Theo is sitting at his usual table at The Grind House when I walk in for my shift, and the normalcy of the image – laptop open, his reading glasses pushed up on his forehead the way he does when he’s switching between screens – hits me so hard that I have to pause in the doorway and remember how to be a person who doesn’t have a werewolf’s heartbeat echoing in her chest.“Ivy!” He stands up and hugs me and the contact feels foreign in a way that makes me sad, because Theo’s hugs used to feel like home and now they feel like visiting a country I used to live in where I no longer speak the language.He pulls back and looks at my face and his expression shifts into something careful and assessing.“You look different,” he says, and his eyes drop to my high-necked shirt – the third one this week, in September, and I can tell he’s registering the pattern even if he doesn’t know what it means yet.“Just tired,” I say, and tie my apron on and start my shift, and he watches me from his table
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