Chapter 24: Errands
The Sunday morning sun poured into Café Klee like liquid honey, thick and slow. It caught the dust motes dancing above the empty tables and lit the steam rising from Yvonne’s first cup of black coffee into a faint, shimmering plume. The usual weekday clatter was absent, replaced by the deep, contented hum of a neighborhood sleeping in. Only the gentle hiss of the espresso machine and the soft crunch of Yvonne biting into a buttery croissant broke the silence.
Victoria sat on a stool behind the counter, knees drawn up, watching Yvonne move through the pre-opening rituals. She wore one of Yvonne’s old, soft band t-shirts and a pair of socks that were definitely not her own.Her own sharp clothes were folded neatly on a chair upstairs. This version of Victoria, sleep-soft and barefaced, was a secret only the Sunday morning light ever saw.
The bell above the door jangled, and Joost ducked in, his blonde hair tousled from the bike ride.“Morgen,” he mumbled, then froze, blinking at the scene. Yvonne was weighing coffee beans on the old brass scale. And Victoria, the sharp-suited consultant, was curled behind the counter like a cat, tracing patterns in the condensation on her water glass.
“Joost.Guten Morgen,” Victoria said, her voice still rough with sleep. She offered a small, private smile.“Right.Morning,” Joost recovered, shuffling to hang his jacket. He shot a look at Yvonne, who was hiding a grin behind her coffee cup. He’d gotten used to Victoria’s presence in the café during off-hours, but the domesticity of it—the shared socks, the easy silence—still sometimes threw him. “Do I, uh, stock the pastries first? Or is there a new, consultant-approved Sunday protocol?”
“Just the usual,” Yvonne said, wiping her hands on her apron. But her eyes kept drifting to the large, woven baskets she’d placed by the door, and to the canvas tote bag slung over a hook.Victoria noticed. She had been noticing Yvonne’s subtle restlessness for the past half-hour—the way her gaze lingered on the street outside, the absent-minded tapping of her fingers against the counter.It was a different energy from her usual focused calm.
“You’re getting ready to go out,” Victoria stated, her voice cutting through Joost’s clattering of trays.Yvonne blinked, caught. “Is it that obvious?”
“Blatantly,” Joost chimed in, arranging cinnamon rolls.“It’s the market bag. You only get that look when it’s Maybachufer market day. The competitive strawberry haze descends.”
A genuine laugh escaped Yvonne.“The strawberries are from Poland this week, not worth the frenzy. But the asparagus is ending, and the first local cherries are in. And,” she added, her gaze settling softly on Victoria, “I need basil.Mine is all gone. Pesto emergency.”
Victoria uncurled from the stool.The tile floor was cool under her borrowed socks. “I’ve never been to a proper Berlin food market.”
“It’s not a ‘proper’ anything. It’s chaos. Beautiful, smelly, loud chaos.” Yvonne’s eyes sparkled behind her red frames.“Joost can hold the fort for a few hours. Can’t you, Joost?”
“I am a fort-holding legend,” he declared, puffing out his chest.“But only if you bring me back one of those fried dough things with the sugar. The one that looks like a snarling hedgehog.”
“Berliner Pfannkuchen?” Victoria asked, one eyebrow raised.“No, the other one. The messy one.” Joost made a vague, swirling gesture with his hands.
“Schmalzkuchen,” Yvonne translated, already untying her apron.“It’s a deal.” She looked at Victoria. “Do you want to see the chaos?”
Victoria answered by sliding off the stool and heading for the stairs. “I need real shoes. And possibly a smaller bag for procurement.”
The market sprawled along the Landwehrkanal, a vibrant, shouting, olfactory avalanche of a place. The air was a layered symphony: overripe fruit, briny olives, sizzling sausages, the damp earth scent of bundled radishes, and the pungent sting of cheese stalls. Sun-bleached awnings flapped in the slight breeze, and a cacophony of languages—Turkish, Arabic, Vietnamese, German—bounced off the water and the cobblestones.
Victoria, in her sleek dark jeans and a simple linen shirt, was a still, observant figure in the current of purposeful shoppers. She watched as Yvonne transformed. Her amiable, slightly distracted café proprietress demeanor fell away, replaced by a gentle, focused precision.She touched tomatoes, assessing their firmness.She sniffed bunches of mint. She exchanged quick, fluent German with a vendor selling mushrooms, her questions specific and technical.
“You’re ruthless,” Victoria murmured, as Yvonne successfully haggled fifty cents off the price of a massive bundle of white asparagus, citing a tiny blemish at the tip.
“It’s a dance,” Yvonne said, tucking the parcel into her now-burgeoning bag. “They expect it. It’s respect.” She led Victoria to a cheese stall, where she sampled a piece of aged Bergkäse, her eyes closing in concentration. “Too salty,” she pronounced to the vendor, who laughed and offered her something milder.
Victoria felt a strange, warm pride swelling in her chest.This was Yvonne in her element, a different kind of competence. It was practical, sensory, utterly grounded. She wasn’t just buying food; she was conducting an orchestra of the season’s best offerings.
At a stall overflowing with vibrant herbs, Yvonne found her basil. She conversed with the elderly woman behind the table, asking after her grandson’s football tournament. As she turned away with two lush, fragrant plants, the woman called after her, nodding toward Victoria with a twinkling eye, “Die Neue ist hübsch. Hält sie dich auf Trab?”
Yvonne flushed, a deep rose spreading across her freckled cheeks. “Ja, jeden Tag,” she called back, and took Victoria’s hand, lacing their fingers together tightly.The simple, public claim made Victoria’s breath catch.
They bought Joost his messy, sugar-dusted Schmalzkuchen, ate warm, salty fries from a paper cone, and shared a cup of tart, fresh-pressed apple juice. As they walked, Victoria gradually moved from observer to participant. Yvonne would point to something—a strange knobby vegetable, a jar of neon-pink pickles—and Victoria would ask a question. She learned to spot the sheen on a fresh fish, the tautness of good poultry skin. When Yvonne debated between two baskets of strawberries, Victoria, drawing on some latent, forgotten instinct from long-ago market trips with her grandmother, pointed to the smaller, darker ones. “They’ll have more flavour.Less water.”
Yvonne looked at her, surprised and delighted. “You’re right.” She bought the smaller berries.
Later, laden with bags, they found a spare bench by the canal.The water glittered, scattered with reflections of the bustling scene. Yvonne unpacked a still-warm plum tart she’d bought and broke it in two, handing Victoria the larger piece.For a while, they just ate in comfortable silence, watching the barges glide past.
“My family,” Victoria began, her voice quiet against the market’s din, “if we did this, it would be a military operation.A list, executed with maximum efficiency. In and out.” She took a bite of the tart, the sweet plum filling bursting on her tongue. “No dancing.No samples. Definitely no questions about football tournaments.”
Yvonne wiped a crumb from the corner of Victoria’s mouth with her thumb.“That sounds lonely.”
“It was. It is.” Victoria leaned into her touch, then looked at her, the vulnerability from the previous night resurfacing, but softer now, weathered by the morning sun.“This is the opposite of lonely. It’s… overwhelming.But in a good way. Like diving into a cold lake.”
Yvonne smiled, understanding.“Too much?”
Victoria considered it. The noise, the smells, the sheer life of it all. Then she looked at the canvas bag at their feet, full of food they would eat together, at the basil plants for the pesto Yvonne would make tonight, at the sugar dusting Joost’s pastry in its paper bag. She saw their future, not in grand gestures, but in these small, shared procurements.
“No,” she said finally, decisively.“It’s just enough. It’s practice.”
“Practice?”
“For staying.” Victoria said it simply. She wasn’t fixing her flight or renouncing her life in London. She was just naming the act of being present, fully, in the chaotic, lovely now.It was a muscle, and it was sore, but it was working.
Yvonne’s eyes grew bright.She didn’t say anything. She just leaned over, her shoulder pressing against Victoria’s, and rested her head against hers. They sat like that, two points of stillness amidst the river of people, watching the Sunday unfold on the water.
On the walk back, the bags seemed lighter.The sun was higher, warmer. As they turned onto their own quieter street, the market’s roar fading into a pleasant buzz behind them, Yvonne shifted her grip on her basket.
“You know,” she said, “for a market novice, your strawberry judgement was impeccable.”
“Beginner’s luck,” Victoria demurred, but a pleased smile played on her lips.“Maybe. Or maybe you have a latent talent for procurement.” Yvonne nudged her.“I could use a good negotiator. My basil supplier is getting cocky.”
Victoria laughed, the sound clear and easy in the calm street.“My rates are high. Paid exclusively in plum tarts and Sunday mornings.”
They reached the café door. Through the window, they could see Joost, expertly handling a small queue of customers, a look of intense concentration on his young face. Yvonne watched him for a moment, a fond smile on her face, then turned the key.
The bell announced their return, bringing with them the scent of fresh produce and outside air. Joost looked up from the espresso machine.“Success?”
Yvonne hefted the bag with his pastry. “Success.”
The scent of basil and ripe cherries still clung to their clothes as they slipped back into the café’s familiar embrace. Joost finished serving a cappuccino to a regular, his eyes darting to their full bags and intertwined hands. “The fort,” he announced with a flourish, “remains unbreached.” He nodded at the pastry bag Yvonne extended. “And the tactical sugary support is appreciated.”
The afternoon unfolded in a gentle, sun-dappled rhythm. Victoria returned to her book, migrating from a window seat to a stool at the far end of the counter, her presence a quiet anchor in the room. Yvonne and Joost managed the relaxed trickle of Sunday customers—students with laptops, older couples sharing slices of cake, a few tourists lured in by the café’s ivy-framed windows. The air was filled with the soft clinking of cups, the murmur of low conversations, and the steady, comforting grumble of the coffee grinder.
By midday, a tranquil lull settled over the space. The last customer had departed, leaving behind a single crumpled napkin on a table. Joost busied himself wiping down the espresso machine, its stainless steel gleaming under his careful cloth. Victoria was circling the café like a benign ghost, straightening a chair here, admiring a new spider plant there, already moving with the unthinking familiarity of someone who belonged.
Yvonne sat behind the main counter, her brow furrowed in concentration. The haphazardly scribbled columns of numbers in her ledger swam before her eyes. She tapped the end of her pencil against her teeth, a soft clicking sound that punctuated the quiet. A discrepancy of twenty euros glared back at her, a small, nagging void in the day’s logic.
“Everything balances in the end, right?” Joost called over, polishing a steam wand. “It’s just maths.”
“Maths is a belief system,” Yvonne muttered, pushing her red glasses up her nose. “And my faith is shaky today.” She sensed Victoria’s gaze from across the room, a warm, observant pressure that normally steadied her. Now, it made her acutely aware of her own frustration, the chaotic handwriting that even she couldn’t decipher.
The silence stretched, comfortable but thick with Yvonne’s silent accounting battle. Joost leaned against the counter, surveying them both—Yvonne, lost in her numbers, and Victoria, who had paused by the bookshelf, watching Yvonne with a tender focus that changed the very light around her.
He broke the quiet with a playful smile.“You know, I just realized something.” His voice was light, teasing. “You two are a bit of a cliché.”
Yvonne looked up, blinking away the numbers.“What?”
“A classic.” Joost gestured between them with his polishing cloth. “The rich, confident businesswoman from London stops into a quiet neighborhood café. Gets utterly smitten with the practical, grounded barista with the great forearms.” He winked at Yvonne. “She learns the profound value of simple pleasures, of fresh basil and market strawberries. Her cold, corporate heart thaws in the Berlin sun.”
Victoria closed her book with a soft snap. A slow, wry smile touched her lips as she drifted back toward the counter. “And which one of us is the manic pixie dream girl in this scenario, Joost?”
“Oh, neither. That’s a different trope.This is pure fish-out-of-water, opposites-attract rom-com. Probably Netflix.” He counted off on his fingers.“Stranger in a strange land?Check. Life-changing, grounding influence?Check.It’s all there. The only thing missing,” he said, his tone dipping from theatrical to something more genuine, “is the third-act twist where the businesswoman ditches her fancy job to stay with the cute barista in her plant-filled apartment.”
The words hung in the air, playful on the surface but slicing cleanly through the cozy afternoon to the fragile truth beneath. Yvonne’s pencil went still. She watched Victoria, who had stopped walking, her expression unreadable.Yvonne forced a soft laugh, aiming for the same light tone. “You’ve been watching too much television.And I’m not that practical. My accounting system is a national security risk.”
“It’s the forearms,” Joost insisted, undeterred. “They’re very convincing.”
Victoria finally moved, coming to rest a hip against the counter next to Yvonne.She didn’t look at Joost. Her eyes were on Yvonne’s ledger, the chaotic evidence of her world. “The premise is flawed,” Victoria said, her voice quiet and precise.“I was never confident when I walked in here.I was tired. And she,” she gestured to Yvonne, “wasn’t some simple, grounding influence. She was a whole, complicated person who made coffee like it was a sacrament and remembered everyone’s story.That’s not a trope. That’s a revelation.”
The air seemed to contract, charged with the unsaid. The melancholy wasn’t an undercurrent anymore; it was in the room, sitting with them at the counter. The ticking clock on Victoria’s Berlin assignment, once a abstract future worry, now felt like a physical presence, measured in shared Sunday mornings and market visits.
Yvonne reached out, not looking, and her hand found Victoria’s where it rested on the counter.Her fingers, stained with pencil lead, laced with Victoria’s. It was an anchor. “Nobody’s ditching anything,” Yvonne said, her voice low, meant only for Victoria but carrying in the quiet café. “Netflix would mess that part up anyway.”
“They’d add a musical number,” Joost added, his own voice softer now, his teasing gentled by the raw emotion he’d inadvertently drawn to the surface.
Victoria looked down at their joined hands.She traced the callus on Yvonne’s thumb with her own. “The third act is always the messiest part,” she murmured. “That’s what makes it interesting.” She didn’t speak of deadlines or flights. She simply turned her hand over, palm up, an invitation and a confession in one.
Yvonne placed the troublesome ledger squarely into Victoria’s open palm.“Prove it,” she whispered, a challenge and a plea wrapped together.
Victoria stared at the ledger, then at Yvonne’s hopeful, anxious face. She slid onto the stool, pulled the ledger close, and without a word, began to decipher the chaos.
She slid onto the stool, pulled the ledger close, and without a word, began to decipher the chaos.
Her eyes, trained on spreadsheets and quarterly reports, scanned the cramped, passionate script. She saw not just numbers, but Yvonne’s entire process: the crossed-out sums, the coffee-ring stains, the impulsive side notes like ‘Joost late, but brought amazing apricots’ or ‘rainy Tuesday, extra cinnamon on everyone.’ It was a biography of the café, written in euros and cents. Victoria’s fingertip traced a column, her lips moving silently as she performed mental calculations, her focus so complete the very air in the café seemed to still around her.Yvonne watched, holding her breath. Joost paused his wiping, watching the consultant’s sharp profile.After a long moment, Victoria leaned back. She exhaled slowly, pushing the ledger gently toward the center of the counter. “Okay,” she said, her voice calm with a note of genuine surprise. “I’m stumped.”
Yvonne’s shoulders slumped a fraction.“See? It’s hieroglyphics.”
“It’s not that.” Victoria took off her thin-framed glasses and rubbed the bridge of her nose. “The logic is all there.It’s just… encrypted. In your own system.” A wry smile touched her lips.“We have an Excel wizard back in London, Stefan. He could find a rounding error in a billion-dollar merger. But he’d need a Rosetta Stone to read this first.”
Joost barked a laugh.“A wizard!You should fly him in. Special mission: decrypt the Klee.”
“The fee would be this entire café,” Victoria said dryly, slipping her glasses back on. “And possibly your firstborn.”
Yvonne propped her chin in her hands, a rueful smile spreading. “So, I’m doomed to eternal financial mystery. It’s part of my charm.”
“Exactly!” Joost leaned forward, his eyes lighting up.“See, this is what I was talking about before!It’s perfect. It makes her flawed.Believable.” He gestured at the ledger as if it were a crucial piece of evidence. “The movie barista isn’t just effortlessly perfect.She’s a mess with numbers! But she grows amazing basil and remembers your dog’s name. That’s depth.”
The word movie hung in the air, but the earlier melancholy had softened, transformed by their shared focus on the silly ledger.It was no longer a symbol of separation, but a shared puzzle.
Victoria looked at Yvonne, her head tilted. “So the flaw is part of the character.”
“The vulnerability,” Joost corrected, waving a finger. “Otherwise, what’s the conflict?She’s just a perfect person in a perfect café. Boring.”
A slow grin spread across Yvonne’s face. She reached over and poked the offending ledger.“So my tragic flaw is that I can’t add. And your flaw?” She turned the question to Victoria, her eyes playful.Victoria considered, tapping her own chin. “The cold businesswoman from London is secretly hopeless at… leisure.She doesn’t know how to have a Sunday. She has to be taught how to buy fruit.”
“Taught very patiently,” Yvonne added, her voice soft.“With great repetition,” Victoria agreed, holding her gaze.
Joost looked between them, a puppet master pleased with his creations. “And the third-act twist isn’t about quitting jobs.It’s about… merging skill sets!” He was warming to his revised theory. “The consultant creates a simple, beautiful tracking app for the café! The barista teaches the consultant how to taste coffee for real, not just consume caffeine.They build a… a hybrid thing. A consultancy-café. A cozy, profitable revolution.”
The image was so absurd—Victoria in her blazer running a spreadsheet while Yvonne explained soil pH to suited clients—that Yvonne snorted. A real, undignified snort of laughter that made her cover her mouth.
Victoria’s laugh was clearer, a bright, surprised sound she still wasn’t entirely used to hearing from herself. It echoed in the quiet café.
“A consultancy-café,” Yvonne wheezed, wiping her eyes. “We could serve espresso shots and pie charts.”
“The synergy,” Victoria deadpanned, her professional jargon turned into a joke. “The vertical integration of baked goods.”
Joost beamed, triumphant.“See?Better than Netflix. Our version.”
Their laughter wove together, dissolving the last of the tension. It wasn’t about avoiding the future; it was about inventing a new one, even just in jest, where their worlds didn’t collide destructively but combined into something bizarre and theirs. The ledger, forgotten for now, was just a prop in their own private, ongoing story.Yvonne reached out and closed the book with a definitive thump. “The flaw stands,” she declared. “The mystery of the missing twenty euros will remain one of life’s great unsolved questions. Alongside the real plot.”
“Which is?” Victoria asked, her voice low and warm.
Yvonne looked at her, then at Joost, then back at the sunlit, empty tables of her café. “How a Sunday feels long enough for once,” she said simply. “What we do with it.”
The momentum of the afternoon shifted, turning toward the intimate, unfolding hours yet to come.The ledger was closed. The conversation, however, felt newly open.