Chapter 8: The Ricocheting of Thoughts
The days after the walk with Victoria passed in a peculiar, muted key. For Yvonne, time felt like she was moving through a museum of her own life, observing exhibits labeled Relationship and Routine with a new, clinical detachment. She smiled at Salim, listened to his excited plans for his street art article, cooked dinners where the conversation skimmed the surface like a flat stone. Her body was present, but her mind was elsewhere, sifting through the debris of that Friday afternoon sunbeam.
She made Victoria’s usual each morning, the meticulous process of the Chemex pour a meditative ritual. But Victoria didn’t come. The absence was its own presence, a quiet question mark hanging in the steam.
Now, it was late Thursday, the sky outside the café windows a deep, bruised violet. The last customer, a graphic designer who came to sketch in the quiet hours, had finally packed away her tablet and left with a soft wave. The hum of the espresso machine was silenced. The only sounds were the slosh of soapy water in the sink and the rhythmic shush of Joost’s broom across the worn floorboards.
Yvonne wiped down the marble countertop for the third time, her movements slow, methodical. The cinnamon scent had faded, replaced by the clean, sharp odor of citrus sanitizer.
“You’re gonna polish a hole in it,” Joost said, leaning on his broom. His voice echoed slightly in the empty space.
She didn’t look up. “Just making sure it’s clean.”
“It’s clean. It was clean an hour ago.” He paused. “You’ve been weird all week. Quiet weird. Not sick weird.”
“I’m not weird.”
“You are. You minced the chocolate for the Streusel yesterday without humming. You always hum the Bowie song when you mince chocolate.”
She finally stopped, the cloth limp in her hand. She looked at him. He stood in the middle of the room, a tall, pale question mark in the half-light, his blonde hair a chaotic halo from a day of work.
“Joost,” she said, her voice quieter than she intended. “Can I ask you something? A guy’s opinion.”
He straightened up, instantly alert. Gossip radar pinging. “Always. Shoot.”
She took off her glasses, pinched the bridge of her nose. The red frames left temporary dents in her skin. She chose her words with the care of someone defusing a bomb. “Hypothetically. If you were with someone. And you got the sense… the strong sense… that they were maybe thinking about ending things. How would you want to find out?”
The silence that followed was profound. The shush of the broom had stopped. She heard the distant wail of a siren somewhere in Kreuzberg.
Joost’s eyes were wide. He slowly propped the broom against a table and took a few steps closer, his lanky frame moving with sudden caution. “Hypothetically,” he said, the word hanging in the air.
“Yes.”
“This hypothetical guy. Is he… kind of self-involved? Prone to grand gestures that miss the point? Possibly named after a spicy sausage?”
“Joost.”
“Right. Hypothetical.” He ran a hand through his hair, making it stand even more on end. He leaned against the counter opposite her, his face uncharacteristically serious. “Okay. Well. First, I’d probably be pretty blind to the sense she was giving off. Guys are stupid like that. We see the dinner made, the laundry folded, the… the presence, and we think the engine’s still running. We don’t check the oil.”
Yvonne felt a lump rise in her throat. He was describing Salim’s exact blindness, the blanket she had woven so well it had become invisible.
“So,” he continued, studying her face, “if she’s at the point of knowing she wants out, he’s probably missed a thousand signals. So the how… it’s gonna hurt him no matter what. It’s a grenade. You can’t throw a grenade gently.”
She flinched.
“But,” he said, holding up a finger. “If it were me? I wouldn’t want it in public. That’s humiliation, not honesty. And I wouldn’t want it over text. That’s cowardly. I’d want it straight. In a place that felt… neutral, maybe. But private. So I could be a mess about it if I needed to be.” He cocked his head. “And I’d want to know why. Not, like, a list of my faults. But the real why. The ‘you don’t see me’ why. Even if it wrecked me.”
The accuracy of his assessment was terrifying. This nineteen-year-old boy had just articulated the anatomy of a respectful breakup with more clarity than she had found in days of silent agonizing.
“That’s… surprisingly mature,” she whispered.
He gave a half-shrug. “My parents divorced. I watched the grenade get thrown. It was in the kitchen. Lots of broken plates.” He paused, his youthful bravado fading. “This isn’t hypothetical, is it, Yvonne?”
The direct use of her name, stripped of any ‘boss’ or teasing, undid her. She looked down at her strong, capable hands, red from hot water and chemicals. They could calibrate a grinder, coax life from soil, create perfect microfoam. They felt utterly useless now.
“No,” she admitted to the countertop. “It’s not.”
He didn’t gasp or push for details. He just nodded, as if he’d finally confirmed a troubling diagnosis. “Are you sure?” he asked softly. “I mean, I’m Team You, always. But are you?”
She thought of the scheduled spark. The franchised dream. The lonely space in her own bed even when he was in it. She thought of the way Victoria had looked at her café—at her—and seen a complete, finished work of art.
“I think I’ve been sure for a while,” Yvonne said, her voice hollow. “I just didn’t have the words for it. Now I do. And having the words makes it… real. It makes me the person who has to do the wrecking.”
Joost was quiet for a long moment. “He doesn’t see it,” he said finally. “Salim. He really doesn’t. He was in here Monday, talking about some gallery opening he wants you both to go to. He’s planning a future you’re not in.”
Each word was a cold stone dropping into her stomach. The confirmation was a relief and a horror.
“What do I do?” The question escaped her, small and desperate, more for herself than for him.
Joost pushed off the counter and picked up his broom again, not to sweep, but to have something to hold. “You do what you just said. You be the person who does the wrecking. Because the alternative is letting everything inside you wreck itself, slowly. And this place…” He gestured around the café with the broom handle. “This organism can’t run on a hollow heart. I see that now, too.”
Tears blurred her vision, threatening to spill over. She put her glasses back on, the world snapping into sharp, painful focus.
“I’m scared,” she said, the admission shocking her with its rawness.
“Yeah,” he said, simple and honest. “That’s how you know it matters.” He started sweeping again, a soft, rhythmic sound in the quiet. “When you decide… if you need an alibi or a distraction or just someone to… I dunno, hide the breakable stuff beforehand… you tell me.”
A watery, choked laugh escaped her. The absurdity of it—this kid offering to be an accomplice in the unraveling of her life—cracked the tension just enough.
“Thank you, Joost.”
“Don’t thank me yet. I’m gonna have to hear all the messy details. It’s part of my wage.” He shot her a lopsided grin, but his eyes were kind.
She finished wiping the counter, the action final this time. The café was clean, ordered, ready for tomorrow’ cycle. Her own life felt like a tangled pile of unspooled thread.
As she turned off the main lights, leaving only the small bulb over the cash register glowing, she knew what she had to do. The neutrality, the privacy, the honest why. It wasn’t about finding the right moment. It was about stopping the wrong future from happening.
She locked the door, the click of the deadbolt a definitive sound in the Berlin night. The decision was no longer a stone in her shoe. It was a path, dark and uneven, stretching out before her. And for the first time in a long time, the very act of choosing a direction felt like a terrifying, necessary kind of breath.
And for the first time in a long time, the very act of choosing a direction felt like a terrifying, necessary kind of breath.
She climbed the narrow, wooden staircase to the apartment, each step a hollow drumbeat against the silence. The familiar scents of her own space—drying herbs, the earthy smell of potted monstera, Salim’s clove cigarettes—wrapped around her like a ghost. She pushed the door open, its hinge groaning a soft complaint.
Salim was sprawled on the worn velvet sofa, a video game controller idle in his hands. The pixelated glow of the television screen painted his face in shifting blues and reds. He didn’t turn, his focus on some paused, fantastic battle. “Hey, you,” he said, his voice easy, absorbed. “Joost finally let you escape? I was about to send a search party.”
Yvonne stood in the doorway, her apron still on, her body a block of solid oak. She could see the back of his head, the dark curls against the cushion. She could see the ashtray on the floor, full. The grenade was in her hand. Her finger was on the ring.
“Salim.”
Something in that single syllable—the fracture, the weight—made him move. He paused the game, the sudden silence abrupt, and twisted to look at her over the sofa’s back. His charming, lazy smile faltered. “What’s wrong? Did something break downstairs? The machine again?”
She shook her head, her dreadlocks heavy on her shoulders. The words Joost had gifted her—the ‘you don’t see me’ why—dissolved into static. “We need to talk.”
He sat up fully now, turning off the television with a click of the remote. The room plunged into the dim, yellow light of her favorite floor lamp, casting long shadows from the spider plants. “Okay,” he said, drawing the word out. His eyes tracked over her, from her clenched hands to the tense line of her jaw. “You’re white as a sheet. Yvonne, what is it?”
“I can’t… here.” The air in the apartment was too thick, too saturated with their shared history. It would catch the words, smother them. “Let’s go out. For a walk.”
“Now? It’s nearly eleven.” He frowned, a crease appearing between his brows. It was his concerned face, the one he used when she was overtired from a double shift. It felt like a replica.
“Please.”
That one word, so strained and un-Yvonne-like, did it. He stood, his movements uncharacteristically slow, and reached for his jacket draped over a chair. “Alright. A walk. Did you eat? You get shaky when you don’t eat.”
She didn’t answer, just turned and went back down the stairs, hearing his footsteps follow. They exited through the café’s back door into the cool, damp night of the courtyard. The Hinterhof was a concrete square shared by their building and three others, a kingdom of bicycle sheds and discarded盆栽. In its far corner, barely visible in the spill of light from a few kitchen windows, stood the playground.
It was a relic: a rusty swing set, a faded rocket ship climbing frame, a roundabout that squealed like a tortured animal. Empty. Always empty at this hour.
She walked toward it, her Keds silent on the paving stones. Salim caught up, falling into step beside her. He didn’t take her hand. The space between their swinging arms felt continental.
“You’re scaring me a little,” he said, his voice softer now, closer to real worry.
They reached the border of the play area, the recycled rubber mulch soft underfoot. Yvonne stopped beside the rocket ship, her hand going to its chipped, cold metal. She focused on the sensation, the solid reality of it anchoring her.
“I don’t know how to start,” she said, the words leaving her like a thin exhale.
“Start with what’s wrong.” He moved to face her, his features unclear in the half-light. “Did I do something? Forget something? That anniversary isn’t until next month, I swear I wrote it—”
“It’s not an anniversary, Salim.” She heard the sharpness in her own voice and recoiled from it. She tried again, softer. “It’s not about a forgotten date. It’s about… the days. All of them.”
He was quiet, waiting. She could see the glint of his eyes, watching her.
“I feel alone,” she said, and the truth of it, voiced aloud, was both a puncture and a release. “I have felt alone. In our apartment. In my own life.”
He blinked. “Alone? But I’m there. Almost every day.”
“That’s the worst part.” Her fingers tightened on the metal. “You’re there. You’re on the sofa. You’re in the kitchen, making coffee. You’re in my bed. And I am still, utterly, alone. Because you don’t see me. You see the person who makes the coffee, who keeps the home, who listens to the ideas. You don’t see the person who has her own ideas. Who is tired.”
Salim’s mouth opened, then closed. He took a half-step back, as if her words had a physical force. “That’s… that’s not true. I see you. I love you.”
“You love the version of me that fits into the space you’ve made around yourself.” The sentences came easier now, tumbling out like stones she’d been carrying for miles. “The space is small, Salim. It’s the space of your procrastination, your potential. There’s no room for my exhaustion. Or my ambition. Or my changes.”
“What changes?” He ran a hand through his hair, genuinely bewildered. “What ambition? You have the café. You love the café.”
“I do.” She nodded, a sharp movement. “And someone recently looked at it, and at me, and saw an empire. You look at it and see my cute little hobby that pays our rent while you write your article.”
He flinched. “That’s a low blow.”
“It’s the truth.” Her voice broke. “It’s the truth I’ve been swallowing for two years. I am a place for you to rest. I am not a person you are building something with.”
The silence that followed was a physical thing, a cold, dense fog settling in the hollow of the playground. Salim stared at her, his expression shifting from wounded confusion to something harder, brighter. The concern evaporated from his face, leaving behind a slick of defensive anger.
He barked out a laugh, a short, sharp sound that startled a pigeon from the gutter above. "Building? You want to talk about building?" He gestured wildly back toward the building, toward the café. "You built that! You spent two years building that place! Every euro, every hour, every thought. What was I supposed to do? Stand there holding a level?"
"This isn't about the café," Yvonne said, her voice thin with the effort of holding steady.
"It is!" he insisted, the words gaining momentum, fueled by a frustration she now realized had been simmering for years. "It absolutely is. Don't you see? It's the same thing."
He stepped closer, his figure blocking the dim light from the kitchen window. "We were happy before that place. Weren't we? Remember that attic flat in Neukölln? The one with the leaking skylight? We were broke. We shared a single bike. And we were happy. We’d lie on that shitty IKEA mattress and talk for hours. We’d make dinner from whatever was left in the discount bin. That was us."
Yvonne remembered. The memory was sweet, but it felt like a photograph of a different person. A younger, softer woman who found romantic poetry in shared poverty.
"You were writing then," she whispered. "Really writing. You had fire."
"My fire didn't pay the bills!" he shot back, his voice cracking. "Your coffee does. And then suddenly, it wasn't just coffee. It was suppliers, and health codes, and staff schedules, and which fucking shade of green for the walls. It was always the café. The café needed you. The café was your dream. What was I? The backdrop?"
He was rewriting their history, painting himself as a casualty of her ambition. The hurt was a swift, surgical cut, deep and clean.
"You never said that," she breathed, the cold from the rocket ship seeping into her palms. "You said you were proud."
"I was! I tried to be." He shoved his hands deep into his jacket pockets, his shoulders hunching. "I tried to accept it as part of you. But it's not a part, Yvonne. It's a totality. It swallowed you. The woman I fell for—the one who’d read graphic novels in the bath, who’d want to go dancing on a Tuesday, who had time for my stupid ideas—where did she go? Café Klee took her."
Each word was a precise strike, aiming for the very heart of her sacrifice. He framed her labor, her creation, her tangible proof of existing in the world, as a theft. He blamed the one thing that was wholly, unequivocally hers.
The pain was so immense it was quiet. It hollowed out her chest, leaving a cavern where her heart beat against cold, empty air. She looked at him, really looked, at the man she had loved in the attic with the leaky skylight. He was a ghost haunting the life she had built from the ground up.