“Here,” Edwin says, getting up from his stool. “You can take my seat. I was getting tired of sitting anyway.”

“Oh, thanks, Edwin,” she says, touching his shoulder lightly as she sits down.

There’s silence as we all look at one another, unsure of what to say. She’s like a disturbance in the airwaves, a ripple in the water. The room smells different—fresh and flowery. She must be wearing perfume strong enough to overpower the smell of beans.

“You look nice,” Andrew says. “I like your sweater.”

She looks down at it and then back up at all of us, a bright smile on her perfectly symmetrical face. “Thanks. It was on sale.”

“Nice,” Andrew says. “You look good in pink.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I can see Chase bringing his hand up to cover a yawn, which makes me yawn in response. And there’s a small part of me—a part I’m not particularly proud of—that’s suddenly relieved I get to see what’s behind the curtain. Not just because I see the truth that Cecilia doesn’t, but because I get them without all the bullshit. I get the real Andrew—the one who is funny and lively and sometimes makes me snort milk out of my nose, but who at other times makes me so frustrated I want to shake him. The truth is a little scary. How can I ever trust a guy around his friends when I know so well how guys act around their friends?

But as I watch Andrew tap his fingers quietly on the surface of the counter, the ticking of the clock loud in the now silent room, I realize maybe a tiny bit of me is glad I don’t count.

NINE

IT SNOWS THROUGH the rest of March, and then finally it’s April, and everything melts under a warming sun. The store gets slightly busier as people come out of hibernation, and I settle easily into the work. Mr. Roth is hardly ever there, and so I spend most of my days with either Dean or this older guy Tim, who can spend an entire shift analyzing a single episode of Star Trek. Obviously I’ve tried to tell him Star Wars is better, but he won’t listen.

It’s Thursday evening and the store has been empty for nearly an hour. I’m up front organizing the rows of sticky pastries into a precarious pyramid formation I’ve been mentally referring to as “Sugar Mountain,” when Dean pops his head out from behind a row of DVD cases at the back of the store.

“So you said you like Hitchcock, right?”

“Yeah, why?” I call back to him, placing a croissant neatly on top of Sugar Mountain, a pile of flaky crumbs raining down onto the counter.