h

ally stopped flinching every time t

ang and I didn't feel my whole body brace for impact. I didn't look up expecting to see anyone I recognized, didn't feel my pulse spike the way it had every si

d call the apartment above the bakery home yet, which I was beginning, cautiously, to think I could - I reali

nd had the particular gift some people have of making conversation feel easy without ever asking anything too invasive. We'd started talking in small pieces over those three weeks - nothing about my life before, n

ffins with a speed I'd only recently developed. "Most people who start here take a month before

and meant it more tha

hip I'd had in my old life came with some invisible ledger - who my family was, who Jake's family was, what version of myself was useful in any given room. Priya didn't know any of th

rd my stomach with the easy directness of someone who'd clear

. "Feels both too far away

laughed. "That's exactly how

them might cost me. It occurred to me, watching her collect her coffee and head back out into the gray morning, how strange it was to be building an entirely new set of ordinary relationships at twenty-six - the kind most people ac

he pastry case, and raised an eyebrow in the particular way she had that

r face," she said finally. "F

realize I'

and leaned against the counter, studying me with the kind of attention that felt less like scrutiny and m

sing, so I just nodded and went back to arranging the pastries, letting the co

the register with a kind of satisfaction I hadn't expected to find in something so ordinary. There was something steadying about numbers that added

lor prints I'd sell alongside the pastries, something that was entirely mine, built from a hobby I'd abandoned years ago when my old life stopped leaving room for anything that didn't serve some larger purpose. I'd s

ne, entirely mine, in a way nothing in my old house had ever quite managed to be, and some nights I found myself thinking

ould hear the town settling into evening around me - a sound so different from the manicured silence of my old neighborho

nderneath the observation, the residue of weeks spent worryin

t strange, like admitting something more vulnerable than the sentenc

, and I laughed for real, the first real laugh I could remember in longe

oating for the baby, none of them serious yet, just something fun to pass between us during slow afternoons at

day," I admitted. "That

ething she'd told me weeks earlier that I'd apparently needed to hear again

any given day. Some days I believed it completely. Other days, usually late at night when the apartment was quiet enough to hear my own thoughts too clearly, I w

night without the low, familiar hum of anxiety I'd carried to bed with me almost every night since I'd left, and for one whole night, I slept the way I imagined ordinary pe

dn't

d, well before anyone in this quiet stretch of town had any reason to be out. Dark sedan, tinted windows, the kind of car that would hav

ut the morning the way I always did - flour, coffee, the low hum of the ovens warming - and by the time Deja came down at seven, the car was gone, and I'd half-convinced

windows, same unbroken stillness that made it feel l

wasn't ready for, would have cracked the fragile, unfamiliar peace I'd only just started to trust. I told myself I was being paranoid, that two and a half weeks of g

at the same hour, I finally understood that this wasn't a coincidence,

still in my hand, my whole morning routine suspended

will, watching a hand emerge first - a man's hand, unfamiliar, wearing a watch too expensive

tirely certain of itself, made every hard-won ounce of peace I

said. "I've been aske