Will

Will’s role in Colton’s life is larger than that of a café boss: through food, work, candor, and practical support, he helps make Masala a refuge where Colton can return after running away, speak about the abuse he survived, and imagine a future beyond subsistence. Will does not pretend to share Colton’s experience. Instead, he offers a more modest and consequential assurance: Colton is not being watched over because he is incapable, but because he is loved as family.

Identity and Work

Will runs Masala, where Colton develops kitchen skills and earns a living. The café is a working environment with its own demands, not simply a sanctuary: Will expects the job to be done, and at one point finds that Colton has brought two starving stray dogs into the storage closet and made them a bed instead of arriving on time. The collision between Colton’s compassion and the realities of the workplace leads to conflict, but it also shows why Will’s place in Colton’s life cannot be reduced to unconditional indulgence.

Will’s own history gives him a perspective on the distance between a chosen life and the future other people prescribe. He left home rather than attend the prestigious university his parents had arranged for him, because he wanted to run a café instead of becoming a doctor. His parents never accepted that he could be happy with that choice before they died. He also describes a former partner as mean and abusive, and admits that fear of being unloved kept him in the relationship for too long. His eventual life with Sage gives him a point of reference for the hope he offers Colton: Will knows from experience that feeling difficult to love does not mean being beyond love.

A Refuge Made of Ordinary Acts

When Colton first runs from Ted House, he goes to Ruby’s and receives the Shirley Temple Ruby has made him since his first night in Fairfield. Ruby calls Will, who is nearby closing Masala. Rather than send Colton away or demand an explanation, Will brings him into the kitchen and shows him how to make gulab jamun. They talk about everything and nothing, leaving what is wrong and how Colton is settling in unspoken. The lesson and the food create company without requiring disclosure as its price.

That quiet welcome becomes a repeated pattern. Colton runs away four more times, each time going to Ruby’s for the same drink and an hour in Will’s kitchen before returning to Ted House. He is not excused every time, and Sage’s disappointment can weigh on him more heavily than the physical injuries he carries from the camp. But Will’s welcome remains part of the route back: the kitchen offers a pause from fear without pretending that Colton can simply abandon the consequences of running away.

Years later, Will’s café is also where Colton learns through work. He has developed decent kitchen skills there, though his focus remains difficult to manage, and ordinary routines are precarious under the pressure of low wages and his impending adulthood. When Colton tries to help two starving dogs in the alley by making them a bed in the storage closet, he risks arriving thirty minutes late. Will finds the dogs almost immediately, and the day turns sour. The scene places care and livelihood in tension: Colton’s impulse to protect the animals is genuine, but the café cannot become their home.

Work, Conflict, and Belonging

Colton’s connection to Masala continues as he grows older. Near twenty, he is an established employee, saving for a car and carrying an accepted college application; six weeks remain before his start date. Later, he is covered in flour after trying to teach Jason how to load the industrial mixer for a batch of cinnamon rolls. Jason has been on the job exactly seven days, and each shift has brought a new mishap, but Colton remembers his own uncertain start. His patient instructions show him beginning to pass on the kind of workplace knowledge he once had to acquire himself.

That movement toward responsibility does not erase the strain of his circumstances. After his apartment building is damaged by a flood, Colton has no rent to pay while it is gutted and rebuilt, but his belongings are ruined. Earning thirteen dollars an hour and paying most of it to a landlord who failed to keep the building up to code, he has no nest egg for replacing what he lost. He is also denied financial aid because his parents never legally lost custody, so their income is counted despite his having spent the last year in foster care. The combination of institutional rules and limited wages makes his hoped-for education seem abruptly unreachable.

Colton later tells Marcel that his parents sent him to Father Benson’s conversion camp after realizing he was gay. He ran away because the camp’s attempts to change him hurt more and more and he feared he would be killed; after living on the streets, he was arrested for vagrancy and sent to Ted House. When Colton speaks of wanting someone to see the person who climbed out of that past, rather than only the trauma, Will does not claim to understand an experience he has not lived. He tells Colton instead about his own abusive relationship and the fear that nobody else would love him. The comparison is careful: their histories differ, but Will recognizes the loneliness beneath Colton’s fear of being permanently defined by his past.

Will then makes his affection explicit. Sage loved him through a period when Will believed himself hard to love, and Will tells Colton that he will not be alone forever. He and the people around him do not see Colton merely as his past; they worry because he is family. Colton breaks down in tears. The reassurance does not undo his trauma or solve his financial difficulties, but it changes the meaning of his dependence: care is not evidence that he cannot handle a future, but a relationship in which he need not face it alone.

Change and Continuing Support

When Colton is offered a position at Elliot’s animal clinic with full tuition paid if he is serious about becoming a veterinarian, the opportunity gives him a way out of the narrow future represented by low-paid café work. He is nervous that accepting it will disrupt Will’s staffing, especially with Jason newly hired. Marcel reassures him that Will will be happy for him because Colton has finally found something he wants. The prospect of leaving Masala is therefore not a rejection of the place that sustained him; it is a consequence of the future that support helped make imaginable.

The transition carries emotion. The day after Brad tricks Marcel into going to the hospital, Colton comes to the café and quits. Jason has failed to show up, and Colton explains what has happened. Will nods, then shuts himself in his office for an hour. Colton panics, until Sage sits with him for about half an hour and later coaxes Will out. The scene registers the disruption of a departure for both sides: Colton is afraid he has caused harm, while Will needs time before he can rejoin the conversation.

Colton apologizes, but Will responds fiercely that he should not, saying that if he had known, things might have been different. Colton recalls that he had thought Brad was merely a jerk; no one had known what was happening. Will’s reaction affirms that Colton’s leaving does not cancel their bond, and that Colton was not responsible for anticipating a danger no one recognized. By the time Brad leaves Fairfield under pressure from the men of Irons and Works, Will’s care has become part of a broader chosen family around Colton and Marcel. His defining contribution is not a single rescue, but a repeated practice of offering food, work, honesty, and belonging without mistaking support for control.