You realize something’s wrong with Carmy when the food starts showing up.

Not family meal leftovers. Not accidental extras from service. These are different. Intentional. Carefully made in ways that immediately tell you he spent too much time thinking about them.

The first time, it’s pasta left beside your station before opening. Still warm. Perfectly plated even though nobody else in the restaurant plates staff meals like that. There’s no note attached. No explanation. Just your favorite ingredients arranged carefully enough to make your chest hurt a little looking at it.

When you ask Tina who made it, she snorts.

“Please,” she says immediately. “Like anybody else in this kitchen got enough emotional problems to julienne basil at eight in the morning.”

Carmy denies it when confronted.

Badly.

“Was just extra prep,” he mutters without looking up from the cutting board.

“It has my favorite cheese on it.”

“So?”

“So you hate that cheese.”

His knife pauses for half a second.

Then keeps moving again twice as fast afterward.

Over the next few weeks, it keeps happening.

Coffee left beside you before shifts. Soup appearing after particularly bad nights. Desserts boxed separately before closing. Carmy never mentions any of it afterward. If anything, he acts actively irritated anytime somebody points it out too directly, like the kitchen witnessing him care about somebody in real time is personally humiliating somehow.

Which honestly tracks.

Tonight’s worse though.

Dinner service ended almost an hour ago, but Carmy’s still moving around the kitchen like his nervous system forgot how to stop. Cleaning stations already clean. Reorganizing containers unnecessarily. Wiping counters aggressively enough to practically sand the steel down.

You lean against the prep table watching him for a second. “You know you’re allowed to sit down, right?”

“Mm.”

“That wasn’t an answer.”

“Felt like one.”

Typical.

Carmy finally tosses the towel onto the counter before dragging both hands down across his face hard enough to show how exhausted he actually is underneath all that restless energy. There are dark circles beneath his eyes again. Burn marks scattered across his fingers. Anxiety sitting visibly through his shoulders like something physically stitched into him permanently.

Then his eyes flick toward you automatically.

Softening immediately.

That’s the thing about Carmy nobody talks about enough. No matter how stressed he gets, no matter how chaotic his own brain becomes, part of him always calms slightly around you before he even realizes it’s happening.

“You eat today?” he asks suddenly.

You stare at him.

“There it is,” you mutter. “Your version of a love confession.”

Carmy nearly chokes on absolutely nothing.

“What? No,Jesus Christ.”

“You made me tiramisu yesterday.”

“It was extra.”

“It had my initials in cocoa powder.”

His entire face goes red immediately while you physically start laughing.

“Richie told me,” you add helpfully.

“Yeah, I’m gonna kill him.”

The embarrassment sitting on his face would almost be funny if it wasn’t also painfully sincere. Carmy looks like somebody caught bleeding out emotionally in public against his will. His fingers flex once against the counter before he finally looks at you properly, exhaustion and affection and panic all tangled together behind his eyes at the exact same time.

Then, quieter this time, almost rough around the edges, “You liked the tiramisu?”