Four weeks sounds like a long time until you're living inside it.
Then it becomes the most precise, most merciless unit of measurement you have ever encountered — each day arriving with the specific weight of a countdown that nobody had agreed to out loud but both of us were running regardless. I knew it. Marcus knew it. We didn't talk about it directly, the way you didn't talk directly about a storm you could both see coming — you just watched the sky and kept moving and made the most of the weather while it held.
The weather, that week, was extraordinary.
He came to the bakery Friday morning.
No text ahead. No pretense of a professional reason. Just the bell above the door at nine fifty-eight and Marcus in his dark coat with two coffees from the place on Atlantic — not bakery coffee,
