Alora's POV
Table seven had a particular quality on Thursday mornings.
Not always — most Thursday mornings it was just a table, four chairs, the window seat that caught the light at the right angle between nine and eleven if the clouds were cooperative. A good table. The kind regulars asked for.
But James had been a Thursday regular.
Every Thursday for two years, nine-thirty AM, soup of the day and the coffee he took with one sugar, and the specific quality of his presence — the way he took up the space with the unhurried ease of a man who had learned that time was worth sitting in rather than moving through. The questions he asked that were actually questions, not conversation filler. The way he'd looked at me when I answered, like the answer mattered.
He hadn't been in for six weeks.
