Chapter Nine: The Routine
Saturday came.
Sebastian Thorne showed up at seven o’clock exactly.
He had been awake since four-thirty. He had stood in his closet for twenty minutes — which was twenty minutes longer than he had ever stood in a closet in his life — because every suit he owned was the wrong thing.
He did not own anything that was not a suit or workout gear.
He finally put on dark jeans and a simple gray sweater that his stylist had purchased for him two years ago and that still had the tag attached.
He cut the tag off with his keys in the elevator going down.
He brought nothing.
He had almost brought flowers. He had stood in front of a bodega on the corner at six-fifty-five with a bunch of orange tulips in his hand before putting them back.
Flowers were for a date.
This was not a date.
This was pancakes and a park. And he was a man trying to learn a routine. Not a man trying to impress anyone.
He arrived at the door with nothing but himself.
Which was both the simplest and the most terrifying thing he had brought anywhere in years.
Elena opened the door before he could knock.
Which meant she had heard him on the stairs. Which meant she had been listening.
From somewhere behind her, Chloe’s voice: “Is it him? Is it the friend?”
“Yes,” Elena called back, not taking her eyes off Sebastian.
She looked him up and down once. Taking in the jeans.
Something in her expression shifted by one small degree. Not warmth. Recognition.
She stepped back.
“Come in. Fair warning — Liam has already decided you’re on his team for the pancake topping debate. And Noah is in the middle of a feeling about the syrup bottle that I don’t fully understand yet.”
Sebastian walked in.
The apartment on a Saturday morning was a different country than the apartment on a Thursday evening.
The energy was horizontal rather than vertical. Spread everywhere. Low to the ground. Radiating from three small people who were in three different states of Saturday morning existence.
Chloe was entirely ready for the day — dress, shoes already on — sitting at the kitchen table with the focused impatience of someone who has been waiting for the activity to start for what felt to her like several decades.
Liam was at the counter in pajamas, making the case for chocolate chips in the pancake batter with the rhetorical commitment of a man who has prepared for this argument.
Noah was sitting on the kitchen floor.
Not in distress. But also not not in distress.
Holding the syrup bottle and examining it in the particular way he examined everything — deeply, quietly, as though he could solve it through sustained attention.
“The bottle is sticky,” Noah said without looking up. As though this explained everything.
And to Noah, it clearly did.
“We can wash it,” Sebastian said.
Noah looked up at him.
“I told Mama that.”
“And she said —”
“After pancakes.”
“That seems reasonable.”
Noah considered this. “It’s sticky now, though.”
Sebastian crouched down to Noah’s level. “Can I see it?”
Noah handed the bottle over with the solemnity of a person transferring a difficult responsibility.
Sebastian turned it over. Found the seam of dried syrup around the cap. Carried it to the sink. Ran warm water over it. Dried it with a paper towel. Handed it back.
The whole process took forty-five seconds.
Noah held the bottle. Turned it.
The stickiness was gone.
He looked at Sebastian with the measured approval he gave to solutions that actually worked.
“Thank you,” Noah said.
He got up from the floor. Put the bottle on the table. Climbed into his chair.
Apparently satisfied that the day could now proceed.
Liam, watching this from the counter, said, “He does that. Fixates on things.”
“I know,” Sebastian said.
Liam squinted at him. “How do you know?”
Sebastian paused. “Your mom mentioned it.”
Liam accepted this and returned to his argument about chocolate chips.
Elena was watching Sebastian from across the kitchen with an expression she was not entirely managing to keep neutral.
He caught her eye.
She looked away first. Which was unusual enough that he noted it and said nothing.
The pancake process took forty minutes and produced a volume of batter-related chaos that Sebastian found completely, bewilderingly absorbing.
Liam won the chocolate chip argument by attrition.
Chloe added strawberries without asking, and this was accepted as a fait accompli.
Noah ate his plain — which he had apparently always done, and which Elena said was simply who Noah was: a person who believed in things as they were fundamentally intended.
Sebastian ate his with strawberries and chocolate chips because Chloe had plated them for him personally and looked at him expectantly.
They were objectively excellent.
“These are the best pancakes I’ve ever had,” he said.
Chloe beamed. “Mama makes them.”
“I know.”
“She puts vanilla in the batter. That’s the secret.”
“Chloe,” Elena said without heat. “That’s our secret.”
“He can know,” Chloe said with absolute confidence. “He’s nice.”
The table went briefly quiet in the way that tables go quiet when a child has said something that lands differently for the adults than it was meant to.
Elena picked up her coffee cup.
Sebastian looked at his plate.
Liam, oblivious, requested a second pancake.
