“You need help with the rest of your stuff?”

She blinks. “This is it.”

“That’s … that’s it?” Myla says. “That’s everything?”

“Yeah.”

“You don’t, uh.” Myla’s giving her this look, like she’s realizing she didn’t actually know anything about August before agreeing to let her store her veggies alongside theirs in the crisper. It’s a look August gives herself in the mirror a lot. “You don’t have any furniture.”

“I’m kind of a minimalist,” August tells her. If she tried, August could get her five boxes down to four. Maybe something to do over the weekend.

“Oh, I wish I could be more like you. Niko’s gonna start throwing my yarn out the window while I’m sleeping.” Myla smiles, reassured that August is not, in fact, in the Witness Protection Program. “Anyway, we’re gonna go get dinner pancakes. You in?”

August would rather let Niko throw her out the window than split shortstacks with people she barely knows.

“I can’t really afford to eat out,” she says. “I don’t have a job yet.”

“I got you. Call it a welcome home dinner,” Myla says.

“Oh,” August says. That’s … generous. A warning light flashes somewhere in August’s brain. Her mental field guide to making friends is a two-page pamphlet that just says: DON’T.

“Pancake Billy’s House of Pancakes,” Myla says. “It’s a Flatbush institution.”

“Open since 1976,” Niko chimes in.

August arches a brow. “Forty-four years and nobody wanted to take another run at that name?”

“It’s part of the charm,” Myla says. “It’s like, our place. You’re from the South, right? You’ll like it. Very unpretentious.”

They hover there, staring at one another. A pancake standoff.

August wants to stay in the safety of her crappy bedroom with the comfortable misery of a Pop-Tarts dinner and a silent truce with her brain. But she looks at Niko and realizes, even if he was faking it when he touched her, he saw something in her. And that’s more than anyone’s done in a long time.

Ugh.

“Okay,” she says, clambering to her feet, and Myla’s smile bursts across her face like starlight.

Ten minutes later, August is tucked into a corner booth of Pancake Billy’s House of Pancakes, where every waiter seems to know Niko and Myla by name. The server is a man with a beard, a broad smile, and a faded name tag that says WINFIELD pinned to his red Pancake Billy’s T-shirt. He doesn’t even ask Niko or Myla’s order—just sets down a mug of coffee and a pink lemonade.

She can see what they meant about Pancake Billy’s legendary status. It has a particular type of New Yorkness to it, something she’s seen in an Edward Hopper painting or the diner from Seinfeld, but with a lot more seasoning. It’s a corner unit, big windows facing the street on both sides, dinged-up Formica tables and red vinyl seats slowly being rotated out of the busiest sections as they crack. There’s a soda shop bar down the length of one wall, old photos and Mets front pages from floor to ceiling.

And it’s got a potency of smell, a straight-up unadulterated olfactory turpitude that August can feel sinking into her being.

“Anyway, Wes’s dad gave them to him,” Myla says, explaining how a set of leather Eames chairs wound up in their apartment. “A ‘good job fulfilling familial expectations’ gift when he started architecture school at Pratt.”

“I thought he was a tattoo artist?”

“He is,” Niko says. “He dropped out after one semester. Bit of a … well, a mental breakdown.”

“He sat on a fire escape in his underwear for fourteen hours, and they had to call the fire department,” Myla adds.

“Only because of the arson,” Niko tacks on.

“Jesus,” August says. “How did y’all meet him?”

Myla pushes one of Niko’s sleeves up past his elbow, showing off the weirdly hot Virgin Mary wrapped around his forearm. “He did this. Half-price, since he was apprenticing back then.”

“Wow.” August’s fingers fidget on the sticky menu, itching to write it all down. Her least charming instinct when meeting new people: take field notes. “Architecture to tattoos. Hell of a leap.”

“He decorated cakes for a minute in between, if you can believe it,” Myla says. “Sometimes, when he’s having a good day, you come home and the whole place smells like vanilla, and he’ll have just left a dozen cupcakes on the counter and dipped.”

“That little twink contains multitudes,” Niko observes.

Myla laughs and turns back to August. “So, what brought you to New York?”

August hates this question. It’s too big. What could possess someone like August, a suburban girl with a swimming pool of student loan debt and the social skills of a Pringles can, to move to New York with no friends and no plan?

Truth is, when you spend your whole life alone, it’s incredibly appealing to move somewhere big enough to get lost in, where being alone looks like a choice.

“Always wanted to try it,” August says instead. “New York, it’s … I don’t know, I tried a couple of cities. I went to UNO in New Orleans, then U of M in Memphis, and they all felt … too small, I guess. I wanted somewhere bigger. So I transferred to BC.”

Niko’s looking at her serenely, swilling his coffee. She thinks he’s mostly harmless, but she doesn’t like the way he looks at her like he knows things.

“They weren’t enough of a challenge,” he says. Another gentle observation. “You wanted a better puzzle.”

August folds her arms. “That’s … not completely wrong.”

Winfield appears with their food, and Myla asks him, “Hey, where’s Marty? He’s always on this shift.”

“Quit,” Winfield says, depositing a syrup dispenser on the table.

“No.”

“Moved back to Nebraska.”

“Bleak.”

“Yep.”

“So that means,” Myla says, leaning over her plate, “you’re hiring.”

“Yeah, why? You know somebody?”

“Have you met August?” She gestures dramatically to August like she’s a vowel on Wheel of Fortune.

Winfield turns his attention to August, and she freezes, bottle in her hand still dribbling hot sauce onto her hashbrowns.

“You waited tables before?”

“I—”

“Tons,” Myla cuts in. “Born in an apron.”

Winfield squints at August, looking doubtful.

“You’d have to apply. It’ll be up to Lucie.”

He jerks his chin toward the bar, where a severe-looking young white woman with unnaturally red hair and heavy eyeliner is glaring at the cash register. If she’s the one August has to scam, it looks like she’s more likely to get an acrylic nail to the jugular.

“Lucie loves me,” Myla says.

“She really doesn’t.”

“She loves me as much as she loves anyone else.”

“Not the bar you want to clear.”