Chapter 16 #3
Then her phone rang.
The shrill sound shattered the quiet like glass underfoot— sharp, sudden, and startling in its brightness. Hazel jumped. Her shoulders flew up, her spine going rigid as she spun toward the sound.
It was too early for a phone call. Too early for anything, except this, her quiet morning ritual.
The bakery hadn’t even opened yet. She hadn’t even poured Beck his morning mug of Harborside Brews.
The hallway felt longer than it had a moment ago, darker, the shadows where the light didn’t touch stretched thin across the floor.
She moved with quick, unsteady steps, the soles of her shoes silent on the hardwood, her apron swishing around her knees.
Something in her gut had already begun to coil— tight, hot, and instinctive. A warning.
She reached the counter where her phone sat, still vibrating against the wood, its sound a sharp, impatient buzz that hummed through her fingers as she picked it up.
And then she saw the name.
Dad.
It wasn’t a name so much as a shiver, something felt more than read.
A single word with too much history, too many hollow spots, too many invisible bruises that still ached when brushed up against. Her stomach dropped instantly, the way it does when a rollercoaster tips over its highest edge, no warning, just that sickening plummet into the place where gravity forgets you.
The anxiety came in like a flood. Rushing past her ribs, up her throat, down into her limbs, every part of her suddenly waterlogged.
The sweetness that had lingered in her body a moment ago— sugar and flour and Beck’s hands around her from the night before— drained from her, all at once.
Like someone had reached inside and flipped off a switch.
She wasn’t ready. She was never ready, not for this.
She didn’t answer right away. She just stared at the screen, watching the seconds tick past as though they were counting something bigger than time.
Her hand froze mid-air, gripped in that now-familiar war between silence and surrender.
She could let it ring out, let it fade like so many other calls.
But a part of her— a small, stubborn, fractured thing buried somewhere deep— still wanted to believe he might say something different this time.
Something fatherly. Something that erased the years of fractured interactions between them.
So she answered.
“Hello?” her voice was small, barely tethered to her.
There was a pause from the other end, almost as if he was surprised she’d answered. Then, his voice came through, flat and unbothered, like he’d dialed out of routine more than intent. “Hazel.”
Just her name. No hello, no how are you, no I’ve missed you. Just a placeholder. A name spoken like it didn’t belong to a person at all, let alone a person he’d once taught to walk and talk.
Hazel’s throat dried up immediately. The remaining warmth clinging to her skin, to her heart, began to cool and fade.
“Hi,” she offered back. “Good morning.”
She leaned her hip against the counter to keep from pacing, trying to anchor herself with posture if not with breath.
“I know you’re usually up at this hour and I was just thinking about the house,” he said, like it was a natural progression, like this wasn’t the first time he’d called in weeks.
Like she’d ever asked him for his advice, for his help.
Hazel blinked, her eyes widening— not in recognition, but in sheer surprise.
He still hadn’t said a word about the article.
She’d sent it to him weeks ago, the link pasted carefully beneath a short, cautious message.
It had been a small offering, a quiet bridge.
He’d seen it almost immediately— she’d watched the little notification flicker to life, seen— and all he’d done was react with a thumbs up.
No message, no comment, not even a question.
And somehow, that silence hurt more than if he hadn’t opened the message at all.
“Have you thought any more about selling?” he asked, as if they were already mid-conversation.
She stared at the counter before her, her mouth half-open, the question echoing into the hollow space he’d left.
No what are your plans for the holidays? No mention of the bakery, no questions about her life or whether she was lonely or how she was doing without her grandmother there to anchor her. Just the house, just the inheritance— just the thing he’d never earned the right to care about.
It was always like this. Transaction over tenderness. Logistics over love. Always an arms length between them that felt more like the width of an ocean.
“I haven’t,” she said, and her voice was too steady to be safe. “Because I’m not selling.”
He exhaled into the phone. Whether it was a sigh or a scoff, she couldn’t tell.
“You could get a good price for it,” he continued, undeterred by her words, as if she hadn’t spoken at all. “The market’s still strong. You could buy a condo or a townhouse in Boston. Something more manageable.”
That word. Manageable. It struck her like a stone to the chest.
Like she wasn’t already managing, like she hadn’t been managing every single day since she stepped into this town carrying nothing but grief and stubborn hope.
As if she hadn’t risen before the sun each day and worked herself raw, as if she hadn’t built something steady and warm out of memory and mortar and soft light.
She’d been managing, and then some.
Her pulse pounded, louder than the soft churn of the proofing oven behind her.
Her breath came fast and short, little breaths that had begun to create an ache in her lungs.
Her hands itched with the need to do something— slam the phone down, or throw it across the room, or grip it harder until the cheap plastic casing cracked in her palm.
“I’m managing just fine,” she said, and this time the words came edged with something sharper. “I like being here and the bakery’s doing well, Dad. I’m doing well.”
But the words felt off, like a borrowed coat she hadn’t quite grown into. They sounded too eager, too defensive, like she was still waiting for him to believe her. Like she still needed him to tell her she was right, that he was proud, that he saw her.
There was a pause on his end. She could hear it in the quiet, the rustling of his shirt collar, the shift of his weight, the beginning of another sentence already forming behind his teeth.
And then it came.
“You’re alone out there, Hazel. I just don’t want you to end up overwhelmed, like your mother was. I worry about you, you know.”
The comparison to her mother carved straight through her.
And that word— that false claim of worry— it prickled at something broken and unhealed within her, a flash of white-hot anger stirring itself awake in the pit of her stomach.
As if he hadn’t left her in the very heart of that feeling. As if he hadn’t stood at the edge of her childhood and decided the weight of it was too much to carry. As if he hadn’t packed up and walked away, hands lighter without her in them.
She gripped the counter again, harder this time.
Her arm was shaking from the effort of it.
She turned for a moment and stared out the front window, at the faint hints of the world continuing on outside the bakery, outside of this moment.
As if her world wasn’t slowly closing in around her, the pressure forcing her body to curl in on itself.
Like it had that first day back in Bar Harbor, out on the front stoop, before someone had come along and offered an olive branch.
A way out. A hint of light at the end of the tunnel.
“I really don’t think you’re in any position to worry about me being overwhelmed,” she said.
Her voice was quiet, but there was iron in it.
Something dangerous, finally unburied. She could feel the seams of her composure beginning to rip free.
Her eyes pressed shut and silently, she begged her father to let it go, to move on.
To apologize, maybe, or wish her a Merry Christmas, and then say goodbye.
They could try again in a few months, when this anger had faded and drifted away on the westward wind.
She wanted to let this be over, to try and forget he’d called at all.
But instead, he went still on the line. She could feel the weight of it and instantly, she knew— there would be no letting this moment go, not for him.
“What does that mean?”
Hazel swallowed. Her heart was a drum against her ribs now.
“It means,” she said, drawing the words out. “Don’t you think I might’ve been overwhelmed at seven, when my mother was sent away and my father just... left?”
The words dropped one by one like stones into still water. He remained silent on the other end.
“And what about when you told me I’d visit you, live with you? And then you just stopped calling instead. You got remarried, had more kids, built a life. One I was never a part of.”
Her voice cracked. She hated how young she sounded, how brittle the words came out.
“I waited for you,” she said, almost a whisper. “I waited. For years. But you never came back. Even though you promised.”
The silence now wasn’t just silence, it was abandonment, reflected back in real time.
Hazel’s breath came hard and unsteady. She pressed a hand to her chest like she could calm the thunder beneath it.
“Why can’t you just support me?“ she asked, voice raw and breaking. “Why can’t you ever just say I’m proud of you, Hazel? Or that you see how hard I’m trying? Or even that you’re glad I’m okay?”
She waited. And waited.
But he didn’t say any of those things.
Instead, his voice came back like a door swinging shut, smooth and detached like it always was. It was as though he hadn’t heard a single word she’d said, as if she hadn’t just torn herself open and bared her pain to him in hopes that he would finally see or understand.
“You could still come for Christmas, if you want. The invitation’s open, Haze. It always has been.”