Chapter 7
Leo
I stand in the puddle of my own incompetence for a full minute; mop handle clutched in white-knuckled grip. The smell of industrial bleach and warm, yeasty bread is disorienting. It’s like someone tried to manufacture comfort and punishment in the same lab and released the prototype into the world.
And here I am, actively being defeated by a plastic tub and a bottle of soap.
And… I am not quitting.
I let out a long breath, loud in the suddenly quiet wash area. Tess and Gwen are back in the prep room, the thwack-thwack-thwack of Gwen’s rolling pin resuming its rhythmic, percussive beat.
“Ok, let’s do this,” I mutter.
I find the floor drain, push the mountain of suds toward it with the mop, and watch them gurgle away. I drain the sink, the water a disgusting, doughy-grey color. I refill it, this time using a single, precise pump of the green-bottled soap, and set about my task.
It is the worst kind of work. Mindless, yet punishing. The dried-on dough is fused to the plastic like cement. I soak, scrape with a stiff-bristled brush, scrub with a scouring pad, sanitize, rinse.
My hands, the hands Amelia forces me to get manicured, are not built for this. Ten minutes in, hot water and harsh chemicals turn them raw and angry red. The scouring pad is merciless.
One by one, the twenty boxes move from “dirty” to “clean,” stacked upside down just as she said. It takes nearly an hour. By the time I finish, the first faint grey light of dawn filters through the front windows, painting the bakery in soft blues and golds.
I am sweating. My pristine white jacket is soaked through with dishwater and suds. I wipe my raw hands on the disgusting beige apron and immediately regret it; it’s wet, scratchy, and faintly smells like old sanitizer and defeat.
Tess emerges from the kitchen with a clipboard. She does not look at me.
She walks straight to the stack of clean boxes, picks one at random, and inspects it. Runs a finger along the inside groove. Holds it up to the new morning light.
“Ready for your next task?” she asks.
“Sure. What can I do?” I ask.
She glares. “The delivery pallet. In the alley. I need you to move it to dry storage.”
She points to a dark hallway I hadn’t noticed before, near the back. “Dry storage is the first door on the left. Stack them neatly.”
I nod, wiping my wet hands on my pants like that will somehow undo chemical burns and the existential collapse of my dignity. I walk down the hall and push open the heavy, metal-plated back door.
The smell of the bakery, cinnamon, coffee, and cardamom, is instantly replaced by the sharp, damp, gritty odor of a Chicago alley at six a.m. The cold bites at my damp clothes. A single flickering fluorescent light illuminates the small concrete loading dock.
And there, on a massive wooden pallet, is a stack of fifty-pound bags of flour.
There are… a lot of them. At least twenty.
One thousand pounds of flour.
I stare at the stack. Look down at my red, stinging, manicured hands. Look back into the warm, fragrant bakery where Tess is now expertly scoring a row of bread loaves with a small, sharp blade, movements fast and precise, like a surgeon.
“Ok,” I whisper to the bags. This is my job.
I bend my knees, thank you, five-hundred-dollars-an-hour personal trainer, grab the first bag, and hoist.
It is heavy. Not conceptually heavy. Not “the weight of responsibility.” Not “leadership is lonely.” Actually, physically, horribly heavy.
The fifty-pound bag feels like two hundred.
I stagger, the coarse paper scratching my cheek as I wrestle it onto my shoulder.
My tailored white jacket strains at the seams.
I stumble back inside, down the hall, into the dry storage room.
It is small, tight, meticulously organized, with floor-to-ceiling shelves. I heave the bag onto the bottom shelf. A cloud of flour puffs out and settles on my damp hair like a very angry ghost has blessed me.
I go back. Grab another. And another.
This is the most real, most physical work I have done in my entire adult life. My work is emails. Phone calls. Staring at data until my eyes burn. The intellectual stress of moving billions of dollars.
This is different. This is gravity.
With every trip, my pants get dirtier, picking up grime from the alley and a fine, ghostly coating of flour. My back, already aching, is now screaming. My split thumbnail throbs with every bag I grip.
I do not stop.
I just move.
Alley to storage. Storage to alley.
I am a ghost. A ghost who hauls.
Through the doorway, I watch Tess and Gwen as I work.
They are a machine. A two-woman, high-efficiency, artisanal machine.
They don’t just move; they flow. Gwen folds and turns massive sheets of laminated dough, her movements creating invisible layers of butter and flour.
Tess loads the massive convection oven in a flurry of motion, pulling out trays of golden-brown morning buns and sliding racks of sourdough in, while shouting instructions to Gwen over the roar of the fans.
“Gwen, check the proof on the baguettes!”
“Pulling the twists in two, boss!”
“Did you prep the egg wash?”
“Done!”
I am, to my own surprise, profoundly impressed.
I run a multinational corporation, and it doesn’t have half the efficiency of this tiny, two-woman operation. I am watching mastery. And I am an obstacle: a clumsy, useless, two-hundred-pound sack of wet clothes and good hair blundering around their orbit.
It takes me thirty minutes to move the entire pallet. When I finish, I lean against the wall of the dry storage room, breathing heavily, my entire body humming with a dull, unfamiliar ache.
I walk back into the prep area. I look at Tess for a second. Her passion is visible, and it feels like a breath of fresh air.
“How’s the bakery life?” Gwen asks from the other side of the room.
“So far so good,” I tell her, and she laughs.
“You see those?” Tess points to a mountain of aluminum sheet pans piled high next to the dish pit. They are black with baked-on, carbonized grease and sugar.
“Could you please scrub them?”
I am back at the sink for another hour.
Scrub. Rinse. Stack.
Scrub. Rinse. Stack.
The carbon is worse than the dough. It is a physical battle. I put my entire body into it, shoulders burning, forearms screaming. My hands are going to be a wreck. I know this with the grim certainty of a man watching a train approach and realizing he is tied to the tracks.
I do not care.
I am just… doing.
The sun is fully up now, streaming into the front of the shop. The OPEN sign glows. I can hear the front door jingling, the hiss of the espresso machine, the low, happy murmur of the first regular customers.
“Morning, Tess! The usual, love.”
“Mr. Henderson! How’s the hip? I saved you a cardamom twist. They’re still warm.”
The smell… it is almost painful. Cinnamon and browned butter, dark-roast coffee, caramelized sugar, yeast. My stomach, which has had nothing but a four a.m. espresso, lets out a low, pathetic groan.
I finish the last pan. It is as shiny as I can possibly get it. I stack it. For the first time, I feel a small, stupid spark of… pride.
And I realize, somewhere deep in my chest, that this feeling is nothing like money or deals or deals gone right. This is… earned.
I did the thing. I stand there, waiting for my next order, a ghost waiting for instructions.
Tess is at the front counter, laughing with an elderly man, whom I assume is Mr. Henderson.
I watch her chat and smile. It transforms her face, softening the hard lines into something bright and warm. I find myself staring.
Gwen is in the back, frantically shaping baguettes, hands a blur. Tess finishes with the customer and storms back, her face instantly resetting to its neutral, wartime expression.
“We’re behind on quiche prep,” she says, not to me, but to the room in general. She looks at Gwen, then at me, eyes narrowing in a frustrated calculation. She is short-staffed, and her useless billionaire intern is, apparently, her only option.
“Can you crack an egg?”
“I… yes. I think so,” I say.
“Good enough.” She grabs my arm, her grip surprisingly strong, her hand warm through my damp sleeve, and drags me to a clean prep station. She shoves a massive stainless-steel bowl in front of me. Then she slams down a flat of thirty eggs beside it.
“I need thirty eggs. For the quiche custard. In the bowl. Please make sure there’s not a single piece of shell in it, ok?”
“Got it,” I say, and a ridiculous surge of adrenaline shoots through me. This is a promotion. I have graduated from scrubbing to food prep.
I pick up the first egg. Tap it firmly on the side of the bowl, just as I’ve seen my private chef do. Crack. Split with my thumbs. Perfect. One.
I grab the next. Crack. Perfect. Two. I am good at this. This is easy. This is just a repetitive, physical-motion task. I can optimize… Three. Four. Five.
I start going faster, finding a rhythm. Crack. Split. Drop. Toss the shell. Gwen rushes past with trays of baguettes.
“Some friendly advice: don’t get cocky,” she mutters.
Crack. Split. Drop. Toss. I am on egg twenty-eight. Almost there. I am a champion egg-cracker, a man of the people, an intern with a future.
Tess is at the station next to me, back turned, weighing out ten-kilo batches of flour into massive bowls for the next day’s bread production. She is focused. Movements economical. She looks like someone who could do this in her sleep and still hit the exact gram.
I pick up egg twenty-nine. I go for the crack. I am going too fast, giddy with my own success. I hit it too hard. It doesn’t just crack. It explodes.
A spray of yolk and white shoots across the pristine steel counter.
But that isn’t the worst part. The shell doesn’t simply fall into my bowl of twenty-eight perfect eggs.
It shatters into tiny, shrapnel-like fragments directly into Tess’s ten-kilo, pre-weighed, bone-dry bowl of King Arthur High-Gluten flour.
A stunned silence drops over the prep station. Gwen, passing by, freezes.
I stare at the yolk dripping down the side of Tess’s flour bowl. I stare at the tiny specks of shell peppering the clean white flour.
Tess very, very slowly sets down her flour scoop.
“No,” she whispers. “That’s twenty-two pounds of flour. That’s… that’s the entire hearth loaf batch for tomorrow.”
“I… I can sift it?” I offer, my voice squeaking.
“Sift egg yolk?” she repeats. “It’s contaminated. It’s ruined.”
She stops herself, pressing the heels of her hands into her eyes as if she could physically push back a migraine.
Then she drops her hands and looks at me, disappointment heavy in her brown eyes.
“Could you step aside, please?” she asks softly.
She grabs the contaminated bowl, twenty-two pounds, a weight I would struggle with, and slams it into the dish pit.
“Gwen, reweigh the hearth batch. I’ll deal with this.”