A familiar aroma hit me as I rounded the corner into the kitchen.
Vanilla. Brown sugar. Something warm and impossibly perfect.
He'd arranged golden brown cookies on a cooling rack in perfect rows—dark chocolate chips and what looked like cornflakes mixed into the dough. It was homemade perfection that someone spent hours creating, measuring each ingredient with the same care Evan brought to labeling leftover containers.
I counted them. Thirty-six cookies. Three dozen. Enough to feed the entire team, or one guilt-ridden roommate forever.
He'd made cookies. After our fight. After I'd stormed out and left him standing in a kitchen full of milk and ceramic shrapnel.
I picked one up—still warm at the edges, perfect weight in my palm—and took a bite. The cornflakes added texture, a satisfying crunch that paired with the melted chocolate in a surprising and inevitable way. He'd figured out the precise formula for comfort and baked it into edible form.
Evan Carter stress-baked.
I stood there for a long moment, cookie melting on my tongue, staring at the evidence of his care. The kitchen was spotlessagain—no trace of our morning disaster except for the empty space on the drying rack where his blue bowl used to sit.
I reached into my hoodie pocket for the napkin, soft edges worn smooth from my nervous handling. The words I'd written sounded different in my head after the walk home, less like bleeding and more like breathing.
I grabbed a Post-it from the stack by the phone—yellow, because it seemed like the most apologetic option—and found a pen that didn't belong to a café basket.
Sorry I touched your face. Also your soul. – The Milkfoot Menace
I placed the note on top of one of the cookies, the bright yellow paper contrasting with the golden brown surface. Not perfect. Not polished. Still, it was honest in a way that would make Juno proud.
As I headed toward my room, I pulled the napkin from my pocket and unfolded it carefully.
Miss the way you move like music
Even when you're just making tea
Alphabetized your cinnamon
Never alphabetized me
I smoothed it flat against my palm and read the words over and over.
Maybe Juno was right. Maybe it was time to learn my own language again.
One word at a time.
Chapter eight
Evan
No singing from the shower. No cabinet doors slamming. No mysterious objects appearing in the butter compartment.
I'd been tracking Jake's infractions for three hours—a mental spreadsheet that updated automatically every time he moved through the apartment. The current tally sat at zero, either a statistical anomaly or evidence that someone who understood the basic principles of shared living had replaced my roommate.
The laptop on my knees displayed a practice schedule that didn't need updating, but I kept my fingers poised over the keyboard anyway. Productive. Focused. Not acting as a behavioral scientist, monitoring the domestic patterns of Jake Riley.
The muted TV flickered with highlights from a Leafs game, blue and white jerseys blurring across the screen in silent choreography. I'd turned the sound down twenty minutes ago when Jake disappeared into the kitchen, claiming he needed to "make amends with gravity."
What unsettled me wasn't the chaos—I'd learned to navigate that, even budget for it in my mental calculations. It wasthe absence of disarray that sent warning signals through my nervous system. Jake Riley's quiet reminded me of the drop in barometric pressure ahead of a thunderstorm.
The apartment still smelled slightly of my stress-baking session from yesterday—scents of cinnamon and brown sugar hanging in the air. I'd made three dozen cookies after our kitchen incident, probably two dozen more than necessary, but excess was a logical outcome of emotion clouding judgment.
I'd folded up the napkin poem and tucked it into my wallet.
I hadn't meant to keep it. It was on the counter after breakfast, abandoned like so many of Jake's belongings—four lines of hurried, messy, real handwriting.
