — she had to admit, privately, grudgingly — a personal best for the two of them.

It started over the espresso machine, which he insisted on calibrating every morning at an hour she considered deeply unreasonable, and ended forty minutes later with both of them laughing too hard to remember what they’d been annoyed about in the first place.

“This is a disaster,” she said, still catching her breath.

“A slow-moving one,” he agreed. “Very scenic, though.”

She told herself the warmth in her chest was leftover annoyance. She was, by the following week, no longer able to maintain that particular fiction.