The loft smelled like Schmidt’s experimental brunch — something involving frittata and a herb he’d definitely misidentified, and the late-morning sun cut across the kitchen table in the particular way that usually meant a good day.
Winston was at the counter with a coffee, Furguson on his shoulder like a furry epaulet.
Schmidt was narrating the frittata’s composition to no one.
Cece scrolled her phone at the table.
Jess sat at the far end of the couch, closer to the window than the group, a magazine open in her lap that she wasn’t reading.
Robby noticed it the second he walked in.
The temperature.
Half a degree off.
A small adjustment in how she held her body, angled away from the room’s center, the way someone positioned themselves when they were present but not participating.
The magazine pages hadn’t turned since he’d arrived.
He set the bag of bagels on the counter and tried for something easy.
“I brought backup carbs.”
Schmidt waved a spatula.
“The frittata is not a carb, but I’ll allow the gesture.”
“Thank you.
I wasn’t sure I’d pass inspection.”
“You’re being evaluated on enthusiasm, not execution.
The bagels are a strong start.”
The rhythm was there, the familiar back-and-forth, but Robby’s attention kept pulling toward the couch.
Jess hadn’t looked up.
She’d smiled at the bagel exchange: a quick, automatic curve of her mouth that didn’t reach her eyes, and gone back to the magazine that didn’t need reading.
He crossed to the couch.
Sat on the arm, casual, leaving her room.
“Hey.”
“Hey.”
“How’s the morning treating you?”
“Fine.
Good.
Schmidt’s frittata smells aggressive.”
“It does.
I think he’s trying to assert dominance over breakfast.”
She smiled again, the same half-smile, and turned a page he knew she hadn’t read.
The gesture was so precise in its distance that he felt it in his chest: a closed door, politely held, with the latch within his reach but the handle on her side.
He tried again.
“Last night —”
“Robby, it’s fine.
We talked.”
“We did talk.
And I want to make sure —”
“I said it’s fine.” Her voice was even, not sharp, but the finality in it was unmistakable.
“Can we just have brunch?”
He nodded.
“Yeah.
Of course.”
He stayed on the arm of the couch for another beat, then pushed up and drifted toward the kitchen, where the familiar machinery of the loft was running without him.
Schmidt was plating.
Winston was setting out napkins.
Cece’s eyes tracked him as he moved, not hostile, just watching, the way someone watched a thing they were still forming an opinion about.
“So,” Winston said, settling at the table with Furguson now draped across his lap.
“Robby made it to brunch.
That’s a plus on the tracker.”
“What’s the current score?” Schmidt asked, sliding a frittata slice onto a plate.
“Solid.
Not spectacular.
He gained ground with the casserole incident, but he’s still below the member threshold.”
“Please tell me you’re not updating the spreadsheet during brunch,” Cece said.
“I’m not updating it.
I’m referencing it.
There’s a difference.”
“Is there?”
“Marginally.
The data doesn’t sleep.”
Robby laughed, the right amount, and took a plate from Schmidt.
The rhythm was intact.
The jokes were landing.
But Jess hadn’t moved from the couch, and when Cece called her name to come eat, she answered with a “in a minute” that stretched the silence longer than it should have.
They ate.
Schmidt’s frittata was herbaceous and slightly confusing.
Winston debated whether the recipe counted as a new entry in Robby’s rotation or just an extension of the egg category.
The debate was familiar, almost comforting: the loft’s machinery running exactly as it should.
“You’re quiet,” Cece said, not looking at him, reaching for the salt.
Robby blinked.
“Am I?”
“Not aggressively.
But you’re usually better at filling space.”
“Maybe I’m letting the frittata speak for itself.”
“The frittata is saying a lot of confusing things,” Winston said.
“I’m getting notes of basil and what might be regret.”
“It’s tarragon,” Schmidt said.
“And it’s perfectly proportioned.”
Schmidt launched into a defense of his herb ratios.
The table dissolved into the familiar chaos, and for a moment Robby thought he’d been wrong about the temperature, that the distance was in his head, a projection of his own guilt.
Then Nick arrived.
Grabbed a plate.
Settled at the table with the particular silence of a man who’d rather eat than speak.
Nick’s eyes found Robby once, briefly, across the table.
The look was neutral, no hostility, no warmth, but there was something underneath it that Robby recognized.
A guard that had been coming down, slowly, over the past few weeks, clicking back into place.
Not a verdict, but a readiness.
The posture of a man who was quietly re-opening a file he’d almost closed.
Jess ate a quarter of her frittata, laughed at a Winston bit about the cat’s opinion on the eggs, and excused herself to “check something in her room.” The excuse was so standard that no one called it.
The door clicked shut behind her.
Cece set her fork down and looked at Robby.
Not accusing.
Just present, waiting, the way someone waited when they knew something was being left unsaid and were deciding whether to let it stay that way.
He didn’t fill the silence.
After brunch, he helped Schmidt with the dishes, letting the warm water and the familiar rhythm steady him.
Winston retreated to the living room with his laptop, the tracker open, and Robby caught the briefest glance at the screen as he passed: a column of numbers, a highlighted row, a small downward tick in a cell he couldn’t read from the angle but understood in his bones.
The loft was running.
The jokes were landing.
The afternoon was warm and ordinary.
Winston called something from the living room: a question about the tracker’s recipe column, whether Schmidt’s frittata qualified as an assist.
Schmidt answered with a full methodology.
Cece said something dry that made Winston laugh.
The sounds of a functioning house, the same sounds Robby had been learning to belong inside for weeks.
And while the laughter carried on without him, he stood at the sink with a rinsed plate in his hand and felt the specific cold of knowing he’d started to slip with no clean way to stop it.
The distance wasn’t dramatic.
It wasn’t a fight.
It was a magazine that didn’t need turning, a smile that stopped at her mouth, a door that clicked shut at the wrong angle.
He dried the plate.
Set it in the rack.
For the first time in weeks, he wasn’t sure what to do next.