We’ve been careful with each other. Professionally warm. The kind of warm that has a lid on it.
Keisha has been watching us the way a scientist watches a very slow chemical reaction.
This morning she sets two cups on the sorting table again. I look at her. She looks at the sky.
“Beautiful day,” she says.
“Keisha.”
“I’m just saying.”
Gael arrives twenty minutes later, and we fall back into the old rhythm almost immediately — walking the rows, checking the cherry density, debating the timing on the upper block. The sun is fully up now, burning the last of the cloud off the hills, and the plantation smells exactly the way it should: ripe and green and alive. I catch him smiling at something in the canopy, a small private smile, and I think, without meaning to: I missed this. I missed him specifically, not just the rhythm. That distinction matters.
We are in the middle of the lower terrace when I hear a car on the road.
I don’t think anything of it at first. Vehicles come and go during harvest — cooperative trucks, equipment suppliers, the occasional buyer wanting to see the operation. But then Keisha appears at the top of the terrace path, walking faster than she normally walks, and her expression is the one she wears when she’s deciding how to deliver bad news.
“Carmela.” She says my name carefully.
I straighten up from the cherry cluster I was examining. “What?”
“Someone’s here. He says he knows you.”
The he lands wrong. I know before she finishes the sentence.
Daniel walks down the terrace path like he still belongs on it. Dark jacket, city shoes already orange with dust, that particular easy confidence he carries everywhere, the kind that used to feel like warmth and eventually started to feel like a wall. He and I were together for two years. He left eleven months ago for a position in Bogotá, and I wished him well and meant it, mostly, and thought we were done.
“Carmela,” he says, smiling. “You look incredible. This place — God, I forgot how beautiful it is.”
Gael is standing three meters behind me. I don’t look at him. I can feel him the way you feel a change in temperature.
“Daniel.” I keep my voice even. “What are you doing here?”
“I was in Medellín for a conference. I thought —” He pauses, spreads his hands in that way he has, like the gesture explains everything. “I thought I’d come see the harvest. See how you’re doing.”
I know this move. Daniel shows up when he senses distance closing between you and something else. I don’t know how he senses it — some old instinct, some signal I didn’t know I was sending. But the timing is not a coincidence.
Keisha makes a sound that might be a cough and might be something else entirely.
“We’re in the middle of a walkthrough,” I say. “I’ll find you in an hour. Keisha can get you a coffee.”
He looks past me, clocks Gael for the first time, and something moves across his face. Recalibration. “Sure,” he says. “No rush.”
He lets Keisha lead him back up the path. I watch him go.
Then I turn around.
Gael is looking at the coffee rows. His jaw is set in a way it wasn’t five minutes ago.
“We should check the cherry density on the east block,” he says, not looking at me.
“Gael.”
“It’s fine, Carmela. It’s not my business.”
And there it is — the lid pressing down harder. I feel something tighten in my chest, and I make a decision.
“He’s an ex,” I say. “He left almost a year ago. I didn’t invite him.”
Gael is quiet for a moment. A bird calls somewhere in the shade trees above us, sharp and bright. The depulper chatters on in the distance.
“I know it’s not my business,” he says again, but softer this time, and he finally looks at me.
The look lasts too long to mean nothing.
“I still have your jacket,” I say.
I watch him absorb that. Watch the careful professional warmth shift into something less managed.
“I know,” he says quietly. “I didn’t come get it.”
“I noticed.”
Another silence, but a different kind. The kind that’s full rather than empty.
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