CHAPTER 5: GRILLED CHEESE AND LANDMINES

He stayed for an hour.

Elena kept working. Refilled coffees. Cleared plates. Pretended her entire nervous system wasn't tracking Danny Miller's location in her peripheral vision like he was a threat she needed to monitor.

Jasmine stayed too. Asking questions Elena wished she'd thought of. Where did he grow up. What kind of music did he listen to. Had he always been into sound engineering or was that new.

Danny answered everything. Grew up on the East Coast. Listened to everything but had a weakness for old blues recordings, the kind where you could hear the room in the track. Fell in love with sound in college, took a detour into the family business, came back to what he actually cared about.

All reasonable. All plausible. All delivered with that same calm patience that made Elena want to shake him until something real fell out.

But then Jasmine asked about his family and something shifted.

"Parents still around?"

Danny's hand paused on his coffee cup. Just for a second. A micro-hesitation that most people would miss.

Elena didn't miss it.

"They're around."

"Close with them?"

"Not particularly."

The words landed flat. Dead. Like he'd cut something off at the root before it could grow into a real answer.

Jasmine tilted her head. "Bad relationship?"

"Complicated."

That word. Complicated. Elena knew that word. She'd used it herself when people asked about her father. When the truth was too ugly for casual conversation and you needed something to fill the silence.

She looked at Danny differently. Just for a moment. Saw something underneath the nice shirt and the expensive watch. Something that looked almost like damage.

Then the moment passed and he was smiling again, asking Jasmine about her music, and Elena went back to wiping tables that didn't need wiping.

At three fifteen, her phone buzzed.

Marcus.

Can you call me when you get a chance? It's not urgent but it's kind of urgent. If that makes sense.

Her stomach dropped. Nothing good ever followed "it's not urgent but." That was the phrase people used when something was very urgent and they didn't want you to panic.

She typed back: Give me 20 minutes.

"You okay?"

Danny's voice. She looked up. He was watching her with that quiet attention that felt like being seen through glass.

"Fine."

"You do that a lot."

"Do what?"

"Say you're fine when you're obviously not."

The words hit somewhere soft. Somewhere she didn't let people touch. She felt her walls snap up, fast and automatic, the same walls she'd been building since she was eight years old and her father's car disappeared down the street and didn't come back.

"You've known me for two days. You don't get to tell me what I am."

She said it sharper than she meant to. Saw something flicker across his face. Not hurt exactly. More like recognition. Like he understood walls because he had his own.

"You're right." He stood. Pulled out his wallet. Left a twenty on the table for a six dollar grilled cheese. "I'm sorry."

She stared at the twenty. Wanted to shove it back at him. Wanted to tell him she didn't need his charity, didn't need his concern, didn't need anything from anyone.

But twenty dollars was twenty dollars. And she was $847 short.

She took it.

Hated herself for taking it.

"I'll see you tonight," Danny said. "At The Hollow. If you're singing."

"I'm always singing."

He nodded. Didn't say anything else. Just walked out through the door with the broken bell, back into a world where twenty dollars probably meant nothing and complicated families were just a topic you changed when it got uncomfortable.

Jasmine appeared at her elbow.

"Well?"

"Well what?"

"Your assessment. Scale of one to ten. How much trouble are you in?"

Elena watched Danny's figure disappear around the corner. Felt the twenty dollar bill crumpled in her apron pocket. Felt the phone buzzing again with Marcus's name.

"Eleven," she said. "Minimum."

She called Marcus from the storage room, surrounded by canned tomatoes and industrial-sized bags of flour. Pressed herself into the corner like she could hide from whatever was coming.

"Ella." His voice sounded wrong. Thin in a way that made her chest tighten. "I need to tell you something."

"What happened?"

"It's about the tuition."

"I told you I'm handling it."

"That's the thing." A long pause. The kind that felt like standing on a cliff edge. "Someone already handled it. The whole year. It's paid."

The storage room tilted.

"What do you mean paid? By who?"

"I don't know. The financial office said it was an anonymous donor. They wouldn't tell me anything else." Another pause. "Ella, did you do something? Take out a loan or something? Because if you're in debt because of me, I swear to God I'll—"

"I didn't do anything."

Her voice came out strange. Hollow. Because she hadn't done anything. She didn't have that kind of money. She didn't have any money.

So who the hell paid her brother's tuition?