31. Delilah
DELILAH
The woman at the register has driven from Poughkeepsie to buy a cinnamon roll and ask whether I can ruin her boyfriend’s life with Microsoft Office.
I am holding a tray of hot apricot danishes when she makes the request.
“PowerPoint only,” I tell her. “Excel gets too violent.”
She laughs so hard that she knocks her purse off the counter.
Priya points at me from the espresso machine. “Stop encouraging them.”
“I’m providing customer service.”
“You’re building a revenge consultancy.”
“It’s called ‘diversifying our revenue streams,’ Pri.”
The woman buys the danishes, too.
That has been my life all month long. People arrive from every borough and half the Hudson Valley because they saw the Christmas video.
They take photographs under the bakery sign.
They buy almost everything in the case by noon.
They ask me to autograph receipts, spatulas, and several divorce petitions.
At first, I was a little gun-shy about the whole overnight virality thing. The first three or four times someone started gushing that they recognized me from the TikTok or whatever, I wanted to hide in the walk-in until they went away.
Then the fifth person came in and placed a six-hundred-dollar order.
I decided then and there that maybe fame wasn’t so bad after all.
We’ve had to change a few things around here to make sure we don’t get ahead of ourselves.
The bakery now requires payment in advance for every order above two hundred dollars.
We cap custom cakes at eighteen per week.
Priya handles online requests, Cameron controls pickups, and Jolene has permission to hang up whenever a caller calls me a fat bitch, calls me a lying wife, or declares the whole thing a half-assed grassroots publicity stunt preying on our worst insecurities as a society.
Jolene, in particular, is really enjoying her new duties.
“Fourth one today,” she announces from the office doorway. “A man from Ohio thinks adultery is a private matter and should be handled by the man of the household as he sees fit.”
“Gross. Did he order anything?”
“I mean, technically, yes. He ordered you to repent.”
“Hah! Did you get a deposit?”
“I told him repentance starts at forty-eight dollars a dozen, and he said that was a bit rich for his taste. I suggested that, if he didn’t have the budget for repentance, he should start with some good ol’ humility and go from there.”
I kiss two fingers and fire them at her with an imaginary gun. “This is why you’re essential, Jo. I’ve never loved you more.”
Honestly, callers like that are few and far between. Most of the attention actually isn’t awful at all. Contrary to what Vivian and Connor had me thinking, a huge chunk of humanity is made up of good, sweet, decent-hearted people.
Some of them tell me things. They share stories they’ve never been brave enough to tell their friends, about heartache and burned relationships.
Some buy cupcakes and tell me they were so inspired that they left husbands, wives, fiancés, churches, jobs, or entire states after watching me walk out of my mother’s house.
I never know what to say to those people.
Good for you sounds too cheerful when a woman finishes telling you how she’s abandoned twenty-three years of marriage and moved into her cousin’s basement.
I’m sorry sounds ridiculous when she’s smiling about it.
Usually, I just give them a cookie. That seems to work just fine.
The money helps, too. By the third week of January, we’re breaking records for bakery sales.
Priya and I huddle together at my desk before opening each Monday and review wages, ingredients, utilities, taxes, and the repairs I have postponed.
If the pace holds, this will be our strongest quarter in years.
It’s giving us some badly needed breathing room. Thanks to the influx of happy customers, I’m able to authorize overtime, place larger ingredient orders, and add the money we need for the wheezing walk-in compressor to the repair account.
I pay everyone else before I pay myself, same as always.
But this month, I pay myself, too.
And I almost consider sending Kane Makov a check for his contributions.
Because it’s not just TikTok gawkers and sexually liberated divorcées going through an Eat, Pray, Love phase of their life who are funding this burst of revenue.
Another new element has joined my customer base.
And they’re… Well, let’s just say “a little different.”
Most of them wear all black. They pay cash only, every time, and they have a significantly higher rate of face tattoos than the average population.
But my God, they love their sweets.
This is a new and unexpected wrinkle in the stereotype of the Russian gangster. Men who look capable of dissolving a body in vats of industrial acid are lining up beneath my chalkboard menu and debating in angry streams of their native language the upsides of raspberry versus apricot jam.
They also tip obscenely.
“Your terrifying boyfriend’s fan club is here,” Priya murmurs one day when the Bratva men turn out in force.
“He’s not my boyfriend.”
“Fine. Your extortionist with benefits.”
“Who said anything about benefits?”
Priya looks pointedly at my mouth, as if the kiss happened four weeks ago but left a permanent stain behind. I don’t know how she always knows these things, but she does. She has a sixth sense for illicit sexual contact.
Meanwhile, at the counter, two broad men in matching black coats pretend not to hear us.
I recognize one from Orthodox Christmas.
Yuri, I think. The other has a spider tattoo crawling over his shaved scalp and is holding a pink bakery box so carefully that you’d think it contained an organ for transplant.
“Ms. Dorsey,” Yuri says solemnly. “Twelve honey cookies, please.”
I arch a brow. “Didn’t you buy eighteen yesterday?”
He glances at Spider Scalp, who looks up and starts intently studying the ceiling.
“They got lost,” Yuri growls angrily. “And some of us are lucky that our testicles didn’t get ‘lost’ along with them. Right, Igor?”
Igor keeps his gaze upward. Probably a good move on his part.
Laughing, I box the cookies. Yuri slides a hundred across the counter.
“The total is thirty-six,” I tell him. “This is way too much.”
“Keep it.”
“I couldn’t possibly—”
“Keep it, Ms. Dorsey,” he insists, shoving the cash across the counter. “It’s the least you deserve.”
Behind him, the line curves out the door. Priya calls the next ticket. The ovens roar, warm and dependable at my back.
For the first time since Christmas, I look around my bakery and don’t see a ship leaking from too many holes to plug.
I see a business so busy the windows fog, with my name on the glass.
Mine, at least for now.
And for one busy morning, that is enough for me.
“Alright. Thanks, Yuri.”
He bows and starts to head out of the door.
Which is when a man barrels in hard enough to shoulder Yuri into the frame.
This is a tactical error from which there is no coming back. Yuri is approximately the width and density of a U-Haul, and he is unafraid of violence.
The newcomer doesn’t notice, though. He’s too busy thrusting his phone around at the inside of my bakery.
“There she is!” he announces to the screen. “The famous lying whale herself!”
All the noise is instantly sucked out of the room. Every conversation dies.
Yuri looks at me.
I see the question in his face.
You want me to kill him?
I shake my head once.
Not yet.
“Good morning, sir,” I say as brightly as I can. “What can I get you?”
The man swings his phone around to face me. “Look at her! Shameless!”
“Sir,” I say, “please don’t record me or my employees.”
“This is a public place, dumbass,” he snaps in response, frothing at the mouth.
“It’s private property,” I correct. “And I own it.”
He pans past Jolene in the office doorway. Cameron turns away at once, forearm coming up to shield his face.
The man laughs. “What are you hiding?”
“Mostly a pimple,” Cameron mutters. “But now, also my desire to punch you.”
I put both palms on the counter. “Phone down.”
The camera snaps back to me.
Up close, the man is younger than I first thought. Expensive puffer jacket, wet blond hair. He has the charged, shiny-eyed look of someone who spent the subway ride here rehearsing this for an audience that lives inside his phone.
“You destroyed a man’s life for clicks,” he accuses. “You humiliated your own sister because you’re jealous.”
“Sure. That’s why I played the video that she filmed.”
His mouth tightens. Logic: the natural predator of the livestreaming dipshit.
“You deliberately edited it to make her look bad!”
“Did you want the director’s cut?” I laugh. “There’s plenty of free versions just one Google search away.”
A few customers laugh. His phone jerks toward them, recording faces before they can duck away.
That does it.
It’s not so funny anymore.
“You need to leave,” I tell him.
“I drove two hours to reveal your lies to my followers!”
“Then you’ve got a nice long ride home to think about your choices.”
“I’m not going fuckin’ anywhere.” He plants an elbow on the glass case, nearly crushing a display of raspberry thumbprints. “People deserve to see what you’re really like.”
I start to come around the counter.
Priya catches my apron tie. “Delilah.”
“I’m fine. Seriously.”
This is not entirely true. My pulse is flinging itself against my throat, and the personification of every ugly comment I’ve received online is suddenly standing in my bakery wearing a Moncler jacket.
But this is my floor beneath my Crocs.
My name is on the window.
And I make the rules around here.
“You were told to leave,” I say. “If you stay, you’re trespassing.”
He turns the phone on me at point-blank range. “What are you gonna do, you cow? Sit on me?”
Behind him, Yuri growls.
Normally, that’s the kind of word you use for a man with a deep voice saying something fierce.
This is not like that.
This is a literal, actual, feral bear growl. Like, the carnivorous version.