Finley woke to an unusual pattern knocking at his door. Not that there were many different patterns of a knocking that could show up at his door, but he knew his regular guests, and knew by know who sounded like what, and it was definitely not Allard, not Wanda, and Victoria was not due back from the East for a while now.

“Hold on!” he shouted in the general direction of his front door as he tried to feed his arms through a housecoat, “gimme a goddamn minute,” he rumbled to himself.

Despite his chosen profession, Finley was not a fan of mornings, and were it to be honest, mornings were not much a fan of him, either.

Especially not this one, “oh shit,” New Lorcastle may have been a small city, but he did not expect to see her here.

The door was opened timidly.

“Uh, it’s you. Everything, everything okay?”

“Can I come in?”

Finley waved Katherine in while both holding back a yawn, and rubbing his eyes awake with the heel of his palm, “Unnngh, yeah, can I get you some coffee?”

“Thank you, but no, I’m good,” she took a seat.

“I’m not, because it is the goddamn morning, Katherine; you want coffee or not?”

“Don’t be like that. And sure, but don’t. And, uh, you forgot the door, should I get, should I get the door, should I get it?”

“No,” he said after waiting in the middle of his hallway, trying to collect himself, “I got it, just gimme a second.”

And so Katherine did, the other beaver in town, give him a second. It took a few more seconds for Finley to remember what she said about the door, but she thought better than to make a fuss about it. From the looks of it, Katherine had either been up for a while, or never went to bed in the first place, and neither of these were terribly good things to have happened. Not that Katherine had an especially terrible sleeping pattern - shes a beaver, after all, they can literally fall asleep almost anywhere, especially if there is some form of fibrous, organic building material. Brick was almost always off limits where they given the option.

It took more than a few more minutes for Finley to catch himself, but no one in that room was going to mention it. He had the ‘#1 Teacher’ mug he got from Avery a while back full to the brim with coffee, a pile of bread, fruit and pickles, and coffee in one of the wooden mugs Basil had made for Phillip a while back. Probably not his best move, that.

“Cute, but thanks.”

“I need to go shopping. So, spill it, what happened now?”

“I don’t know, he just… well, what I mean is that Phillip happened. He came home early last night. And no,” Katherine said, replying to Finley’s eyebrows, “not that. Basil sent him home early, and, well, he found somewhere else to get a drink, or someone else to bum him a drink. I don’t know, but he was not very, well, reasonable.

“The kids are okay, I am okay. The door is not okay, and neither are the tomatoes, but they’re fine, they’re just vegetables, vegetables I don’t water enough.”

“Fruits, actually,” he took another swig of coffee and reminded himself, again, that he needed to go shopping as he bit into a pickle for breakfast, “it’s a fruit, actually. A berry.”

“Wait, how is it a fruit?”

“I think the technical reason is because you pick them, and not harvest them.”

“That makes… wait, what about beans? Beans are definitely a vegetable, and there is nothing you can say that will convince me otherwise.”

“Damnit. No, okay, it’s not the… picking, it’s the seeds. That’s it, the seeds.”

“Why the seeds?” she asked.

“Basically, fruits can plant themselves. Like, a potato, right? No seeds. Carrots? No seeds. Beans? Shit,” it was too early for Finley to think this much.

“Shit what”

“Beans do have seeds. Beans are actually fruit.”

“Finley, you are blowing my mind.”

“And so it is, kind of, how they are picked. With vegetables, you harvest the entire plant - the potato, the carrot, the lettuce or celery. With fruit, you pick them.”

They were both, quite honestly, flabbergasted.

“Why are we talking about whether or not the tomato is a fruit?” she asked, after a bit of introspection.

“To distract you, because Katherine, you look like shit. Where are the kids?”

She smiled, although awkwardly, “with my parents.”

“So what all went down, then? He broke the door and some tomatoes, and probably something else.”

“Right,” she was about to finish her coffee, and Katherine was definitely not finished with tea quite yet, “well, then he got really loud, woke up a whole neighborhood of people, and we all kind of booked it. He is stupid as fuck, but not stupid enough to mess up his parents place.”

“So you’re okay?”

“For now, I guess.”

“You need a place to crash?” Finley asked.

“Not… necessarily. I should see the kids, but I am not sure how much they want to see mom in all sorts of… whatever this is.”

“Why haven’t you just left him yet?”

“Because I have been a fucking terrible wife and I am more than convinced that I am why he started drinking. At least, started drinking too much.”

“As certain as you are about beans being a vegetable?”

“Touche,” Katherine said.

“Anyways, you look like shit, go have a shower and I’ll see if anything you left here still fits.”

Katherine was not sure how to take that, but took an extra long shower, leaving the bathroom door extra ajar just to be sure. Finley spent the time checking his pantry and working on whatever form of a grocery list he thought himself capable of paying attention to.

Finley was not a wealthy badger, but he lived in New Lorcastle comfortably, and New Lorcastle treated him well. Teaching was never how he imagined he would spend his adult years, but he did, and it was working out well.

Decades ago, Finley took a job opportunity that landed him near the center of the city. It had flexible hours, more than enough of a wage, but it was not meant for this world. After a year or two, the place that he worked at - Brakebills Books, found itself victim of some sort of insect infestation. Considering that the entire value of the store was held within the pages of the books it sold, the owner never put up much a fuss when it was recommended that they tear the entire place down. Work was cheap, he said to Finley, and the cities center was getting old anyways, so a few renovations were do.

“Nothing unnecessary, of course,” the city planner, a thin beaver said, “but it would also make is cheaper to work on some of the other buildings too. Just to keep them from falling apart, and to check if they have any evidence of an infestation problem, too.”

Again, he never saw himself influencing the young minds of his city, but before everything went sideways, Finley found himself fond of reading to some of the children in the city. That is where he first met both Wanda and Avery, and it was through both a connection of hers, and her general positive and charming demeanor that landed him the job.

That is all to say that the leftovers from that bit of the city’s touch up is how he landed himself such a great shower; it wasn’t far from Brakebills, and it wouldn’t take that long anyways. Technology does wonders, especially when the city has a shortage of teachers, and relative to any alternatives on the books, this would have been one of the cheaper ways to convince a teacher to take a job.

Finley always took his showers before heading to bed.

Either Katherine had lost some weight, or Finley was keeping terrible care of the shirts she left behind, but every seemed to fit terribly loose.

“Thanks again,” she didn’t quite look proper, but she sure did not look improper.

The small talk was forced and awkward, and both of the offending forest-folk were more than aware of this objective fact.

“So… you, uh, you said you needed to go grocery shopping or something? Or what is up for today?”

The two forest-folk were far from close anymore, but they were not far enough to think that they never were. Shit happens, and people grow up, but the compatible pieces rarely stop being compatible. They may be less so; their edges may be worn down from excessive use, or poor upkeep, and their fit may be looser than before, but they still worked relatively well. You could still identify the image in the puzzle, it would just have a few more cracks in it.

Something big and traumatic would have to happen for the painted pieces of irregularly shaped cardboard to really stop fitting altogether. In fact, the laws of the conservation of metaphor downright forbids it.

“Yeah, you want anything in particular?”

Katherines eye were still too worn up to express much of her sarcastic surprise.

“Uh, no, I’m fine. You sure you don’t mine me crashing for a few days?”

Finley’s ears were twitching, “yeah — er, no, I don’t mind. It’s fine, you got shit to work through, and I am of the few that knows what that kind of shit is. I’ll try to think of something descent for dinner. I usually have plans to, well, we can talk about that later.”

Katherine kissed Finley on the cheek as he left his house, his possessions, and his work in the hands of a woman he has been trying to decipher for years.

Next Chapter: Chapter 19 - "Dinner"