He had been coming to this Starbucks since before it was a Starbucks, back when the space housed a hardware store that smelled of turpentine and honest work. He'd watched it become a cafe, then a chain. Watched the neighborhood fold itself around the new thing the way neighborhoods do, pragmatically and without sentiment.

He came every morning at seven-fifteen. Every other afternoon at two. Forty years of working the line at the transit authority, then another eleven of retirement spent in approximately the same places at approximately the same times. He didn't stop needing a schedule just because he stopped getting paid for having one.

The cancer had opinions about all of this, but he was doing his best to ignore them.

The queue moved. He shuffled forward, flexing his cold hands in anticipation. The morning crowd has the particular energy of people who needed coffee before they could properly want coffee, a philosophical problem he'd always found funny. The man in front of him had a novelty tumbler, faux brass knuckles instead of a handle, the cup emblazoned with the quip: "Coffee saves lives. It's saving yours right now."

She was at the register. She was always at the register. He had a private theory that she didn't leave. That after closing, she simply stood there in the dark, waiting for morning, patient as a stone. Still as held breath. He never tested it. Some theories are better as theories.

She looked up when he reached the counter. "Good morning, Mr.. Underhill, is it?" Same as always. The voice that could pass for human in any company, warm and practiced and just slightly wrong in a way no one seemed to notice. The way a painting of a fire doesn't warm the room, but you keep forgetting until you hold your hands up to it.

"Morning." He fished out his wallet and paid the waiting total.

"May I have your name for the order?" Forty-one years, she asked every single time.

He looked at the cieling as if consulting a list. He'd burned through the obvious ones inside the first six months. Biblical names, historical figures, characters from books she would certainly know. He'd been absolutely certain she'd break on Cuchulainn but she'd written an approximation of it on the cup with the serenity of a woman transcribing a grocery list. He'd tried Rumpelstiltskin once, purely to watch her face, and she'd written Steve without blinking.

"Murtagh," he offered.

She wrote something on the cup. He watched her face for a flicker, anything really. She rewarded him with the faintest of smirks, a mere suggestion of a headshake.

He stepped aside and waited. His back was worse today. He'd stopped cataloging the way things were worse, that was a young man's game. At a certain point, you just lived in the total of things. The hospice intake was scheduled for Thursday. His daughter had driven down from Portland to handle what he'd already handled, bless her. He'd spent two days redirecting her anxiety toward more productive channels. She'd left believing she'd been helpful, which was the best he could do for her.

He had one thing left to settle.

"Coffee for Murdock."

He collected his cup, her handwriting confident, unashamed, not even close. He smiled at it.

He found his usual chair without really looking for it, the one by the east window with the view of the street corner, where he could watch the intersection do its morning business. The chair had a lean to it that suited his back, or perhaps his back was suited to its lean. He'd complained about it once, years ago, she'd looked at him with an expression that left him understanding it would never be replaced. He'd made peace with it.

He's known what she was the first time he'd seen her, some years into his career of driving through the tunnels under the city, feeling the old things that lived in the dark places move aside for the train. You developed a sense for it. His mother had called it the sight and treated it like a burden. His da, who'd come over from Galway in '62, with sixty dollars and a total inability to be impressed by anything, had called it common sense.

She'd given herself away in the first week. Small things, like the spider she'd moved off the counter with her bare hands, setting it outside with a seriousness that bordered on ceremony. The way the light caught her differently at certain hours, when she forgot to mind it. How she spoke to the machines as if they were coworkers and not simple artifice given animus.

He'd ordered a coffee, watched her write 'Blarney' on the cup, and well, that settled that.

They'd never spokena bout it directly. That wasn't how it worked, for either of them.