2. Bianca
BIANCA
I’m elbow-deep in dough two hours before the sun comes up, kneading it with the stand mixer. It’s cold for an early October morning, and the heat clicks on.
Due to the late night, I’m functioning on such a small amount of sleep, I don’t even think coffee could save me.
My phone is across the kitchen on the flour-dusted counter, buzzing so hard it’s migrating toward the edge. Every few seconds, the screen lights up.
I let it go. I still can’t bring myself to look at the notifications that have been going off nonstop since the event last night.
Plenty of people recorded my interaction with Theo Sawyer. And it’s likely someone posted the interaction. If I don’t look at my phone, this could be true or not true. I won’t actually know until I look.
And the longer I put off looking, the longer I can pretend it might be possible to forget about the night.
The dough is soft under my palms, warm, elastic, exactly right. It’s my mom’s recipe. Her handwriting is taped to the wall above the station: Proof until they double, Bianca, not until you get impatient.
I don’t need the reminder anymore; she wrote the note when I was a teenager. But I leave it up, because the note makes her feel closer.
Incessant buzzing from my phone again.
I give in. I wipe my hands on my apron and pick it up.
Twenty million. Twenty million freaking views on a video uploaded last night.
The thumbnail is me, mid-sentence, chin up, eyes locked on Theodore Sawyer, with a scowl on my face. Someone titled the video: When a Jacket is Worth More than Basic Human Decency.
Underneath, a second clip—this one zoomed in on Theo’s face at the exact moment he realizes the mic is hot. The poster titled it: The Audacity Leaves the Body.
Ninety thousand shares.
I shove the phone aside and dig both hands back into the dough before I can keep scrolling.
My instinct was right to ignore it. Next time, I will listen to my gut.
When the bakery opens at seven, the line is out the door, even though it’s a chilly autumn morning.
Not the normal Saturday morning line, which is typically the loyal regulars who show up for my fresh cinnamon rolls and argue about who gets the last rosemary olive oil cake.
This is different.
These people are holding phones. They’re taking pictures of my sign, my windows, the hand-painted Sugar Bloom Bakery in my mother’s handwriting above the door. A few are angling for selfies with the display case behind them.
A woman I’ve never seen walks up to the register and says, “You’re her. The girl from the video.”
“I’m the baker,” I say. That’s what I am. “What can I get you?”
She orders a dozen cinnamon rolls, tips seventy-five dollars on a seventy-dollar order, and tells me I’m her hero.
I thank her and box the rolls. Smile until the muscles in my cheeks ache.
Behind her, a man in a blue coat is filming me.
I duck behind the display case and find Eliza restocking the lemon curd tarts, calm and unhurried, same as always. Her apron has a fresh dusting of powdered sugar, and she’s half-singing a tune I don’t recognize.
“Eliza, there is a man filming me.”
“Mm-hmm.” She slides a tart into place. “There were two earlier. I told the first one to buy something or leave. The second one bought a cookie and cried.”
“Cried?”
“Said you reminded him of his daughter.” She straightens and fixes me with the kind of look that has been undoing me since I was fourteen years old and trying to hide a burned pie from my mother.
“You did a brave thing last night. You stood up for yourself, even though that man intimidates pretty much everybody. People want to show their support. Let them.”
“What if they’re not here for the baked goods?”
“Well, to stay, they have to buy the baked goods. That’s still good business.”
I nod, go back to the register, and sell forty-seven cinnamon rolls before noon, which is a new record.
The support is loud.
The rest of it is louder.
By midafternoon, my inbox has thousands of unread emails.
I can’t read them all, but most are kind.
Strangers tell me I inspired them. Local business owners offer solidarity.
A food blogger requests an interview. And there are three catering inquiries from people who saw the clip and wanted to hire someone with my spirit.
But mixed in with the positive messages are not-so-positive messages.
About a dozen messages are calling me a gold-digging opportunist who ambushed a good man for clout.
One says I staged the whole thing. One says I should be grateful a Sawyer even looked at me.
One—the longest, the most detailed, and the one I’ll scrub from my memory with bleach if necessary—is a paragraph-long explanation of why I deserve to be put in my place, with specifics that make my skin crawl.
I close my laptop, and I grab a rag and start wiping down a counter that’s already clean.
This is what I do when I’m stressed. I clean.
When the grief after Mom’s funeral got so big I couldn’t sit down, I scrubbed the bakery grout with a toothbrush at 2 a.m.
When I almost lost the bakery the first year, I reorganized the walk-in pantry and didn’t cry until every shelf was labeled.
Cleaning is useful. Cleaning is productive. Cleaning means I don’t have to think about strangers who have decided that they know who I am after watching thirty seconds of footage.
I wipe down the display case glass. I reorganize the pastry boxes by size. I sweep the front, then the back, then the front again.
Daphne calls at four.
“Donovan. Are you hate-cleaning?”
“I’m regular cleaning.”
“You’re hate-cleaning. I’ve known you for eleven years. Tell me what happened. I saw the video.”
I tell her about the emails. About the man filming. About the line out the door, which should be the best day of my business life, except that every customer who walks in mentions the video. A low point in my life, they are asking me to relive over and over.
“Finding success from a bad video is nothing new,” Daphne says. “At least it’s not a sex tape.”
A snort comes out when I can’t hold back a laugh.
“In the meantime,” my best friend continues, “this is a marketing gift. A terrible, stressful, deeply unfair marketing gift. But a gift. They came for the drama. They’ll stay for the baked goods.”
“A man told me I should be grateful a Sawyer looked at me.”
“Forward it to me,” Daphne commands. “I’m keeping a file.”
“A file?”
“You publicly embarrassed one of the most powerful families in the country. A family with unlimited legal resources, a team of publicists, and the emotional maturity of a newborn crocodile. You need a file, and you need me. So forward the concerning emails, eat a real meal instead of raw dough, and I’ll be there at seven with wine and a legal pad. ”
She hangs up. I eat a cookie. It’s a darn good cookie.
The bakery clears out around four. Jamie and Luis handle the last customers while I box up the remaining pastries for the local women’s shelter. My mom started that tradition, and I’d sooner close the bakery than end it.
Although today, I only have a few pastries left.
Eliza goes home with a firm hug and a reminder to lock the front door, which I would be offended by if she hadn’t caught me leaving it unlocked three times this month.
I lock it. Flip the sign to closed. Pull the shade.
Then I sit on the floor behind the counter with my back against the cool tile wall, my knees pulled up, and my phone in my hand. Glutton for punishment, apparently.
I play the video three times. And I listen to him tell me I won’t be paid.
I don’t regret charging the credit card I had on file for the event as soon as I got home last night. If he tries to dispute the charge, I have millions of witnesses who can attest to what really happened.
The video is everywhere. A morning show picked it up.
A late-night host made a joke I’m told was funny, but I can’t bring myself to watch the clip.
And then there are memes I can’t scroll through fast enough—Theo’s face photoshopped onto increasingly absurd backgrounds, my chin-up moment turned into a motivational poster with fifteen different fonts, the petit fours rendered in commemorative fan art by someone with a truly impressive amount of free time.
It’s flattering. It’s mortifying. It’s both at once, and the scale of it presses down until sitting with it becomes impossible.
My face is on the internet. Not my bakery. Not my cinnamon rolls. My face, frozen in the worst moment of a night that was supposed to be the best of my career.
I press my thumb into the birthmark on my wrist.
What would you do, Mom?
She’d tell me the same thing she told me when Danny Kowalski dumped me at junior prom, and I wanted to transfer schools: You don’t get to shrink, baby. Not for any man. Not for any reason. You take up your space, and you make it beautiful.
I don’t regret my reaction. He ran into me. He screamed at me. He threatened my paycheck for a job I did perfectly, and he did it in front of three hundred people who were still clapping for his speech about kindness.
I don’t regret a single word.
But I really don’t want the stress that comes with this attention.
A lot of people are judging me, yet none of them know how much this business means to me. It’s more than my livelihood; this business is the only thing I have left of my mother.
I will not let it become a footnote in a billionaire’s bad week.
I stand up. Wipe my eyes with the back of my wrist. Wash my hands.
Daphne arrives at seven with two bottles of red and a legal pad already half-full of notes. She’s still in her work blazer and ankle boots, dark bob tucked behind one ear, and she’s got a look on her face that I’d hate to be on the wrong side of in a courtroom someday.
“Okay, Donovan.” She drops her bag on the counter, uncorks the first bottle, and pours two glasses.
“Here’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to keep making your ridiculous cinnamon rolls.
You’re going to keep being your annoyingly warm self.
And I’m going to make sure that if anybody messes with you, they’ll regret it. ”
“Daph—”
“Nope. Drink your wine. We’re strategizing.”
I drink my wine. We strategize.
She goes through the emails and helps me get through them.
Threatening ones get flagged, supportive ones get archived, and interview requests get template responses drafted.
She makes me promise to screenshot everything, document every interaction, and call her immediately if anyone shows up at the bakery who isn’t buying baked goods.
“You don’t owe these people access to you,” she says, jabbing her pen at me across the counter. “Not the fans, not the haters, and especially not anyone with the last name Sawyer. You are a baker, not a public figure, and they don’t get to turn you into one without your permission.”
Daphne decides to sleep on my couch. It’s something she does often, and I love it.
I put a blanket over her, grab the book I’m reading from the coffee table, and head to bed.
Tomorrow I’ll open the doors. I’ll proof the dough.
I’ll sell the cinnamon rolls and the lemon curd tarts and the brown butter cookies.
And I’ll smile at every person who walks in, whether they’re here for the baked goods or the spectacle, because that’s who I am, and that’s who my mother raised me to be.
Whatever the Sawyers do next, I’m ready.
I am so, so ready.
I set my alarm for 4 a.m. and close my eyes.