I COULD JUST GO home. I really could.

Craig props his chin on his hand and stares through the plate glass window, through the large, swooping white and gold letters that spell out Sucre Coeur — backwards of course, from his safely indoors perspective — as a tiny red Toyota goes careening down Queen Anne Avenue. The car's tires slide over the ice-sheened asphalt in front of the bakery, and Craig winces as it squeals through the intersection. Assuming I would make it home. The odds look good for neither pedestrian nor driver.

A decade of Januaries in Seattle and he has still not quite come to grips with the danger factor of winter here. Not that his native England hasn't got its share of dangerous cold weather, but he'd had eighteen years to get used to that before he took off for the States. By similar reckoning, he'll acclimate himself to Seattle nicely by his thirty-sixth birthday.

Then he'll move somewhere else. With a beach.

Craig observes how very, very far the sugary sprinkle of snowfall is from warm white sand, and sighs.

"Don't worry," says a voice, bright with amusement. "It could snow ten feet, and you'd still find a way to make it to the pub."

Adrenaline sends Craig spinning to face the voice while simultaneously jumping what must be a good foot into the air: not his most graceful moment. Heart racing, he collapses against the register stand. "Don't sneak around like that!"

Laughter, light and airy and free of any remorse or contrition whatever, floats from the depths of the bakery kitchen before the owner of the voice emerges and pools of shadow resolve into the diminutive shape of Sucre Coeur's best decorator. "Right," Sarita says, dropping the pink plastic trays she's carrying onto the marble top of the display case with a crash, "because when I'm wearing Docs and carrying a stack of trays, I am totally a sneaky ninja. Not my fault you weren't paying attention."

This is not an argument he will win with any dignity or grace, Craig understands — best not to try. "I didn't realize you were still here. Thought you'd gone out the back entrance when you started the dishwasher. I heard the door."

"I did go out the back entrance, to take the garbage out to the dumpster. As is part of my duties when closing, much like washing the display trays and putting them back." With exaggerated care, she pulls open the display cases and starts returning the trays, widening her already large dark eyes in mock astonishment. "Ooh, look, doing my job, ooh, I'm a freaky quiet ninja-slash-decorator."

"All right, you've made your point; I wasn't paying attention, shut it." He sticks his tongue out at her as he tugs at one of his dreads, willing himself to calm down, already.

"Weren't doing your job, either," Sarita observes, arching one delicate black eyebrow. "Register count? Inventory? Time off slips?"

Craig snorts and reaches beneath the counter for a zip bag and a manila envelope. "Done and dusted, thank you very much."

"Because you have to get to the pub, because it's Thursday." Again the mock innocence as Sarita closes the display case. She pretends to dust her thin hands together and hold them out for his inspection. "Yes?"

"Because our esteemed employer is coming to pick up the money and paperwork on her way to the airport; she's got a red-eye to Brussels." He draws himself up to his full five feet, eleven inches, more out of a reach for dignity than any attempt to intimidate Sarita, who is possessed of the impressive implacability of a Galápagos tortoise. "I always have the paperwork done early for Theodora anyway, whether she's off on holiday or not. I think I resent the implication you're making."

"That you go to the pub every Thursday, rain or shine or snow, because you have a routine and you like your routine?" She pokes at the messy bun of black curls piled atop her head, a pile that adds a good three inches to her height. Her attitude adds another foot at least. "What's to imply?"

"You make me sound dull." Craig pulls his coat and hat from the cupboard below the register and stacks them next to the zip bag and envelope. He checks the pockets of the puffy blue anorak, making sure the wax paper bundles he stashed away earlier are still there, and slides a glare at Sarita and her amused eyes. "I like things a certain way. Nothing wrong with that. That pub's got good microbrews and decent food. Not a bad place to spend a couple of hours before I go home."

"Alone, because you don't pick up anyone at the pub." Sarita rolls her eyes as she tugs her own winter gear from the cupboard and slips into a bright pink coat. She yanks a bright rainbow-knit cap down over her hair and tucks her stray curls under the wool. "Don't you — "

"Alone, because I usually have work to do when I get home from the pub," he retorts, raising his voice to carry over whatever lecture she is about to deliver about the human condition. His human condition, specifically. In the four years they've worked together, he's heard a thousand of these lectures, and they've only gotten worse since Sarita decided to enter the University of Washington's graduate philosophy program. God spare me the philosophy grad student's view of the world. "Which, tonight, includes a review of that blues band we saw last week. The arts district wants it for the debut issue of their new quarterly. I've got a deadline." He raises an eyebrow at her. "See? I don't only ever go to the pub. And I am not always alone. Took you with me that time."

"I didn't say you only ever go to the pub, I said you never deviate from routine, and your routine is that you go to the pub on Thursdays and you never go home with anyone," she corrects, her irritation and stern tone at distinctly stark odds with the fuzzy pink mohair mittens she's pulling on. "And that's —"

"A perfectly acceptable way to live, for me and a thousand other people in this world," he says, feeling no guilt or shame over interrupting her twice. Well. Perhaps some guilt. His mother would have shot him for being so rude. "It's nice. It's quiet. I like nice and quiet. My life is perfectly satisfactory by my standards, which is a good thing, as it's my life and all." Craig pauses and takes a closer look at Sarita. Tonight, at close range, her implacability seems more like a veneer than second nature. "Hey. What's your problem? You're giving me more shit than usual this week."

She knots a rainbow scarf at her throat with more aggresÂsion than is generally required for the task. "Nothing."

But Craig Oliver is the middle-ish child of a rambunctious, English, Caribbean and Scottish family, with all the patience such a position in life has forced him to develop, and so he stands and waits while putting on his own cap and gloves and he keeps a steady eye on her.

She gives in with a sigh and another of her expert eye-rolls but doesn't look at him, seeming to prefer instead the apparently fascinating sight of her mittened hand stroking the black and white marble top of the display case. "Sengupta family dinner tonight."

That is not usually something that upsets her to this degree, so Craig casts about for something that might. Ah. There. "So your sister and her husband are in town," he guesses — correctly, if the tight, flat line of Sarita's mouth is anything to go by.

Craig has never met Anjali Bhattacharyya, but watching the aftermath of clashes between Sarita and her...