58 Damn Old Man

'It's odd… I don't recall seeing her at the cafe before,' Jade pondered, her lips pursed in thought. 'Normally, I'm pretty good with faces; I'm not great at remembering names, but the faces of customers, I remember fairly well.'

Looking down at her apron, Jade checked that she had not put on her name tag, which would have been unusual for her.

'Nope, no name tag, and I don't remember any customers calling me by name while they were here.'

Jade served a few more customers while thinking about it. In the end, she concluded, 'Oh well, I'm probably just overthinking it.

'Perhaps she did overhear someone, or maybe my memory is worse than I thought and she's been here before.'

As Jade decided to put the matter aside, she suddenly thought of Bernie. 'Ah yes, Bernie enjoys playing detective; I should speak to him.

'That reminds me, I need to tell him about what Liam said.'

…

When Jade entered the kitchen, it looked like Bernie had been waiting for her.

Like an excited little kid, he was staring at Jade in anticipation.

"Bernie, I… Is there something you want to say?" asked Jade, noticing his weird expression.

"No, no, you go ahead."

"Ok, so it's like this…"

After hearing about Blondie, Bernie's reaction was not as enthusiastic as Jade had expected. "Oh my, how interesting. That's a real conundrum."

He said those words, but his tone sounded almost sarcastic.

"That's not all…" Disappointed but not really affected, Jade then told Bernie about what Liam had said.

"Yes, yes," Bernie interrupted, "Liam's a great kid. I'm sure you two will be happy together."

"Yes, exactly… wait… what?"

As he waved his hand dismissively, Bernie turned around to pick something up off the surface behind him.

Before Jade could even correct him, Bernie handed over a piece of paper like a child handing over their school report.

"I… er…" While tugging at his collar, Bernie explained, "I had some free time, so I threw together this poster for that event we were talking about.

"If you don't like it, we don't have to use it. I just had some free time. I wasn't busy or anything."

When she saw the poster, Jade was taken aback.

On the poster it read, 'Night Cafe: Themed Sets. The number one cafe meal deal!'

The words themselves were not surprising, but the design of the poster was very unexpected.

The papers was normal white printer paper, but the words were written in a pink gel pen. There were little pink hearts all over the paper, and there was even a sprinkling of glitter.

Seeing the expectant look in Bernie's eyes, Jade replied, "It's cute, Bern. I can see you've put a lot of effort in. Of course we'll use it."

Bernie chuckled. "Barely any effort! It only took me two hou— twenty minutes on-off!"

Unable to stop herself from facepalming, Jade thought, 'Damn old man! If you were so proud of it and wanted to show it to me, why didn't you say so earlier?'