Zoe

Zoe ate quickly, more focused on the day ahead than on the food. She picked an outfit with the speed of habit, cleaned the smudges of dried paint off her fingers, and stepped outside just as a breeze swept the scent of morning bread across the street. She reached the gate without noticing the pencil still tucked behind her ear, worn down and chewed slightly at the end.

It was a gift from her cousin Jean, who always had a way of giving objects people will really use. Jean had started out wanting to bake cakes for a living. She had spent years chasing the dream of airy meringues and buttery layered sponges. But life in professional kitchens rarely follows the recipe. She ended up in savoury work instead, elbows deep in stock pots and spice rubs, and somewhere along the way, rediscovered a love for the rhythm of cooking meat: the control, the heat, the transformation.

Gregory watched Jean more than he probably should, which led people to jump to conclusions. They assumed it was romantic. It wasn’t. Not even close. That part of him never really switched on the way it did for others. He had tried, briefly, messily, without ever quite finding “the one”, or even just someone. So instead, he stayed busy: handling the rush at lunch, prepping alone in the quiet lull before dinner, going out with friends, helping his dad on the weekends.

His father, George, liked to grumble about it, about Gregory still being single, about him not pushing harder, not dreaming bigger. But under the complaints, there was pride. He’d never say it outright, but George knew his son was solid. Decent. Steady. And damn, he could cook. George himself used to work in a high school kitchen, feeding hundreds with whatever supplies showed up that week. “You make do,” he’d say, “but you still make it good.” Once a month back then, just for the joy of it, George would spend extra time baking pâtisseries à la française, tartes, éclairs, something with cream. Always something with cream.

Camille loved those pastries. It made Wednesdays survivable. She swore she had the worst schedule of any seventh grader in the entire school. Yes, Mom, I really do want to study Greek and Latin. Even if it means staying when everyone else goes home. Even if it means waiting three long hours between classes, marooned in the empty halls. So, she waited, every week, with Charles and Claudia. The three of them, nicknamed “the C’s” by pretty much everyone, shared the same curse of overachievement. Top grades, always helping others, the kind of kids who volunteered to be class reps and never missed a club meeting. But deep down, they all knew the truth: they were only fighting for second place. First belonged, unquestionably, to Daphné.

Daphné was bored, most of the time, but content, sometimes. Schoolwork didn’t challenge her much any more, though she still did it thoroughly. She was two years ahead of her age group, and most of the time, it showed. She was disconnected from others. She liked school, but not the teachers. They had a habit of telling her to wait, to lower her hand, to dress differently, to not dye her hair green. Daphné didn’t care. Her parents backed her most of the time, and near-perfect grades protected her like armour. She wasn’t rude, just stubborn. Still, every Saturday, she found herself in detention. A courtesy of Mr Munch, the music teacher who, for some reason, couldn’t stand her.

To be fair, Edward Munch had long been known as a strict teacher, intimidating, icy. Some students said he didn’t like kids at all. That wasn’t true; he just didn’t know how to show it. Until Momoe. A tall, warm-hearted Russian woman who smiled at everyone and laughed like sunshine. People often mistook her for a man from behind, but no one ever mistook the joy she carried. The couple adopted two boys, and over time, Edward softened. The way people grow bitter with age, some also learn to unfold. Years later, when his former students returned to drop off their own kids, they barely recognised him. He cracked jokes, made animal noises during music class, and chased little Tom down the hall with the patience of a grandfather.

Tom was always running. Not because he chose to, but because that’s just how he was wired. He was always late. From childhood to adulthood, rushing to work, to football practice, to the gym, to his bed, to his life. Today, he was running for his bus, weaving between pedestrians like a pinball. He collided hard with a shoulder, Isabella’s, and barely had time to blurt out an apology before disappearing into the crowd again, legs pumping as he had somewhere to be ten minutes ago.

Isabella was tired. Selling tickets at the town stadium wasn’t glamorous, but it paid enough to keep a roof overhead and a few groceries in the fridge. The job wasn’t hard, just repetitive, with long stretches of downtime between bursts of noisy crowds. But that quiet time gave her space to draw. Sketching anime characters and manga scenes on her tablet became her ritual, her escape. So, when she boarded the bus that evening after a local match, headphones on, stylus in hand, she didn’t notice the man sitting next to her that glanced over. She didn’t know he worked for an indie label scouting for new visual artists. One curious glance at her screen, one question asked, and things began to shift. Right place, right time. Not like the man in front of her.

Chase had spent five years thinking about timing. Five years behind bars for being in the wrong place when the wrong thing happened. Mistaken identity, bad luck, no alibi. A security camera caught a blurry figure in a hoodie, and the cops filled in the rest. But hope came from a sharp-eyed attorney, Julio, who found an old video feed from a football game Chase had actually attended that day. Chase watched it over and over during his trial, jumpy, grainy footage that might just be enough to give him a second chance the system was reluctant to.

Julio had spent three full months combing through digital archives to find it. Every morning, like clockwork, he’d pass through the coffee shop next to the local TV station, and every morning Simon would greet him with a nod and a mug of dark roast. They didn’t talk much. Simon wasn’t a talker. But on good days, he’d slide a slice of pie across the counter. The kind his mum used to make.

Simon’s pie was simple, comforting, brown sugar, cinnamon, and apples that softened just right. He learned it from his mother, who had learned it from her mother: Granny Grace.

Grace didn’t come from a cosy kitchen. She wasn’t the pie-baking type until much later. No! Back in her youth, Grace rode a motorcycle, wore a leather jacket with patched shoulders, and ran with a crew known as “the Owl Package”. She was kind of a caricature and she loved it. She wasn’t afraid of much and did plenty she wasn’t proud of. She didn’t buy the book with the pie recipe, she stole it. Everything changed the night she met Tim.

Tim arrested her. He was a paragon of decency. Righteous, kind, with a spine of steel, but a voice always measured. He’d never raised it, not even when he cuffed Grace all those years ago. He credited that to his uncle, the man who’d raised him with quiet discipline and an unshakeable sense of right and wrong.

His uncle, Cecil, despite his appearance, was a gentle man. Retired military, he had lost his leg to a mine overseas and returned home to silence and a dog named Pongo. The dog passed away a month before Cecil’s sister and her husband died in a car crash. They left behind a small, wide-eyed boy who stared too hard and asked too many questions. That boy filled something Cecil hadn’t realised was hollow. At least that’s what his psychotherapist, Fabian, told him in their final session.

New year, new city. Paris would be a fresh start. Fabian had always wanted to go, but never had reason. Now he did. He had plans to talk, meet people, and see art, not just admire, but live it. That’s where Fabian met the painter, Anna.

Anna had wild hair, an accent that danced between languages, and a way of looking at people like they were unfinished canvases. Her stories from her trips, India, Chile, Morocco, were like colour splashed across a grey wall. One of her tales ended up halfway across the world, in the head of a screenwriter in Mumbai, Eugene.

One particular story stuck with him, the way the painter had dodged a pickpocket in India with nothing but wit and a baguette. It became the seed of a playful parody inspired by her: a globetrotting heroine always falling into unlikely traps, escaping through clever tricks and sheer charm. He pitched it to ten agencies. Nine said no. The tenth was different.

Jayden, the actor and director who owned the tenth agency, said yes instantly. They didn’t just like it, they wanted it. They saw themself in the role: goofy, clever, with just enough heart to pull it off. They threw themself into the project, training for months. Part of that training took place in the countryside, with Boubacar, an ageing French veteran who had once been stationed in Rajasthan… and stayed for love.

Boubacar ended up there on the run, fleeing a debt so large he couldn’t even speak it aloud. He’d gambled away everything he had, and a little more he didn’t. Desperation stinks, and he wore it like cologne. As always, it was Pierre who found him a place to crash. Pierre always knew someone, knew somewhere. That’s what he did.

Pierre used to be the guy you called when you were lost. Until the day he lost someone, his best friend Boubacar vanished, no warning, barely a goodbye. That absence gnawed at him. One thing went wrong, then another, and then another. He started picking fights, growing bitter, his edges no longer rounded by kindness. The warmth left his voice. You could feel it.

The young cashier at the store he visited every week saw it happen. Month by month, Iris saw the man turn to stone. It scared her, how ordinary sadness could harden someone. She promised herself she wouldn’t end up like that. Iris studied, networked, changed her tone, her smile, her goals. She went to every party worth attending, calling them “strategic mingling”. It was at one of those that she met her husband. Iris always said she found love while searching for opportunity. Maybe that was true.

That’s what Lucas, her son, wrote in a short paragraph of a character sheet. It was for the game he was making, a tribute and a transformation. A fictionalised mother, shaped with admiration and a touch of creative exaggeration. Real life didn’t need to know the true details. He liked her legend more than her resume.

And Aurora certainly did too. She was a massive fan of the game. She turned to be drawn not just by its world or its message, but by the aesthetic. The colours, the drama, the silhouettes, they inspired her. She began to sew, piecing together fabrics into fantasies. She posted one extravagant outfit online. It blew up. Her inbox overflowed. Her quiet confidence found its footing in that noise.

Collaborations followed. She hesitated for months before asking one of her models out. She was half-expecting a polite no. But to her stunned delight, the answer was a yes.

She waited outside the café, heart buzzing. When Zoe arrived, she kissed her on the cheek, softly, then properly. Aurora reached over and plucked the pencil Zoe had once again forgotten in her hair. They both laughed, bright and surprised.

Life, they agreed, could be complicated and tragic and twisting. But not today. Today it was, as often dumbly, wonderfully simple.

In this vast, intricate world, they were, in that moment, just happy. And that was enough.