For a year and a half, that had felt like enough. Some days, it still did.
Other days, like today, with a dented trident charm sitting heavy in her jacket pocket, it felt more like hiding than living.
Around 9:30, a woman named Ruth Anders came in for her usual order. And while Ren rang her up, Ruth leaned on the counter and lowered her voice.
"I heard about this morning," she said. "On the bus."
Ren kept wiping down the espresso machine. "News travels fast."
"It's a small town, honey. News doesn't travel. It just hangs in the air, and everybody breathes it in eventually."
Ruth shook her head. "That Colton boy. His mother would be ashamed, God rest her. She was a kind woman. I don't know what happened between her passing and now, but that boy's turned into something she never would have recognized."
"People change," Ren said noncommittally, sliding a paper bag with a cinnamon roll across the counter.
"Some people change because life humbles them," Ruth said. "Other people just get worse the longer nobody stops them. I worry it's the second kind with him."
She paid, tucked her change into a worn coin purse, and buttoned her coat back up against the morning chill.
"You take care of yourself, Ren. This town's better for having you in it, whether folks say so out loud or not."
Ren watched her go, the bell over the door ringing once behind her, and felt something loosen slightly in her chest.
It wasn't much. A kind word from an old woman on her way to somewhere else. But she'd learned in the last year and a half to let small kindnesses count for exactly as much as they were worth, instead of dismissing them the way she used to, back when the only currency she trusted was competence under pressure.
Kindness was its own kind of competence, she was starting to understand. It just didn't come with a rank or a ribbon attached.
At 11, an older man in a faded Army cap came in for his usual. Black coffee, no sugar, and a corner piece of the cornbread, if there was any left.
"Morning, Frank," Ren said, sliding the coffee across the counter before he even asked.
Frank Delaney was 71 years old, with a cane he leaned on more for company than for need, and eyes that had spent decades reading people before they spoke a word. He noticed the small scrape on her jacket collar, the place where the cord had rubbed against her skin when it snapped.
"You all right, kid?" he asked.
"I'm fine, Frank."
"You say that like it's the answer to every question anybody could ever ask you."
Ren almost smiled. Almost. "Maybe it is."
Frank took his coffee to his usual table by the window, the one that looked out onto Main Street, and settled in with the newspaper he never actually read anymore. Just held, out of habit. Like some men hold a hat they no longer wear outside.