Page 65 of Rise
Iris exhaled like she’d just seen the first bloom of spring.
“That’s it,” Iris whispered. “That’s the headline.”
Hazel let out a soft breath. Not quite a laugh, not quite a sigh. Her thumb stroked idly over the seam of the sweater, comforted by its weight. Her chest felt tight, but not with fear.Withlonging.With the ache of something unfamiliar beginning to grow inside her, something warm and steady and terrifyingly real.
“So… what are we calling this, then?” Iris asked, chin resting on her hand, eyes twinkling with far too much glee for Hazel’s liking.
Hazel blinked, her hand stilling on its path towards her water glass. “What do you mean?”
Iris leaned forward, lowering her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Is this a situationship? A slow-burn epic? Or maybe—“
“Iris.” Hazel shot her a look, somewhere between a plea and a warning.
“What?” Iris raised both palms innocently, though her grin betrayed her. “Oh, don’t give me that look. I’ve been married, happily, for like a billion years. Let me live vicariously through you. I haven’t felt a romantic rush in a decade unless you count when my wife comes home with an extra bag of organic fertilizer I didn’t have to ask for.”
Hazel shook her head, but her mouth tugged at the corners. “There’s nothing to call it. It’s… it’s not a thing.”
“No?” Iris arched a brow. “Because it suresoundedlike a thing. Feels like a thing, too. You’re wearing the man’s clothes, Hazel.”
Hazel looked down at the sweater, as if she could pretend for a second that she hadn’t noticed it still wrapped around her like a second skin. As if it hadn’t comforted her the whole morning.
“I don’t know what it is,” she admitted, softer now. “I don’t know what he wants. Or what I want, really.”
Iris’s expression gentled.
“Well,” she said, folding her hands on the table like she was preparing to deliver some great, cosmic truth. And knowing Iris, she probably was. “It doesn’t have to be a thing yet. But whatever it is, it matters. You don’t look the way you just looked talking about him and then walk away untouched.”
Hazel didn’t answer right away. Her fingers found the rim of her glass again, slow and steady.
She knew Iris was right. But knowing something and being ready to say it aloud were two very different things.
Still, she felt her voice tug toward honesty, even just a little.
“I think I’m scared itissomething,“ she admitted, her voice so quiet it barely crossed the table. “Because what if it is real and it disappears? What if I get used to it and then he leaves? People do that with me. They let me down. A lot.”
Iris reached across the table and covered Hazel’s hand with her own, her touch warm and steady.
“Then you let yourself feel it anyway,” she said, her voice softened by the weight of Hazel’s admission. Iris’s dark eyes were wide and warm as they stared into hers, comforting and reassuring in all the ways she didn’t know she needed. “Because sometimes, the scariest things end up being the best ones.”
And just as Hazel began to open her mouth, to say something else, something truer, the atmosphere shifted.
Not gradually butsuddenly,like a door opening somewhere unseen and letting in a draft.
Hazel felt it first in Iris, whose expression dimmed from soft to sharp in a single breath. She sat straighter, her hand withdrawing from Hazel’s, and folded her napkin with the kind of practiced grace that belonged to a different version of her. She had fixed her gaze on a point just past Hazel’s shoulder.
Then came the sound of heels, sharp and decisive against the polished floor. Not hurried, but measured. Intentional.
A moment later, the blonde woman from the day before— and from the opening day of the bakery— appeared like a trick of light,conjuredrather than born, pressed from the pages of a lifestyle magazine where nothing bled, nothing bent, nothing broke.
She wore a bone-coloured turtleneck and dark trousers, cropped to reveal the precise slope of her bare, pale ankles. Her shoes were cheetah print mules with pointed toes and a low, gold heel— an unexpected flourish, like something beautiful with teeth. Her posture could have sliced glass.
When her gaze landed on Hazel, it was cool and familiar. Not hostile, not yet. Just... searching for cracks. Evaluating.
She smiled, almost, but it didn’t quite reach her eyes. “Hazel. So nice to see you again.”
Hazel straightened automatically. The sound of her own name inthatvoice felt like being handed a slip of paper with something unpleasant written on it. “Hello,” Hazel offered, lifting a brow. “I don’t think we’ve been properly introduced.”
“I’m Imogen. I run Fork & Fable.”
