Chapter Five – Bailey
The day after the Harvest Bash tastes like cinnamon and consequences.
I unlock the door to A Page in Time with one hand and balance a paper bag of Daisy’s “I Won’t Bake Again Until Noon (Lie)” pastries on my hip with the other.
The porch boards are still damp from last night’s fog; the string lights I forgot to take down from the windows glow faintly in the gray.
I’m not saying I left them up for ambience.
I’m saying I left them up because they make the lighthouse look like it took a deep breath and remembered it was allowed to be pretty.
Inside, I flick on the lamps, and the shop wakes in warm layers—brass, wood, paper, and sea-salt air sneaking through the old casements.
The espresso machine hisses as if it’s rolling its shoulders, which is rude because I’m the one who tied rope knots until my palms stung and then stood in a park pretending I didn’t notice a six-foot-something problem bidding on cookies like a man with intent.
Not a date, I remind the ceiling. A fundraiser. A basket. A rash decision made by a quarterback with generous pockets.
The ceiling, as usual, refuses to referee.
I move—rugs straightened, windows cracked, cash counted, muffins plated. Normal is a choreography I can do by muscle memory. It helps. It always has.
The bell over the door jingles, and Mrs. Winthrop drifts in wearing a cape and an expression like she’s already shocked by whatever I’m about to say. “Darling, I have terrible news. I woke up this morning and discovered I’m still not twenty-five.”
“Tragic.” I slide a maple pecan in her direction. “Carbohydrate condolences.”
She accepts, bites, then sighs dramatically. “I suppose we must go on. Tell me everything.”
“About?”
“Don’t play coy,” she scolds gently. “It ages you. The basket, Bailey. The literary lovers nonsense invented by the mayor. You allowed a public man to buy a private hour. I require details so I can live vicariously and give excellent advice.”
“It’s not—” I stop, realizing I’m about to say a date out loud to a woman who once told me plants thrive when you talk to them about scandal. “It’s an appointment. After hours. For tea and cookies. The end.”
She hums like a woman who has never once accepted the end as a reasonable conclusion to a story. “Hmm. Well, when you inevitably wear that soft blue sweater your eyes like, tell him to sit on the rug. Men open up closer to the ground.”
“Is that…science?”
“It’s experience.” She pats my hand, purchases a mystery, and sails out again, leaving perfume and prophecy in her wake.
I set the bell to ring a little louder because I refuse to be ambushed by any more wisdom before nine.
The morning rush trickles—tourists finishing out long weekends, teachers hunting for class read-alouds, a fisherman who buys a book of poems and claims they help his casting rhythm.
I let the town talk itself out around me, answering to Bailey, lighthouse lady, and, once, book witch (which, honestly, is flattering).
At ten, the side door creaks, and Daisy backs in with a tray of scones balanced like a tightrope act. “I brought tributes for your not-date,” she singsongs, nudging the door shut with her heel.
“It’s not—”
“I know.” She sets the tray down, peels off her jacket, and studies my face. “You slept?”
“Like a woman who tied rope knots for fun.”
She grins. “Sawyer said your lines were clean. Also he said if you’re going to keep using that old glass, you might want to rub in a little linseed oil. But that could’ve been about bread. He was eating toast at the time.”
“I’ll ask him.”
“Or,” Daisy says, “you could ask the person who clearly wrote you a donation check like a man trying not to be noticed.”
I do not look at the drawer where the envelope lives. “You anointed yourself as treasurer of my secrets, when?”
“The minute I learned how to make frosting. It’s in the bylaws.” She leans on her elbows. “Have you set a time?”
“For the…appointment?” I aim for bored and land somewhere near breathless.
“For the not-date in your lighthouse with baked goods and moonlight,” she corrects.
“I was thinking tomorrow,” I say, because apparently my mouth has decided to live dangerously before my brain has a chance to file a safety report. “After close.”
“Perfect,” she beams. “Do your hair. Wear the blue sweater.”
“Mrs. Winthrop texted you, didn’t she?”
“She added me to a sub-thread. It’s me, her, and your pigeon.”
The door opens, and the pigeon—my nemesis—stares in as if on cue before deciding the weather is beneath him and flapping away. Daisy waves. “See? He’s invested.”
“Fantastic. A bird and two women over seventy are managing my love life.”
“Please. I’m not over seventy.” She kisses my cheek, snags a scone, and disappears with a parting, “Call me if you need reinforcements or have a hairbrush emergency.”
The shop settles. A father and daughter browse the nature section, arguing about whales with the kind of intensity that says they’re going to be fine.
I ring up a stack of cookbooks for a customer who confesses he’s never baked a pie but is suddenly deeply competitive about it.
I recommend a recipe. He vows to return with samples.
I support his dreams because I, too, am not immune to sugar.
The bell rings again, and this time four things happen at once: a gust of cooler air tumbles in, two young reporters I don’t recognize step over the threshold with mics clipped to their shirts, the taller one says “We’re with Channel Seven doing Harvest Bash follow-ups,” and the fourth thing—the one that knocks my balance—is that Crew, of course, is right behind them holding a takeaway tray of coffees like they’re a peace treaty.
I remind my face that it has edges and a position. “Hi.”
“Hi,” he says, and the room shifts because his hi says more than it should.
The reporters spin, light snapping on. “Mr. Wright! Do you have a second for a quick feel-good piece?”
He flinches a millimeter. Just enough to make me want to form a protective circle with my arms. He recovers, a smile sliding into place. “I have sixty seconds. After that, I’m a hazard to your equipment.”
They laugh. “Perfect. We’re doing post-Bash human interest. Local hero returns, supports library, bids on literary basket—”
“It was for cookies,” he says, shooting me a side glance that asks permission to keep telling our joke in public.
“Cookies,” I echo, playing my part because if the town expects anything of me, it’s that I can commit to a bit.
“Right.” The shorter reporter checks her notes. “And the basket includes—let me get this right—an after-hours ‘story hour for two’ hosted by…” She squints at her card. “Bailey Hart.”
“So,” the reporter barrels on, “tell us—what moved you to bid?”
He could feed them lines: community, literacy, sister’s influence, nostalgia. He could turn the charm up two clicks, and they’d eat out of his hand. And for a second, I think he will.
Then he glances at me, breathes once, and chooses a different stage.
“I like lighthouses,” he says simply. “And books seem to bring out the truth in people.”
The taller reporter blinks. The shorter one recovers. “That’s…poetic.”
“It’s accurate.” His smile tilts. “Also, I hear there are cookies.”
“There are,” I say, because someone has to steady the scene, and it turns out it might as well be the girl who wore flour on her wrist the night before. “But only to approved bidders following rigorous cookie protocols.”
“Fortunately,” he says, eyes warming, “I come pre-approved.”
“Debatable.”
The interview lasts exactly sixty seconds and feels like walking across a frozen pond that decides mercy is fashionable today. They get their footage. He gives them a quote that will play well. I do not flip a microphone into the bay. Everyone’s a winner.
When they leave, he sets one of the coffees on the counter in front of me without fanfare. “Oat milk, minimal sugar. You’re chaotic but disciplined.”
“Stop reading my diary,” I say, fingers curling around warmth I will not name.
He lifts the other cup. “Truce?”
“Terms?”
“You don’t ban me from the premises for being a public nuisance. I don’t let anyone else bid on your time.”
My pulse, unhelpful traitor, leaps like it was waiting to be told to. “You can’t stop—”
“I can try.”
“Intimidation isn’t a personality.”
“Tell my agent,” he mutters.
I fight a smile and fail, because in the light morning, he looks exactly like a man who would pay four hundred dollars to keep a promise to himself.
“So,” he says, casual like the world isn’t slanting, “about my winnings.”
“Your cookies,” I say, for the cameras that no longer exist. “And the…hour.”
He nods once, all the joking sluicing off his face for something steadier. “Tonight? After close? If you’re not—”
“I was hoping for tomorrow, but tonight works,” I say, as if my mouth has separated from my central nervous system and run off with my best impulses. “Seven thirty.”
“Perfect.” He reaches into his jacket and pulls out a small paper bag. “Peace offering.”
“I thought the coffees were—” I open it and pause. Inside are two brand-new pairs of work gloves. One small, one large. Both soft, broken-in, like someone took the time to oil the leather last night while thinking about my hands.
“I like my book witch with skin,” he says with a shrug, laughing at his own chivalry before it can embarrass him. “Also, Sawyer said to tell you he’ll come up on Wednesday to look at the lantern frame.”
I swallow past the feeling gathering in my throat. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me for gloves.”
“For not making a joke when the mics were on,” I say. “For choosing the boring, honest answer.”
His mouth does something that isn't a smile, yet is heading that way. “Trying out this whole ‘man’ thing.”
“How’s it going?”
He glances down at my wrist. The flour streak is still there despite my early morning shower (don’t ask me, Daisy’s work is witchcraft).
Without thinking, he reaches out and rubs at it with his thumb.
The touch is light. The charge is not. And the damn thing disappears.
Not even super flour is immune to his charm.
“Better,” he says, thumb withdrawing like he can feel the scaling heat he left in his wake.
We stand in the quiet hum of the shop, two coffees between us like a treaty, two pairs of gloves like a dare, and the after-hours hour hovering overhead like a promise I wrote myself and then forgot to deny.
A kid barrels in with a dollar and a mission to buy a bookmark with a dragon on it. We both jump, ridiculous and guilty, and the moment slides toward sensible again with a small, shamed laugh from my rib cage.
“Seven thirty,” he says, backing toward the door before we both make choices we can’t fold back up. “I’ll bring…something.”
“Bring your inside voice,” I say. “It’s a library-adjacent event.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
The bell sings, and he’s gone.
I look down at the gloves in my hands and only realize I’ve been smiling like a fool when Daisy appears at my shoulder and whispers, “Oh, this is catastrophic.”
“It’s not—”
“Bailey,” she says, head tipped, eyes kind, voice relentless. “Honey, you’re already in the lighthouse. You might as well turn on the light.”
I make a face at her. She makes one back. We’re both twelve and thirty and ancient in the way women are when they stand behind counters and decide where their lives will go and who will be allowed to walk in.
At six, I flip the sign to CLOSED.
One minute later, the group chat lights up like a bonfire.
Lila: Need me to deliver a bodyguard/babysitter/baked goods?
Ivy: I wrote you a playlist titled “Tea & Tension.” Do not waste it.
Me: If I don’t respond, I was kidnapped.
Daisy: You’re welcome.
Mrs. Winthrop: Blue sweater. Rug seating. Also a dab of vanilla behind the knees. It’s science.
Me: ABSOLUTELY NOT.
Mrs. Winthrop: Your loss.
I laugh alone in the middle of my shop and don’t feel alone at all.
At seven, I boil water and set out cups and cookies and the hardcover stack he paid for like a ridiculous, perfect man.
At seven fifteen, I check the lantern ropes even though they’re fine.
At seven twenty-eight, I stand with my hand on the light switch and breathe like I am not about to invite history up a narrow staircase.
At seven thirty on the dot, the bell rings.
I open the door. He stands there, wind-tousled, jacket unzipped, hair damp at the edges. He lifts a thermos like an offering.
“I know this night comes with tea. But I brought a peace offering,” he says. “Again.”
“What’s in it?”
“Cinnamon tea,” he says, and smiles like a man about to tell the truth.
I step back, let him in, and close the door behind him. The lighthouse settles around us, patient and old and extremely nosy.
“Books first,” I say, because control is a warm blanket, and I like being warm. “Tea second. Then cookies. Then—”
“Questions,” he says, and I blink.
“Science,” I mutter.
He grins. “Lead the way, Book Girl.”
I pick up the gloves and the thermos. He takes the books. We climb—step, breath, hand to rail—and at the top, in the lantern room, the glass holds steady, the rope hums, and the air goes sweet with cinnamon and the hope of something like repair.
Not a date, I tell myself one last time, purely for tradition.
Then I sit on the rug beside him, set the cups between us, and admit, quietly, when the room is listening and nobody else is, “I’m nervous.”
“Me, too,” he says, and says it like an invitation instead of a warning.
We don’t kiss. We don’t touch. Not yet. We drink tea, we eat cookies, and we read a page aloud from a book about second chances because I am who I am and he is who he has decided to be.
We ask each other questions we should have asked a decade ago.
And when the hour we auctioned finally runs out, neither of us moves to stand. Until, with the strength of one thousand men, I walk Crew to the door and bid him good night. Even though I want to do anything but.