Chapter 16 #4
Hazel stared at the counter, blinking back the sting in her eyes.
His offer was too casual, too hollow, like inviting someone to fill a seat at a dinner reservation.
Like he hadn’t missed twenty Christmases before this one, like he hadn’t left twenty versions of her sitting alone with unopened presents and unanswered calls and an ache in her chest too big for her small body to carry.
She laughed, but it wasn’t a laugh, not really. It was a sound scraped from the bottom of her lungs, ragged and empty.
“This won’t be the first Christmas I’ve spent without you,” she said, each word cracked at the edges. She paused, drawing in a trembling breath. “I’d rather stay here,” she continued, her voice dipping a bit lower. “Where I’m wanted. Where someone actually cared about me, once.”
Then, before he could respond, before he could say something cutting or careless or worse, nothing at all, she hung up.
She stood there for a long time afterward, the phone still in her hand, the silence loud enough to drown in.
The oven beeped. Somewhere in the distance, a car passed on the road, kicking slush up onto the sidewalk, spraying the edge of the front window.
But Hazel didn’t move. She couldn’t, not yet.
Minutes later, she found herself further into the kitchen, though she couldn’t remember her legs carrying her there.
One moment, she was standing motionless in the hallway, the phone screen still warm in her palm.
The next, she was sliding a tray of uncooked croissants into place with hands that moved on muscle memory alone.
Her body knew what came next. Whisk, fold, preheat, brush with cream.
But inside, everything was fogged and muffled, like the sound had been turned down on the part of her that usually felt tethered to the moment.
But she kept moving, counting out pastries, setting timers she didn’t check, rotating trays in the oven as the smell of browning butter thickened around her.
Her mind didn’t settle, not once, not even when she began setting the first delicate batch behind the glass display case.
Her fingers were steady as she worked but her heart was not.
When the oven timer beeped again, she didn’t hesitate.
She reached for the tray automatically— too fast, too bare— and the edge of it grazed the soft underside of her wrist with a sharp, blistering sting.
Hazel hissed aloud, a strangled sound that scraped up her throat as the metal clattered back against the rack inside the oven.
She backed away on instinct, breath caught in her chest, eyes already stinging— not from tears, not yet, but from the jolt of pain so sudden it made the world lurch sideways.
She reached for a nearby oven mitt and removed the tray properly the second time, though the damage had already been done.
A moment later, Hazel turned on the sink with trembling hands and shoved her wrist under the cold stream.
The shock of it made her shoulders lock, but she didn’t move.
She just stood there, hunched over the basin, watching the cold air rise and disappear in slow curls while her pulse hammered in her throat.
The water roared over her skin, numbing the sting, but it couldn’t reach the ache building somewhere deeper.
She stood like that for a long time, letting it run, letting herself vanish into the white noise of it.
And that was when the question came.
What am I even doing here?
Not just in the bakery, not just in this moment, but in Bar Harbor.
In this life.
In this body that kept getting hurt and trying again, anyway.
She looked around at the empty kitchen, at the golden light starting to creep across the tiles from the lampposts outside, at the familiar curves of the bakery she’d poured herself into.
And for the first time, she didn’t feel held by it, she didn’t feel steady.
She felt like a ghost floating through a room that used to mean something.
This was supposed to be the dream, she thought. The healing. The home.
But instead, it felt like another place she’d built out of need, not belonging. A shrine to someone else’s memory. A story she was trying to finish with a voice that didn’t sound like hers anymore.
She dried her wrist, flinching at the dull burn that still lingered across her skin.
And then she moved through the rest of the opening routine like someone playing a part in a play that had lost its script.
She stacked muffins, topped the cinnamon rolls with glaze, poured herself a coffee and left it to go cold beside the register, unable to stomach the taste of it against her tongue.
Six-thirty came and then passed. And Beck didn’t show.
Not at six thirty-one, when he usually arrived just as the hands of the old antique clock on the console table ticked, always a minute behind.
Not at six thirty-three, when she glanced toward the window and saw only sidewalks slick with snow and distant headlights.
Not at six thirty-five, when the ache in her chest began to shift into something tighter. That familiar kind of emptiness that left a hollow sound in your lungs when you breathed too deep.
He’d been there almost every morning, even when the roads were bad, even when neither of them had much to say. He showed up. He stayed.
And when he couldn’t, he sent her a message to let her know. She reached for her phone, then, thumb sliding across the screen. It blinked to life, but displayed no new messages.
The door stayed closed. The bell remained steady and still in its position against the frame.
Her breath hitched, just once. She told herself it was nothing. That he was late, or busy, or had been called to the docks. But the words didn’t land.
Instead, another voice rose.
Maybe you scared him away.
Maybe last night was too much.
Maybe he saw you, really saw you, and realized it wasn’t worth the weight.
Her fingers curled around the edges of the pastry tongs she hadn’t realized she was holding. Her knuckles had gone pale and bloodless from the pressure. She set them down and stepped away from the counter, trying to force air into her aching lungs.
The bakery felt heavier than it had before. Too warm. Too still.
She remembered her father’s voice. The flatness of it. The word manageable, tossed like a verdict, like a life she hadn’t earned. And for the first time in a long time, she wondered if maybe he was right.
Maybe she wasn’t built for this. Maybe she was just pretending. A little girl playing at being whole.
Maybe she should sell the house.
The thought came quietly, like fog rolling in over the water— soft at first, then suddenly it was everywhere. It wasn’t new, just louder now. More plausible. More dangerous.
Maybe she should go back to Boston. Back to the place where ambition had once lit her up from the inside out, where the pace was brutal but familiar, where the hours were long but at least they made sense.
Maybe she should return to the version of herself who knew how to disappear into a kitchen and emerge with something immaculate and sharp.
Maybe she should shut the door on this place before someone else did it for her.
Before the bakery lost its warmth. Before Beck decided it was too much. Before the people here, kind and well-meaning, realized that Hazel wasn’t who they thought she was. That she wasn’t made of hometown comfort or quiet resilience. That she wasn’t anyone’s safe place, not really.
She could sell the house and start fresh.
Buy something small and new, without chipped trim or slanted floors or memories pressed into every square inch of wall.
She could make positive changes, set boundaries, choose rest over ritual.
She could live in a neighborhood where no one knew her past, where the shadows didn’t call her by name.
She could make it work.
She always did.
Maybe staying in Bar Harbor wasn’t the solution after all. Maybe it never had been. Maybe it was just the only door left open when everything else fell apart, a soft landing that had started to feel more like a holding pattern.
A dream she’d mistaken for a destination.
Because now, even the bakery didn’t feel like sanctuary.
It felt like a place where her job was to put on a performance, like she was holding her breath between each interaction, willing herself to stay kind, stay calm, stay warm, when all she really wanted was to lie down in the flour-dusted quiet and vanish.
She blinked, and her eyes found the smudged windowpane, the faint outline of her reflection barely visible in the darkness of the morning. She didn’t look like someone with answers. She looked like someone who’d wandered too far into something and had forgotten the way back out.
And maybe that was what scared her most.
Not the leaving, never the leaving. That part was easy— she’d seen it practiced before her, all her life. She’d had a front row seat.
But the staying? That, she didn’t know how to do.