Coffee-shop warmth in space
A beloved local institution, professional stakes, careful honesty, and two people learning what it means to protect warmth without turning each other into projects.
Warmth is something you choose to make.
Linnet Ashworth has run The Long Steep, Thistledown's only coffee shop, its worst-tech and best-loved institution, for fifteen years. She knows every regular's order, every mug on the hook, every rhythm of a settlement that built its days around her.
What she does not need is someone turning up with plans to replace all of it with something faster, newer, and theoretically better. And she definitely does not need to like the contractor they sent to do it.
Callum Pruitt has spent twenty years being good at jobs that do not remember him. Show up, finish the build, leave. Except then he walks into The Long Steep and sees exactly what his work is threatening, and he starts doing math he was not supposed to do.
The technical problem is easy to name. The contractual one is harder. What to do about either, when telling the truth means torching the job and staying quiet means being exactly the kind of man Linnet already learned to stop trusting, is where things get complicated.
coffee shopworkplace tensionslow burnforced proximity
Book 3
Keeping it Warm stands alone, but it follows Small Repairs in the Thistledown release order.