Chapter 11
Leo
I have been nervous ever since I left the bakery yesterday. Tess did not say much, but I know she is not happy about the video. And neither am I.
The comments have been unhinged. Some people say we look like we belong together. Some are calling Tess fat in ways that make my stomach turn. Others want to know if I am single and are asking for my number.
The bakery still holds the afterglow of yesterday. The cake saves. The chaos. The collaboration. That raw, collective joy still hums in my bones. It was the most fun I have had in a decade.
My phone vibrates like a live wire in my pocket. I ignore it, but I catch the first text from Julian anyway, and a cold stone of dread drops into my stomach. Then I see Rex Chen’s name and feel an even colder wave of irritation.
So, I turn the phone off.
I do not want to deal with the brand. Or the docu crew. Or the deal.
I want to deal with dough. I want to see if I can make another star.
I want to see Tess smile again, that short, rusty, beautiful laugh she gave me before my phone ruined everything.
I walk in wearing a hopeful, slightly goofy smile.
“Morning, boss. I…”
My smile dies.
Tess is standing at her steel table, not with a clipboard, but with her arms crossed so tightly it looks painful. Her face, soft and laughing just hours ago, is now a mask of glacial, crystalline fury.
She is colder than she was on my first day.
Gwen stands behind her, very deliberately not looking at me. Her face is pale.
“Boss?” I ask. My voice wavers. The air in the bakery feels heavy and suffocating, like the warmth and yeast have been replaced by something sharp and metallic.
“You are a liar,” Tess says.
Her voice is not loud. It is worse than loud. It is low, flat, and lethal.
“What? No. I…”
“I asked you if this was a stunt. A collaboration. A reel.” She steps toward me. “You looked me in the eye and said no.” Her gaze does not blink. “Was the little girl an actor, Leo? Her mother? Was the canceled cake from La Fantaisie part of the script, too?”
I am stunned.
The accusation lands like a physical blow, knocking the air from my chest.
“Tess no.” The words come out too fast, too desperate. “My God. Of course not. That was real. You saw her. Maya…”
“Don’t.” The single word cuts clean. “Say her name.”
She is shaking. Her rage is a physical thing in the warm, yeasty air, and it makes my skin prickle.
“I woke up this morning to twenty-three texts,” she says, and her voice strains with control.
“From strangers. I have eight hundred new followers on the bakery’s Instagram, and every single one of them is asking, ‘Where is the hot guy?’ ‘Why is he with you?’ And that’s not even touching the insults. ”
The fact that she is emotional hits me harder than the words. She points a trembling, flour-dusted finger toward the front window.
“There is a van across the street,” she says. “It says Channel Five News on the side. At four forty-five in the morning. For my bakery.”
I look.
She is right.
A white van sits in the pre-dawn gloom; a dark shape slumped in the driver’s seat. Waiting. Like a predator. Like a consequence.
“This is my life, Leo,” she whispers, and something in her voice fractures, not into tears, but into something white hot and unyielding.
“This is my business. My home. It is not the goddamn set for your Midnight Mavericks redemption arc. You didn’t just lie to me.
You used me. You used my bakery. And you used that kid. ”
“I didn’t.” The denial tears out of me, sharp now, defensive, wounded in a way I hate. “I didn’t know. I didn’t ask anyone to film us. I don’t want a docu crew. That was the Mavericks crew. I told them no.”
“But they are here.” She gestures at the window as if it were an accusation painted in white. “You brought this circus here, Leo. You and your dare. You dragged your world, all glass and steel and cameras and branding, into mine. And you ruined it.”
My throat tightens.
“I can fix it,” I say, because fixing is what I do.
It is what I have been trained to do since I was old enough to understand that problems are solvable if you have enough resources.
My hand fumbles for my phone, thumb hovering over contacts like weapons.
Julian. Lawyers. PR. Security. “I’ll make them leave. I’ll…”
“You’ll what?” she snaps. “Throw money at it like you do everything else? You can’t unring this bell. You can’t unpost the video.”
Then she looks at me with something deeper than anger.
A bone-deep exhaustion. The kind that goes beyond eighteen-hour days, butter prices, and razor-thin margins.
Something older. Something like the knowledge that the world will always choose spectacle over substance, and she will be the one paying for it.
“You’re a sellout, Leo,” she says. “You will never be anything else. You don’t fix things. You buy them. Or you break them.” Her voice drops. “And you are breaking my bakery.”
I have no answer.
Because she is, in a way, right.
My world follows me like a shadow. I can close deals, shutter factories, reroute supply chains, and still feel like I am moving through clean white air. I step into her bakery, her warm, living, flour-dusted life, and the cameras arrive like flies.
I have broken this.
“I can’t fire you. The entire internet will come after me if I do. So, here’s the new rule,” Tess says, and her voice is dead now, stripped of anything soft. “You are not a person. You are not Leo. You are a ghost.”
The words land in my chest like weights.
“You stay in your corner,” she continues.
“You will touch dough. And nothing else. You will not come to the front of the shop. You will not speak to a customer.” Her jaw tightens.
“If a camera crew comes in here, you will go into the walk-in freezer, and you will stay there until I tell you to come out.”
Her gaze never wavers.
“Your dare is for a month. Fine. You will serve your time. But you will do it in the dark, where you cannot contaminate the rest of my life.”
She takes one step closer, and the distance between us feels like the edge of a cliff.
“I can’t lose everything I’ve worked for.” Tears gather in her eyes, unshed but burning.
“Tess,” I start, because my body wants to reach backward. To yesterday. To the laugh. To the almost-smile. To the tiny shift in the air between us that felt like a possibility.
“Do you understand?” she asks, louder now. The words crack like a whip.
“Yes, boss,” I whisper.
My voice is small.
“Clear.”
“Good.” She turns her back on me, final as a sentence. “Gwen, laminate. I’ll handle the ovens.”
Then, without even looking at me, she adds, “He is on pre-shape. Indefinitely.”
Gwen glances at me, an expression I can’t quite read, before turning back to her work.
The rest of the week is torture.
The social media post becomes a phenomenon, exactly as Julian predicted. Gold. Irresistible. The story is too clean, too meme-ready, too perfectly shaped for the internet’s appetite. A cold, beautiful, hyper-competent baker and her giant, adoring, himbo billionaire intern.
The forty-five-second clip of her teaching me to pipe a star is a viral atom bomb.
Sunrise the bread Tess and Gwen are killing themselves to produce. They come for the story.
“Is he here?” someone asks on the second day after the video, voice loud, camera panning. “Is the billionaire here?”
“Where’s the hot guy? The one from the video,” another person chirps, already smiling at their own screen.
One influencer-type, glossy lips, massive sunglasses indoors, leaning on the counter, says, “Can I get his number?” She pouts when Tess just stares at her blankly.
“He wouldn’t date you, would he?”
Tess, true to her word, is a general. She is polite. She is cold. She is efficient.
“We have classic, chocolate, or pistachio-cardamom croissants today,” she says, voice monotone. “No phone numbers.”
She runs on fumes. She and Gwen start coming in at 3:45 a.m. just to try to meet the new, absurd demand.
They sell out of everything by ten a.m. Then the new crowd, denied a selfie with me, denied a sparkly croissant, denied the fantasy they came to consume, leaves one-star Yelp reviews like little acts of revenge.
Rude owner. The guy isn’t there. Not worth the hype.
Sold out of everything by 9? Poorly managed.
I saw the boss lady yell! She’s actually really mean IRL. #NotMyBaker
I see Tess read them once, her jaw tight, eyes flicking across the screen like she’s bracing for impact.
Her spreadsheet-fueled anxiety goes into overdrive.
Revenue is up, yes, but she is miserable.
She runs herself into the ground serving a clientele that hates her, all because of a video she never asked for.
This is her fear of scaling, made manifest. This is exactly what she’s afraid of: losing the soul of her bakery.
And me… I am in my isolation cell. I honor my word. I am a ghost.
I arrive at 4:44 a.m., in my black T-shirt and expensive jeans, now permanently dusted with a ghostly white film of flour. I go straight to the back prep area. I do not speak. I do not make eye contact. I just… work.
I put all my frustration, all my shame at what I unleash, all my boiling-hot anger at myself, into the dough.
My world is an eighty-percent hydration starter. It is twenty-pound tubs of Auntie June, which I now have to feed and maintain myself. I learn her moods the way you learn weather. The smell when she’s hungry. The way she rises when she’s happy. The subtle sour note that means I’m late.
It is the thwack of my bench scraper. It is the burn in my shoulders. It is the pull. The scrape. The turn. The fold.
At first, I am angry, and my dough shows it.
I tear the gluten. I manhandle it. I fight it like it’s an opponent I can dominate through force.
Tess walks by, slaps my messy, torn dough ball with the flat of her fingers as if testing fruit for ripeness, and says, “Again. You’re fighting it.”
I am. I am fighting everything.
But after a few days, the anger burns off, leaving only quiet, simmering determination. The kind that doesn’t need to be seen. The kind that just… keeps going.
I stop fighting. I start listening. I learn to feel the dough’s life, its subtle push-back. I feel the moment the tension is just right, when the surface is no longer sticky but smooth and taut, like the skin of a drum.
And my hands begin to change.
The blisters heal, replaced by calluses on my palms and at the joints of my fingers. The skin toughens. My nails, which Amelia once paid someone two hundred dollars a week to buff, are now permanently caked with dried sourdough starter.
They are ugly. They are useful.
They are, I realize with a strange, sober satisfaction, baker’s hands.