Extra Shot

You have a ritual, and the ritual does not involve the machine.

Water just off the boil, poured carefully down the side of the bowl so it never scorches. The whisk sits loose between your fingers as you work it back and forth until the matcha turns bright and a thin layer of green foam gathers across the surface.

You do this every morning at the far end of the island, one hip against the cool marble, the city spread forty floors below you through walls of glass.

You take your time.

This is yours. The one part of the day nobody managed to ruin.

Three feet to your left sits the machine, all four thousand dollars of it.

You do not look at it.

Not looking takes effort, the same kind it takes to walk past someone you have decided not to see. The brushed chrome. The portafilter handle jutting toward you. The little dials Preston used to fuss over.

He talked about the thing the way some men talk about their cars. Nine bars of pressure. Thermal stability. Extraction time.

He would stand right where you are now, wearing his robe and pulling a shot while narrating the entire process, and you would watch from the bedroom doorway thinking he was a little ridiculous.

You thought it with tenderness then, and you loved him anyway.

You caught him in April.

You came home early because a shoot had been cancelled. There were two wine glasses in the sink and a coat draped over the back of a chair that was not yours, and you are not a stupid woman. You never were. Somewhere along the way, you had simply decided to stop paying the sharp kind of attention.

He did not cry. He did not beg.

He got dressed and started making calls, one after another, moving around the bedroom with the phone pressed to his ear as though the afternoon had done nothing more than rearrange his schedule.

That is the part that stayed with you.

Not your own crying, which came later and in private. The calls. The calm efficiency of them. How ordinary he made the whole thing look.

He was gone in a weekend.

The penthouse had been yours to begin with. Your name on it. Your down payment. Your view. There was not much to fight over except the things.

And Preston, who had walked out of a four-year engagement without once raising his voice, stood in the doorway Sunday night holding his last box and asked if he could take the espresso machine.

“No.”

“Come on. You don’t even drink coffee.”

“I know.”

He looked at you for a moment like he was deciding whether to explain why you were being unreasonable. Then he saw your face and changed his mind.

He left the machine.

You kept it because he wanted it, and at the time, that felt like reason enough.

Since April, it has sat untouched at the end of the counter. You have never turned it on. Never learned which button does what. Never cared to.

Most days, you barely notice it.

Most days.

The nights were the hard part.

You could handle the days. There was work, somewhere to be, people to talk to. Enough noise to keep your mind occupied.

After ten, the penthouse went quiet and somehow felt twice as large. Sometimes you would catch yourself listening for footsteps in the hall before remembering there was no one else coming.

You cried more than you would ever admit to anyone. Once, you turned on the shower to let the water warm up, forgot about it, and started crying when you heard it running from the bedroom because for half a second, you thought he was home.

None of it was dignified.

Which is how, six months after Preston left, you let your friend Dani talk you into having a tarot reader come to the apartment.

You did not believe in any of it. Dani would not let it go, the woman came highly recommended, and frankly, it gave you something to do on a Thursday night besides sit there alone.

Her name was Ruth. She was maybe sixty, small and calm, with rings on nearly every finger. There was nothing theatrical about her. She carried herself like a woman who had seen plenty of heartbreak before yours and did not find any of it particularly shocking.

She spread the cards across the island.

You do not remember most of what she said. Something about change. Something about letting go. A new beginning waiting for you if you were willing to see it.

You half listened. Mostly, you were being polite.

Then, near the end, Ruth turned over a card and went still.

She looked at it for a moment, then at you.

“Your happiness is sitting in the last place you would think to look,” she said. “And you walk past it every day.”

“That is very reassuring,” you said, in the tone you use when you mean the exact opposite.

She did not smile.

She held your gaze a second too long, then looked past you toward the counter.

Her attention caught on the machine and stayed there.

“May I?”

She was already crossing the kitchen before you realized what she meant.

Ruth touched the machine with two fingers and stood there for a moment, perfectly still. Then her expression shifted, just slightly.

Then she pulled her hand away.

A small smile touched her mouth, private and pleased, like she had just learned a little secret.

“Interesting,” she said.

“What is interesting.”

“Nothing at all.” She gathered up her cards. “Thank you for the tea. It was lovely.”

You walked her to the door. Dani hugged you in the hall, made you promise to eat something, and left with Ruth.

A couple of hours later, the apartment had gone quiet again.

You ended up back in the kitchen, staring at the machine.

The machine, predictably, did nothing.

You stared at it for another few seconds before realizing you were a grown woman standing alone in her kitchen waiting for an espresso machine to respond to you.

“Do not,” you said.

You were not entirely sure whether you meant the machine or yourself.

You turned off the lamp and headed toward the bedroom. At the doorway, you stopped and glanced back.

“Goodnight, you smug piece of garbage.”

Then you went to bed.

You would think about that later. The fact that you had said goodnight to it at all.

A few seconds after you left the kitchen, you heard a faint sound behind you.

A click. Maybe metal cooling. Maybe nothing.

You stopped in the hallway and listened.

Silence.