The parking garage was cold. Atlanta in late November was not Minnesota cold, but it was enough to make you zip your jacket and see your breath, and the concrete amplified the chill in a way that made the garage feel like a refrigerator. I did not make the refrigerator joke that presented itself because I had heard about Cole Briggs's Russian language incident from Jonah, and the story had nearly killed me, and I was saving it for a moment when Wes might actually appreciate it.
We reached our cars. Mine was a Honda Civic that was old enough to vote. His was a black truck that was immaculately clean in a way that suggested he cleaned it the way he cleaned everything, thoroughly and in solitude.
This was normally the point where we said goodnight. A nod from Wes. A wave from me. The separation that bookended every day and sent us to our respective apartments to do our respective things alone.
Wes unlocked his truck. Then he stood there with his hand on the door and did not open it. He stood there for long enough that I noticed, which was approximately three seconds, because I noticed everything about Wes Chen and the three-second delay between reaching for his door and opening it was a deviation from the pattern and deviations from Wes's pattern meant something.
"Moretti," he said.
"Chen."
"I made bread."
I blinked. "Right now?"
"Last night. Sourdough. It's..." He paused. The hand on the door flexed. His jaw did the thing it did when he was working through something internally, the slight tightening that meanthis brain was running calculations his mouth hadn't cleared for release. "I have too much."
"You have too much bread."
"The recipe makes two loaves. I only need one."
"So you're offering me bread."
"I'm informing you that excess bread exists. What you do with that information is your business."
I bit the inside of my cheek so hard I tasted copper. Because what was happening, underneath the flat delivery and the studied casualness, was that Wes Chen was inviting me to his apartment. He was doing it in the most Wes Chen way possible, which was to frame the invitation as a logistical notification about surplus baked goods, but the invitation was there. Underneath the bread. Underneath the words. A man who let no one into his space was cracking the door open and pretending it was about sourdough.
"I could take that bread off your hands," I said. "As a favor to you. Surplus bread is a serious issue."
"It is. Storage concerns."
"Exactly. I'd be doing you a service."
"A public service."
"Practically civic duty."
The corner of his mouth moved. Not a smile. The scaffolding of one. The architectural plans submitted for review but not yet approved.
"Follow me," he said, and got in his truck.
I followed him. Through the streets of Atlanta, which were doing their evening thing, all headlights and restaurant signs and the particular amber glow that the city takes on after dark. He drove precisely. Speed limit. Full stops. Turn signals deployed with military timing. I drove behind him in my geriatric Civic and thought about the fact that I was going to WesChen's apartment and that my heart rate was elevated and that Sofia was going to have so many opinions about this.
His building was in a neighborhood called Reynoldstown, east of the city center. A converted warehouse turned into lofts, the kind of development that Atlanta was producing at an alarming rate as the city grew. His unit was on the third floor. Parking garage. Elevator. No lobby, no doorman. A building designed for people who wanted to come and go without being witnessed.
He unlocked the door and I followed him inside and stopped.
The apartment was exactly what I expected in one sense and completely surprising in another. The living area was spare to the point of austerity. A leather couch, a television, a bookshelf with six books on it. No art on the walls. No photographs. No decorative objects. The space of a man who viewed his living room as a waypoint between the rink and the bedroom and had not invested emotional energy in either.
But the kitchen.
The kitchen was a revelation.
Professional-grade oven, the kind you'd find in a restaurant. Marble countertop, pale and smooth and flawless. A stand mixer that I recognized immediately as a KitchenAid Pro 600, which cost eight hundred dollars and was the mixer equivalent of a top-of-the-line hockey stick. A rack of cooling racks on the counter. Jars of flour, sugar, salt, each one labeled in small, precise handwriting. A proofing bowl with a cloth over it. And on a wooden cutting board in the center of the island, two perfect loaves of sourdough bread with golden-brown crusts and the particular sheen that indicated proper hydration and a steam-injected bake.
I stared.
"You weren't kidding," I said.