The silence stretched long enough to hurt.
It was the kind of quiet that settled into your chest before you even knew why, thick with the smell of burnt espresso and the low hum of the fridge behind the counter.
Lauren forced a smile that didn’t quite hold.
“G-good morning, Mr.
Briggs.”
He didn’t return it.
He stood in the doorway to the staff room with his arms loosely crossed, the overhead light throwing hard shadows under his eyes, the look of a man who had already had this conversation in his head a dozen times before either of them arrived.
“Is it?”
Her smile fell away entirely.
He took one slow step closer, his shoes scuffing against the tile in a way that somehow sounded louder than it should have.
“What time were you two supposed to be here?”
“Eight,” Lauren said, eyes dropping to the floor.
“And what time is it now?”
Neither of them answered.
The wall clock ticked with what felt, in that moment, like real malice, each second dragging the silence out a little further, until it felt less like a clock and more like a countdown to something neither of them wanted to name.
Briggs sighed, long and disappointed, the kind of sigh that carried more weight than any shout could have.
“This isn’t the first time.” His gaze shifted, sliding from Lauren to Camille and back again, weighing them both.
“It isn’t even the second.”
Camille met it anyway, steady despite everything churning underneath — the exhaustion she hadn’t slept off, the questions she still hadn’t asked, the face of a stranger she couldn’t stop picturing whenever the café went quiet enough to think.
None of that showed.
“I’m sorry, Mr.
Briggs.”
“No excuses?”
“No, sir.
None that would matter.”
He studied her a beat longer than usual, as if trying to decide whether the calm in her voice was sincerity or something closer to practiced control, before turning to Lauren.
“And you?”
“I overslept.” Lauren rubbed the back of her neck, not quite meeting his eyes.
“You overslept Tuesday too.” Her face went red.
“…Yes, sir.”
“And somehow it’s always the two of you, arriving together.” He let that hang there, half accusation and half something almost like fondness, the way a man speaks about problems he’s grown used to but hasn’t yet decided to stop caring about.
Lauren wished, quite genuinely, for the floor to open beneath her.
“I’m really sorry.”
Briggs exhaled, some of the anger finally leaving his voice, softening into the tired patience of someone who had run this café long enough to know which battles were worth fighting.
“You girls work hard.
That’s the only reason I’ve let this slide as many times as I have.” He gestured at the café, already filling with the morning crowd, the door chime sounding somewhere behind him as the first customers wandered in stamping cold off their shoes.
“But this place doesn’t run itself.”
He let the silence sit a moment before folding his arms.
“So here’s what happens.
Three weeks, both of you on closing duty.
Evening shift, and you lock up yourselves, every single night.”
“Three weeks?” Lauren’s voice cracked.
“Would you rather it be four?”
“No — no, sir.”
“That’s what I thought.” He turned to Camille, one eyebrow lifted, waiting.
“Objections?”
“No, sir.” She managed a small, apologetic smile — the kind she’d perfected over years of being the responsible one, even on nights when responsibility was the last thing she actually felt like being.
“We’ve earned it.”
“Glad someone in this room has some sense.”
Lauren shot her a look of pure, wounded betrayal, mouthing something that might have been a curse if Briggs hadn’t still been standing right there.
“Traitor.”
Camille bit back a laugh despite herself.
Briggs cleared his throat one final time, the sound like a period at the end of a sentence he was finally satisfied with.
“And one more thing.
If either of you is late again during those three weeks — don’t bother coming back at all.”
Lauren’s stomach dropped somewhere near her shoes.
“Understood?”
“Understood,” they said together.
“Good.
They retreated to the staff room, and the second the door clicked shut, Lauren collapsed dramatically into the nearest chair, letting her head fall back against the wall as though the last five minutes had physically drained her.
“We are so dead.”
“It’s three weeks,” Camille said, tying her apron with practiced hands, not even looking up.
“We’ll survive.”
“Do you understand what closing duty actually means, Camille?
Wiping every table, dusting the surfaces of every flat equipment, sweeping the whole cafe, mopping, stacking chairs at midnight while normal people are already asleep.” Lauren gestured at the dining room like it had personally wronged her, as if the empty tables themselves were complicit in Briggs’s punishment.
“We’ll survive, it can’t be as bad as you’re making it sound Lau,” Camille said again, unmoved, though privately she was grateful for something as small and ordinary as extra shifts to fill the hours — anything that kept her hands busy and her mind from circling back to a hospital room across the city, a stranger she still hadn’t stopped thinking about, a face she’d only seen for a handful of frantic, blood-slicked minutes and couldn’t seem to put down.
“You always say that.”
“Because it’s always true.”
Lauren groaned, dragging herself back up out of the chair with the theatrical suffering of someone twice her age.
“I hate that you’re usually right.”
They headed back out a few minutes later, aprons on, the café already humming with its usual rhythm — quiet conversation over coffee, the hiss of the espresso machine, warm croissants filling the air like something out of memory itself, the low clatter of spoons against porcelain blending into a sound so familiar it barely registered anymore.
Morning light spilled through the front windows and lay in gold stripes across the worn floor, catching the dust in the air and turning it, briefly, into something almost pretty.
Maple Grove wasn’t much to look at, all scuffed tile and mismatched chairs, but it held people the way few places did — some for the coffee, some for the pastries, and more than a few simply because it felt, in some hard-to-explain way, like somewhere they belonged.
Camille had felt that pull long before she ever wore the apron.
The café had once belonged to a close friend of her mother’s, and she’d spent whole childhood weekends here — chocolate cake in front of her, her mother’s laugh carrying across the room like it might never stop, the smell of cinnamon and fresh bread woven so deeply into those memories that she could still summon it without trying.
Ownership had changed hands since.
That feeling never had.
If she was honest with herself, that was the real reason she kept turning her father down — not stubbornness, not really.
This place held something of her mother that no office, no branch with her name on the door, ever could.
“The usual, Miss Wilson?” An older regular approached the counter with the same warm smile he always wore, the same worn newspaper folded under one arm.
“One cappuccino, one blueberry muffin,” she said, smiling back easily.
“You remember.”
“I always will.” Some things, she thought, you didn’t let yourself forget — not on purpose, anyway.
He chuckled and moved toward his usual table by the window.
A few feet away, Lauren caught the exchange while balancing a tray and smiled quietly to herself — one more small, familiar reminder of why Camille had never seriously entertained a single one of her father’s offers.
This wasn’t just a job to her.
It never had been.
The rest of the morning slid by easily enough.
Orders came and went, cups clinked against saucers, and outside the window the trees along the quiet road swayed gently in the breeze — indifferent, for now, to everything that had happened the night before, and everything that was still, somewhere across the city, only just beginning.