Lattice

You fall asleep with the phone on your chest and wake up with the screen pressed into your cheek, which is not a dignified way to start a Monday.

You read the thread once in the gray light. Then again. You don't know what you expected from Valentin Esmond texting at midnight about nothing. You know it wasn't that. Short sentences. Periods on everything. And in between them, something that almost sounded like a person who doesn't know how to say he's lonely.

You put the phone face down and go to work.

He's already in the diner when you get there at six. Not at the counter. In the kitchen. Wearing one of your mother's aprons, the yellow one with the cherries, over a black cashmere sweater that probably costs more than the walk-in fridge.

"I was invited," he says, before you can open your mouth. "In writing. Your mother left a note on my door."

Maudie waves a rolling pin at you from the steel table. "Pie day, Ava. He wants to learn."

"He doesn't want to learn. He wants to observe the subject."

"Both," says Valentin.

Your mother has taught pie to half of Pippin. She taught you at six, standing on a milk crate. She taught Gilly, and Gilly's cousins, and the Lutheran ladies, and one memorable summer, a visiting senator's wife who cried. She has never, in all that time, had a student like Valentin Esmond.

He measures the flour twice. He asks what temperature the butter should be, exactly, in degrees. He asks why the water has ice in it and whether the ice is "a creative choice or a technical requirement." He rolls the dough into a perfect circle, then measures the circle with your mother's sewing tape and adjusts it by a quarter inch.

"Honey," Maudie says, very kindly, "it's a pie. It's not a contract."

"Everything's a contract," says Valentin.

Then he gets to the lattice.

You've seen him lay out a forty-board campaign in an hour without a single mistake. You've seen him rebuild a Super Bowl spot the night before shoot. He takes a knife to the dough and cuts eight strips so precisely they could be used to calibrate instruments, and then he tries to weave them, and something in him just breaks.

The first strip tears. The second sticks to his thumb. The third he lays across the others in a perfect diagonal, and when he lifts the fourth to go under, the whole thing collapses into a pale, buttery heap in the middle of the pie.

He stares at it.

"Over, under," your mother says. "Over, under. Like a basket."

"I've never made a basket."

"Everybody's made a basket."

"I went to boarding school in Switzerland," says Valentin. "We made enemies."

And you laugh. You can't help it. It bursts out of you, loud, the way your mother laughs, and he turns his head and looks at you with flour on his cheekbone and dough on his fingers, and then the strangest thing happens.

He laughs too.

It's short. Low. Surprised, like it got out before he could stop it. It's the first time you've ever heard it, in three years and one month, and the whole kitchen goes quiet. Kjell, at the griddle, actually turns around.

Valentin stops laughing. His ears go faintly pink. He looks back down at the ruined lattice and says, very seriously, "Again."

Your mother hands him more dough. She's smiling at you over his bent head like she knows something. You go out front to check on the coffee before she can say it.

The back door bangs open at eight with a crate of apples and Fletcher Keogh behind it.

"Morning, Maudie! Honeycrisps for the week, on the house, don't argue. Gilly, you look gorgeous, don't tell your mother I said so." He sets the crate down by the walk-in and straightens, and sees you, and his whole face goes bright. "Well. Look what New York sent back."

"Hi, Fletcher."

He hugs you before you can decide whether to let him. He smells like apples and sun and diesel, same as when you were twenty-three and dated him for one long summer before you got on a plane. He's gotten even better-looking, which is annoying. Sun-gold hair, shoulders built by ten thousand ladders, the easy grin of a man who has never once in his life wondered if he was welcome.

"You staying?" he asks.

"For a while. Mom needs help."

"Good." He means it. That's the thing about Fletcher; he always means it. "We should get a beer. Catch up. You can tell me all about the big city and I can tell you all about aphids."

"Tempting."

"Isn't it?" He grins wider. Then his eyes go past your shoulder, and the grin shifts, the way a dog's ears shift when another dog walks into the yard. "Who's this?"

Valentin is standing in the kitchen doorway in the cherry apron with flour on his face.

He does not look like a man in a cherry apron. He looks like a man who owns the building the apron was made in.

"Valentin Esmond," he says.

"Fletcher Keogh." Fletcher holds out a hand. Valentin looks at it, then at his own floury fingers, and doesn't take it. "You're the guy renting upstairs."

"I am."

"Here long?"

"As long as the work takes."

"What work?"

"The kind I'm paid not to discuss." Valentin's voice could frost a window. He turns to you. "Your mother says the second crust is ready for inspection."

"I'll be right there."

"She said now."

Fletcher looks between the two of you. Then he laughs, easy, and picks up his empty crate. "Beer, Ava. Call me." He heads out the back, whistling.

You turn on Valentin. "What was that?"

"What was what?"

"You were rude."

"I was floury." He goes back into the kitchen. Over his shoulder, without turning, he says, "He's very tall."

"He's six one."

"Noted," says Valentin, in a tone that suggests the information is going in a file somewhere and the file is on fire.

By ten the rumor has a shape.

Eskil comes in for his break with a face like weather. "It's a food company," he tells the counter. "Big one. Packaged stuff. They sent lawyers to the plant Friday. Agustina's been in meetings all weekend."

"Which company?" you ask.

"Nobody's saying."

At the end of the counter, Valentin is very still over his coffee. Not typing. Just still.

You know that stillness. You've seen it in a hundred pitches, in the second before the client says the number.

The bell over the door rings.

The woman who walks in is tall, in a fitted navy suit too sharp for Main Street, dark hair in a low knot, a leather portfolio under one arm. Agustina Castellano: the cannery owner's niece, the one who has been signing the checks for six years. You remember her from when you were a kid, coming to the Christmas party in pearls. She looks older now. Older and very, very tired.

The diner goes quiet. Eskil sets his cup down.

Agustina doesn't look at any of them. She walks straight to the end of the counter, to the man in the black sweater with flour still on his cheekbone, and stops.

"Mr. Esmond," she says. "Meridale said you'd be in town."