The bikes come back in the late afternoon. I hear them before I see them — five engines, the rumble that's become the sound of my people coming home.
The kitchen door opens. Vaughn walks in first, windblown, smelling like road and leather and cold air. He stops. Looks at the counter — the cookies, the shortbread, the croissants, the flour-dusted evidence of a man who spent his Sunday doing the thing he was born to do.
"You baked."
"I baked."
"With your hand."
"With my hand." I hold it up. The scar is pink and the fingers are stiff but they're working. "It's not pretty yet. But it works."
He crosses the kitchen. Takes my face in both hands. Kisses me once, firm and proud.
Jason appears behind him. Smells the air. His eyes go wide. "Are those cookies?"
"Help yourself."
Jason doesn't need to be told twice. Then Ash is there, and Knox and Toby, and Silas and Ezra, and my kitchen is full of windblown lions and humans eating my cookies straight off the cooling rack, and Toby is making coffee, and Jason is telling thestory of Ezra nearly clipping the guardrail with dramatic hand gestures while Ezra protests that it wasn't that close.
I lean against the counter and watch them. My people. My food. My kitchen.
Vaughn catches my eye across the room. Raises a cookie. I nod.
This is it. This is what the café will be. A room full of people I love, eating things I made, feeling at home. Just on a bigger scale. With an espresso machine.
Later, when the kitchen is quiet and the cookies are mostly gone, Vaughn and I sit at the table. His arm around me. Crumbs everywhere.
"Hey Vaughn?"
"Yeah?"
"Would you teach me to ride? When my hand's better?"
He looks at me. "You'd want to learn?"
"Maybe. It looks fun when you're not actively seeking death." I shrug. "Also, your legs in those leathers are—" I gesture vaguely. "I want the full experience."
"No one teaches you but me."
"Wouldn't want anyone else."
He kisses the top of my head. I lean into him, notebook in my lap, his arm around my shoulders, the evening sun warm through the kitchen windows.
Two people. Doing their own things. Coming back to each other.
That's the whole point.
Chapter 24
Vaughn
Robin's been sketching café layouts on napkins for three days. The bar counter has become his war room — business books, printouts from Toby's spreadsheets, drawings of equipment placement. He talks to himself while he works. Not full sentences — fragments, questions, the half-voiced thinking of someone building something in their head and trying to get it onto paper before it disappears.
"If the espresso machine goes here, the steam wand is facing the wall. That's wrong. Counter needs to flow left to right — order, pay, pick up. Like a sentence."
He doesn't know I'm listening. I'm in the garage doorway, wiping down a socket wrench, watching him. His pencil moves in short, decisive strokes. His left hand holds the napkin steady — still stiff, still healing, but stronger every day. Yesterday he held a whisk for twenty minutes without stopping. The scar is fading from angry pink to something quieter.
He's beautiful when he's building something. Focused in a way that strips away all the performance — no flirting, no deflection, no charm as armor. Just Robin, bent over a napkin, figuring out where the ovens go.