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make you a cup of coffee, she thought. And yet, the vast bulk of missing years was wedged between them, and there was nothing to say.
    â€œShe seems to trust you,” Thea said.
    His lips curled into a sneer. “She didn’t get it from her mother.”
    She took a step back—and just like that, he’d smacked her in the face with the past, the blunt force of it knocking her composure down. “Garret, we should talk—”
    He held up his hand: stop. Then he pushed open the screen door and went outside. She followed him to the doorway, watching him for a moment as he shoved his hands into his pockets and walked with his shoulders back and straight. Her heart cried out—traitor that it was. She hadn’t seen him in so long.
    â€œGarret!”
    She pushed open the door, one foot inside her house, the other on the sidewalk. The street was narrow, old, more alleyway than thoroughfare. He stopped and turned to look at her, the streetlamp just above his head, orange light falling down.
    All at once, shyness overtook her. With one word she felt as if she’d thrown herself at him. She pulled herself up straighter and tried to be cool.
    â€œThanks for doing this,” she said.
    â€œThis was for Jonathan,” he said.
    And then he turned, whistling, and walked away.

    From “The Coffee Diaries” by Thea Celik
    The Newport Examiner
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    Coffee has been controversial since its discovery, and the debate continues even now.
    Some studies proclaim coffee to be a miracle drug—its antioxidant properties are touted as the cure for cancer and age. Other studies decry coffee as the instigator of various diseases, since caffeine can trigger stress responses in the body and interfere with overall health.
    Caffeine wakes us up on rainy mornings or keeps us going when we lag, but it shouldn’t be forgotten that caffeine is a drug. One hundred cups of coffee will kill an average man.
    In nature, caffeine has a practical purpose: It’s a pesticide, a natural bug deterrent. Caffeine emitted from the roots of a coffee tree will keep other plants (including other coffee seedlings) from growing nearby.
    But there’s a downside to having a built-in toxicity. Caffeine becomes more concentrated with time, so if a coffee tree lives long enough, the caffeine that protects it from being harmed can also kill it in the end.

THREE

    Jonathan hadn’t gone looking for trouble. He’d never liked to make waves. But one night, when he was on a business trip meeting with a potential new client for the firm, there she was, at a hotel bar in Boston. She was not some femme fatale in a backless dress, not a wallflower either, but she was there, cliché as any stranger seems on first glance, so that later Jonathan felt that she might have been waiting—if not for him, then for someone like him. He—and she—could have been anyone.
    She was a graduate student passing through town to visit a friend. Her hair was highlighted blond and her laugh was easy. They’d struck up a conversation about Boston, and soon they were talking about baseball and then cooking and then politics, and then they were ordering another round of beers.
    He hadn’t made the decision to sleep with her lightly. Instead, he’d felt what had happened was a thing that he had let happen—as opposed to a thing he had done. He simply had to accept, to receive her, and not say no. In the musty elevator she’d pressed against him, her hips circling, and his body had responded with quick desperation. He was still vital. Alive, after all.
    In a hotel room that could have been any hotel room, she’d left him with bruises and bites. Jonathan was sure Thea would see the dark shadows her mouth had made on his chest—she would notice them at night when he took off his shirt. Or when he toweled off after a shower. Or when he climbed into their bed. He couldn’t separate his fear of the