CHAPTER THREE: The Fifty-Eight Percent
1403 Words
There is a specific kind of morning that only happens in October.
Not the golden-leaf kind the greeting cards sell you, all warm cider and soft scarves and everyone being photogenically charmed by the season. I mean the other kind. The sharp kind. Where the sky is the colour of a bruise healing and the wind comes off the harbour with a genuine personal grudge and every step you take on Crestholm's pavement feels like the city is trying to tell you something.
The morning after Marcus Vale gave me forty thousand dollars, Blackthorn University confirmed my scholarship, the Section 14-B application moved into review, and I spent four and a half hours in Harbour and Hatch building the most ambitious business plan I had ever attempted — that morning was that kind of October morning.
I walked to work with my collar up and my notebook in my bag and the particular feeling of a woman who has put so many pieces on the board that she has temporarily forgotten whether she is actually any good at the game.
The Radio — my internal monologue, which had become, in the nine days since my rebirth, considerably more opinionated — offered the following: You are fine. You have a plan. The plan has sub-plans. The sub-plans have contingencies. You might be overdoing the contingencies. Actually no, there is no such thing as too many contingencies. But maybe sleep more than four hours tonight.
"I'll sleep when the manor is safe," I said, out loud, to no one, because it was six-thirty in the morning and the pavement outside Harbour and Hatch was empty except for the pigeons and they had their own concerns.
Petra let me in with the flat affect of someone who had worked the opening shift long enough to no longer register anything before seven AM as a personal interaction.
I put on my apron. I started the machines. I made the first twelve drinks of the day with the automated efficiency of someone who had worked this exact job, at this exact counter, for two years in her first life, and I let my mind run free through the things I needed to do today while my hands did the things they already knew.
Milk temperature. Espresso extraction time. The precise angle at which you held the jug to get the microfoam right, which I had been doing correctly for so long it was now muscle memory stored somewhere below thought.
I loved this job. People in my first life had assumed I was embarrassed by it — Damien's people, his mother's people, the entire constellation of Cole-adjacent professionals who had looked at me across dinner tables with the polite pity of people cataloguing how far the CEO's wife had fallen before he found her. I had let them think I was embarrassed. It was easier than explaining that the café had been the only place in my first life where I had felt fully competent, fully useful, and entirely my own.
In this second life, I was going to buy the place.
The thought made me smile at the milk frother. Petra, passing with a tray of cups, gave me the look she reserved for regulars who were having private experiences she did not consent to witnessing before eight AM.
"Sorry," I said. "Business plan thoughts."
"Before seven," she said. Not a question. Just documentation.
"It's a good plan," I said.
"They always are," she said, and moved on.
He came in at twenty past eleven.
I knew he would come in. In my first life, the Blackthorn scholarship announcement had been picked up by the university's business department newsletter — a forgettable piece of content nobody read, except the people specifically scanning it. In this second life, I had been awarded the scholarship three days earlier than the original timeline, which meant the newsletter announcement was hitting inboxes this morning.
Damien Cole was on the scholarship committee.
The committee chair would have notified the relevant parties about early awards this morning.
Therefore, Damien Cole had received a notification this morning that contained my name.
I had built this probability into the day's schedule. I had chosen the eleven o'clock slot for highest likelihood because I knew, from five years of observing his patterns, that he walked this route on days when he was working from the Cole Tower annex building two blocks west, and he stopped for coffee when the morning meetings ran long and he hadn't eaten, and the morning meetings ran long on Fridays because Patricia Hess ran them and Patricia Hess had opinions about thoroughness.
I had a fifty-eight percent confidence estimate. Marcus, when I'd explained this over the loan agreement paperwork, had put his pen down and looked at me for a long moment and said: "You assigned a probability estimate to whether a man would come in for coffee." I had said: "I assigned a probability estimate and a contingency for if he didn't." Marcus had picked his pen back up and continued signing without further comment, which was one of the things I was already finding excellent about him.
Damien walked in at twenty past eleven.
Confidence estimate revised upward to a hundred percent. Filed.
He was in the grey suit today — the lighter one, the one he wore when the day had started conventionally and not yet required armoring up. He looked like someone whose morning had been functional but not restful, which was consistent with a long meeting running into a notification that had given him something to think about.
He looked at the menu board. He looked at the counter. His eyes landed on me.
I was already making his order.
Not because I was trying to impress him. Because I remembered it — the flat white, medium-strong, oat milk, the particular way he took it that I had watched the café's previous barista prepare for him seventeen times across five years of brief early-morning appearances that I had never, in my first life, been present for because I was either at home or not yet in his life in any capacity.
In this second life, I was behind the counter and I had started pulling the shot the moment I clocked the grey suit through the window.
He reached the counter.
"Ms. Calloway," he said.
"Mr. Cole." I slid the cup across without fanfare. "Flat white. Oat. Medium-strong."
He looked at the cup. He looked at me. The recalibration expression — that specific fractional adjustment his face made when encountering variables that didn't fit his model — appeared and was immediately controlled.
"I didn't order yet," he said.
"I know," I said pleasantly. "That'll be four-fifty."
He paid. He did not move away from the counter. He stood there with his cup and the expression of a man who was deciding something, and I went back to the milk frother and the next order, because I had seven customers behind him and I was not, in this second life, the kind of woman who stopped working because a handsome, complicated, structurally problematic man was standing nearby.
"The scholarship," he said, after a moment.
"Mm," I said, not looking up from the jug.
"You start the spring semester."
"I do." I finished the pour, slid the cup, and called the name. "Is there a question in there?"
"How did you know my order?"
I looked up at him then, and I smiled — not the customer-service smile, but the one I was developing in this second life, the one that contained just enough of what I actually knew to be interesting without revealing any of it specifically. My mother called it my "I have opinions about this and I will share them in my own time" face. She had been seeing it for about a week and had already noted, with the satisfaction of a woman whose daughter had spent five years being too soft with the wrong people, that she approved.
"You come on most Fridays," I said. "People's orders don't change much. I pay attention."
He looked at me for a bit too long.
"You pay attention," he said.
"Occupational assets," I said. "Anything else?"
Another beat. He picked up the cup. He moved one step back from the counter, which was the physical signal of someone intending to leave, and then he didn't leave.
- Writer
