Chapter 11
Eleven
Wren
I set my bakery on fire at one in the morning, which is not covered anywhere in Marigold’s binder. I checked. After.
In fairness, it’s mostly the oven’s fault.
I can’t sleep. I haven’t slept right in days. There’s a restless, itchy, too-warm feeling under my skin lately that won’t let me lie still, so I’ve quit fighting it and started coming down to bake at hours no reasonable person is awake for.
It’s more than not sleeping. My own skin doesn’t fit right.
Smells are louder than they’ve got any business being, the cedar and coffee and smoke of them worked so deep into my walls now that half the time I catch myself with my nose in a tea towel one of them touched, like a woman losing her mind.
I’ve decided it’s stress. Stress, a new town, a festival I can’t run, a bank balance that gives me the sweats.
That’s my official position, and I am sticking to it, right up until it lights something on fire.
Tonight it’s the tart. Again. Attempt nine hundred.
I’ve got the big oven going, a tea towel over my shoulder, and my head a good three hundred miles from the kitchen, which is precisely where the trouble begins.
Because I’m not thinking about the tart.
I’m thinking about a pack. Six years, no omega, then me.
I’ve been hauling that around for two days like a stone in my shoe, and I’m turning it over for the thousandth time when the big oven, the ancient one, Marigold’s pride and joy, makes a noise it has never made in its life.
A crack. Then a fizz. Then a little tongue of orange flame slips out of the gap behind it, finds the tea towel I’ve left hanging on the rail, and decides it’s in love.
“Oh, come on,” I say to the fire, like it’s the one being unreasonable.
The towel goes up with an enthusiasm I take personally.
I grab for it, realize halfway that snatching at a burning towel is a poor life choice, and knock a whole bag of flour off the counter instead.
This helps nobody. It just makes the same emergency, now in white.
The flames find a second towel and settle in.
I dive for the little fire extinguisher under the sink, the one I have never once so much as read the label of, and spend a genuinely humbling few seconds trying to establish which end of it does the business.
That’s when the new alarm goes off.
Not shrieking for nothing, like the old one used to. Shrieking because there is, for the first time in its short life, a real and pressing reason. It’s the loudest sound I’ve ever stood next to, and I have never been so grateful to be deafened by anything.
I get the pin out. I level the canister, roughly, at the general idea of fire, and squeeze.
And then the back door bangs open hard enough to rattle every pane in it, and my kitchen fills up with fireman.
All three of them. Under a minute, because they are literally across the road and were, from the look of it, already awake.
Cal comes in with a real extinguisher, and he’s on the oven before I’ve finished jumping.
Eli goes straight past me to the gas and kills it at the wall, checks the line, calm as a man reading a menu.
And Rhett takes the sad little canister out of my hands, spins it around so it’s pointing the right way, and looks at the flames I have been so bravely misting.
It’s over in fifteen seconds. That’s the part that undoes me. Fifteen whole seconds. All that flour, all that terror, all that heroism on my end, and three men stroll in, and it’s just finished, quick as turning off a tap.
The kitchen goes quiet. White with flour. Gray with smoke. Quiet.
And I am standing in the middle of it in an oversized sleep shirt with nothing on under it, coated head to toe in flour, my hair full of it, one sock on and one sock gone, holding a spent red canister like a tiny useless sword. Three enormous, extremely awake alphas turn and look at me.
“So,” Rhett says. “Late supper?”
“It’s the oven.” I gather what dignity a woman can while actively shedding flour onto her own floor. “The wiring. I didn’t, this isn’t a me thing.”
“It’s a little bit a me thing,” says the tea towel, still smoking gently on the tile.
“Nobody asked you,” I tell it.
Cal’s shoulders start going. He’s fighting it so hard he’s gone red in the face, and when I turn my glare on him the whole thing collapses and he loses it, folding over next to my dead oven, wheezing.
That sets Rhett off. And then even Eli, quiet Eli, has a hand pressed over his mouth and his eyes are creased right up at the corners, which on him is the same as anybody else on the floor.
I should be mortified. I am mortified. But it’s one in the morning.
I nearly torched my aunt’s bakery over a goddamn lemon tart and a daydream.
There are three ridiculous men laughing in my smoke-filled kitchen like it’s the best call they’ve had all year.
And I feel the whole awful, sleepless, aching week crack straight down the middle, and I start laughing too.
Properly. Hard enough to fold me in half. Which I haven’t done once since I got to this town.
“You misted it,” Rhett gasps. “You stood there going pff, pff at an open flame.”
“It was contained.”
“It had plans, trouble. It had a future.”
“I had it handled.”
“You had it seasoned.”
“I’m going to need all three of you to leave and forget this ever happened.”
“Not a chance.” Rhett looks like it’s Christmas morning. “This is the best night of my life. You, the little sword, the one sock. I’m getting it tattooed.”
“You have exactly one sock on,” Cal tells me kindly, in case I’d missed it.
“I am aware of the sock situation, Cal.”
“Just making sure you’re aware of the sock situation.”
Eli’s the first to stop, because Eli’s the one who checks things. He does a slow lap of the kitchen, props both doors to pull the smoke out, then runs a hand along the scorched wall behind the oven. His face does the thing it does when a number comes out wrong.
“Wiring’s gone,” he says. “The whole oven’s done, birdie. You got lucky it went while you were standing right here. If that had let go overnight, empty shop, nobody home, it’d be a different morning.”
Birdie. It lands square in the soft part of me I keep boarded over, and I decide, firmly, not to look at it.
“The oven’s done,” I repeat, and the giggles drain out as the math arrives. No oven. A month to a festival. A shop that only stays open because of that festival, and a bank balance that kisses zero at the bottom of every month. “Shit,” I tell the oven, the month, the math. “I can’t buy a new oven.”
“You don’t have to buy one tonight,” Cal says, and the grin gentles right down. “Tonight you need the windows open, a cup of something hot, and to sit down before you fall down. We’ll figure the rest out tomorrow.”
We. He drops it in like it costs nothing. Like it’s the plainest word in the language. Like a broken oven is a thing that belongs to all of us now, and always did.
I don’t correct him. I’m too tired, too floured, and, at one in the morning, too warm at the sound of it to want to.
Because I keep not saying the thing underneath.
I’ve been carrying this shop alone for a month like it’s a test I’ll fail the instant I ask anyone for help, the same as I’ve carried everything my whole life.
And three men just kicked my door down at one in the morning, put out my fire, insulted my technique, and called my ruined oven ours, and not one of them made me feel like a fool for any of it.
Marigold would have liked them. The thought comes out of nowhere and lodges in my throat, and I have to study the floor for a second until it passes.
Which is when I notice all three of them have gone still.
It happens to them at once, the same as it did at the breakfast, the same as it did on the sidewalk.
Heads lifting. A shift in the room I feel before I see it.
Rhett’s grin fades into caution. Cal’s eyes sharpen and go dark.
And Eli goes very, very quiet, a quiet that has nothing to do with the fire.
They’re scenting me. Whatever the restless, itchy, too-warm thing is, the one that’s had me down here baking at one in the morning all week, they can smell it. All three of them. It’s filling up my little kitchen, and from their faces, it is a long way from nothing.
Whatever it is, it’s changed the whole air of the room. The three of them have stopped being three men who came to help. Now they’re three alphas holding very still in a very small space, keeping their hands to themselves on nothing but good manners, and it’s plainly costing them.
“What,” I say. “Why do you all have a face. You’ve all got the same face.”
Nobody answers. Cal opens his mouth and closes it again. Rhett, for the first time since I met him, appears to have run clean out of words.
It’s Eli who finally speaks, low and careful, setting each word down like it’s breakable.
“Wren,” he says. “When did you last talk to Dot?”
And how he says it, the care folded into it, the thing underneath none of them will say out loud at one in the morning in a room full of smoke, drops the floor out of my stomach one more time tonight.
The kettle sound. The one I’ve been so sure I couldn’t hear.
It’s getting louder.