I grin into the gleaming reflection of the glass lid perched on the stainless steel stockpot. I’ve got to force it this morning, and boy, is that a look. It’s lucky that I can’t actually see myself very clearly, what with the quartered potatoes bubbling under the lid, almost ready for the breakfast service.

I look terrible.

“What’s the point?” I mutter the words at my roiling reflection.

“Tell me you’re not talking to the potatoes.” Gerald’s gruff voice cuts through the low-level hum of the kitchen, and I try my best not to look like I’ve been caught red-handed talking to a starch when I straighten up. He steps in from the kitchen’s side door, paper-wrapped packages filling his arms, and crosses to me, opening the walk-in fridge with his foot and disappearing inside.

“Not really.” 

When Gerald reemerges a few moments later, he has a plastic tray in his hands that’s filled with sliced bacon. “It looked like you were talking to the potatoes.”

“I was just trying to see if I look as shitty as I feel.”

He shoots me a look. For a wizened chef, Gerald does not appreciate salty language, but it’s true. I feel like shit. I’d blame Conrad Ford, my recently new ex-boyfriend, but he’s only partly to blame. I was the idiot who thought he loved me.

What a ridiculous assumption.

At any rate, I’m still the idiot who’s feeling sorry for herself over having to move back home, over losing something I probably never had in the first place. I have to knock it off. I have to stop spending so much time watching sappy movies alone at the cottage.

Gerald puts the tray on the counter next to the griddle and starts laying out strips of bacon. He does it the same way every single morning. He’s been doing it that way since I first got a job here in high school. I shouldn’t have been surprised when I came back two weeks ago to find everything just how I left it. The only difference is that Gerald is eight years older. Not that you can tell by looking. 

He flicks his eyes across the kitchen to me and lays out another row of bacon. “Is Sharon in yet?”

I open my mouth to answer him at the same time the front door to the restaurant opens, the bell chiming merrily against the glass. Sharon sweeps into the kitchen with an early morning summer smell clinging to her clothes, her dark hair piled high on top of her head. “Good morning, loves,” she sings, breezing by to toss her purse into the tiny back office where she writes out our paychecks every Friday. “Everything good to go?” Her smile is so ungodly bright that I can’t help but smile back, but the expression fades a little from her face when she finally gets a good look at me. “Looks like it’s not good to go.” She crosses her arms, cocking one hip to the side. “Spill it.”

“Don’t,” says Gerald.

“It’s nothing,” I insist, pulling my apron off the hook on the wall next to Sharon’s office. “Allergies.”

She narrows her eyes. “You don’t have allergies.”

“Seasonal allergies.”

“Valentine Carr, don’t bullshit me.”

Gerald sighs heavily, not looking at either of us, and Sharon rolls her eyes. They’re not married, but they bicker like a couple that’s been together for years—mostly through eye rolls and sighs.

I take my sweet time tying the apron around my waist. I can feel how puffy my eyes are every time I blink. Clearly, the concealer I applied so damn carefully this morning isn’t doing a thing.

It’s not that I don’t want to tell Sharon what happened. It’s just that the whole thing is so...stupid, so mortifying, that I’m not sure I can make my mouth form the words.

“Was it that asshole Conrad?”

The look on her face makes me burst out laughing. When I showed up here two weeks ago, fresh off a failed start to my would-be career in marketing and recently kicked to the curb by my boyfriend, Sharon gave me my old waitressing job back, no questions asked. Those came later, during the slow hours, when we wrapped silverware into napkins and wiped down the plastic menus with cleaning solution meant to kill the germs. She never said a word against Conrad then, but she didn’t have to. She didn’t even have to meet him. All she had to do was purse her lips and say hmm in that same old Sharon way. 

“No,” I finally manage to say. “Well, yes. But that was my fault. I should have seen it coming.”

She waves her hands in the air like she’s dispelling a bad cloud. “He wasn’t worth your time. And he’s not worth your tears.”

Maybe not, but that doesn’t make me feel better now. And tomorrow morning, when I wake up with that same pit in my stomach, it still won’t help.

“I’m not crying.”

Sharon cocks her head to the side. “We can all see your face, Valentine.”

“Maybe I was crying because...” I want to say because I’m back here working at a café when I was supposed to be starting a magnificent career, but that would be a dick move. I also don’t mention the fact that it doesn’t make me proud to be living in one of my parents’ cottages on their wide lakefront property. The Short Stack, after all, is Sharon’s career, and Gerald’s, too. It’s only me who became too good for the place when I left for college.

Fine. I’ll admit it. It stings that I had to come running back here with my tail between my legs. College was not the experience I thought it would be. I imagined I’d come out the other side confident and sure of myself and in possession of at least an entry-level job at a marketing firm.

I also imagined that Conrad wouldn’t react the way he did to what happened.

Instead, I’m here, sliding my order pad into the pocket of my apron and getting ready to serve breakfast to a crowd of indeterminate size. It’s Friday, so you never know how many people will show. 

At least Sharon pays a decent wage, so I don’t have to rely on tips. If I did, I might never save up enough to make it back out of here.

To where? The question thuds around in my brain.

“Cat got your tongue?” Sharon says, laughing, and then sweeps out toward the front of the restaurant. It’s a tiny place, three rooms and a kitchen in what used to be a private house. A moment later, I hear her on the phone, talking to the guy who delivers the dairy products once a week. “—on your way?” There’s a pause. “The side door. As usual.” I’m still thinking of what to say when the door tinkles against the glass, and Sharon greets the first customer of the day.

It’s time to get my shit together.

I put a few pens into the pocket of my apron. The wood floor creaks under Sharon’s feet while she seats whoever it is—probably a couple of old men, ready to camp out at a table with coffee for the first few hours of the morning—smooth my hands over my hair, and wash them one more time in the sink.

“Valentine will be right with you,” says Sharon, loud and clear. That’s my cue.

I move out to the front room, but my apron is wrong, somehow, despite all the time I took to tie it. Doesn’t matter. I can do two things at once. “Good morning,” I chirp, my hands working behind my back. I look down to make sure it’s sitting just right. “Welcome to the Short Stack. I’m—”

That’s when I look up and meet his eyes.

That’s when everything changes.