21. Mia
Mia
The inbox hits me at eight forty-seven, right after the last croissant tray comes out.
I see the first notification while I’m stripping off my oven mitts, then the second, then my phone starts going in a way that has nothing to do with a good morning. I pick it up and read it standing at the back bench with flour on my forearms and the oven still ticking behind me.
Gold digger. Fraud. Attention seeker. Home wrecker.
The bakery’s social account has fifty-three new comments in the last two hours and none of them are about the croissants.
Someone dug up my personal account. Someone found the Google listing and left a one-star review that doesn’t mention the food once.
Someone took a screenshot of my face from the press conference live stream, put it next to the contract headline, and wrote a paragraph about what kind of woman does this sort of thing.
I put the phone face-down on the bench, pull the next tray, and finish the morning. The oven doesn’t care about the internet and neither do the croissants and I’ve got a custom order due Thursday that isn’t going to pipe itself.
By ten the rush is through. Juno has texted four times.
The last one is just capital letters and I don’t need to read it twice to understand the sentiment.
Mr. Austin hasn’t called, which means he either hasn’t seen it or he’s making a plan to get me out.
I sit on the stool behind the counter and go through all of it, every comment, every review, every tagged post, because I’ve learned the hard way that the thing you don’t look at directly is always bigger in your head than it is on the screen.
But it’s pretty bad on the screen, so I call Reed.
He picks up on the second ring. “I’ve seen it.”
“The reviews,” I say, suppressing a sob. “The comments on the bakery account. All of it.”
“I know.” He’s already somewhere else in his head, already three steps into fixing it. “I can have a lawyer file against the site before lunch. Defamation, clear grounds. They pull the article, the reviews lose their hook, and the comments die down in forty-eight hours.”
“No.”
“Mia.”
“It’s already too late for that,” I say.
“I want to walk into this bakery without watching every regular check their phone when they think I’m not looking.
” I glance at the display case. Full this morning, good morning’s work, nothing about it has changed.
“If it disappears, people think I made it disappear. That’s worse. ”
“What do you want to do?”
“Talk,” I say. “For myself. Here, in the bakery, on my own account. No Celeste, no talking points, no approved statement. Just me showing people what this place actually is.”
The silence this time is him considering it.
“Alright,” he says.
I hang up and prop my phone against the flour jar before I can think too hard about it, and I go live.
The viewer count starts at zero and climbs. I don’t wait for it to get somewhere impressive before I start talking because waiting gives me time to lose my nerve.
“I’m Mia,” I say, to the phone, to the forty-three people currently watching me stand in an apron.
“I own Calder Bakes. Three years, one location, one employee who is me and sometimes a friend who takes pity on me when I beg her.” I move the phone so it catches the space behind me.
“This is what it looks like at ten in the morning. It’s not glamorous and it’s a set. ”
I walk them through it the way I’d walk a new hire through on their first day.
The oven I’ve had since year one, left side runs five degrees hot, I know it by feel now.
The display case with the latch that sticks unless you lift and push at the same time.
The back bench where I do all the custom work, every commission I’ve taken in three years, the big ones and the ones that paid me in oat milk and a social media mention.
The small shelf above the sink where I keep a spare tube of cerulean because sometimes I’m here until midnight on a mural sketch and I need paint within reach.
“I started this with four hundred dollars and a folding table at a farmer’s market,” I say.
“First month I sold eight cakes. Enough for groceries but not much more. Second month I sold twelve. Third month the folding table leg snapped and I duct-taped it back together because a new one wasn’t in the budget and I had three orders to fill that weekend.
” I open my laptop and spin it toward the camera.
“These are three years of invoices. Supplier orders. Equipment repairs. Late rent notices I’ve been too embarrassed to sort.
Mural commissions. Custom deposits. What comes in, what goes straight back out, what’s left at the end of a good month, which isn’t always very much.
” I scroll slowly so the camera can see the numbers.
“I’m not making a speech about transparency.
I’m just tired of someone else narrating my bank account. ”
The viewer count has climbed past three thousand. The comments are moving faster than I can read them.
“Yes, I signed a contract,” I say. “That’s been reported correctly and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.
I needed my rent covered and Reed Hawthorne needed something I had.
We knew what we were walking into with open eyes when we started this.
What I object to is the part where that makes me a scammer.
I’ve been in this bakery at five every morning for three years, contract or no contract, because this place is mine.
I built it in a city that does not make that easy, on a budget that required a lot of creative thinking about what electrical tape can structurally support.
” I hold up the mixer on the back bench, tape still wrapped around the base where the housing cracked eight months ago.
“This is my mixer. It still works. I know because I used it two hours ago.”
A laugh escapes me, and I let it go because it’s real and right now real is the only thing I’ve got.
“If you’ve been a regular here and you’re watching this, thank you for showing up,” I say.
“If you’ve never been here and you want to make up your mind about me, come in.
Order a croissant. Tell me what you think of it.
If you still want to leave a one-star review after the butter hits, I’ll take it. ”
My stomach turns without warning, starting somewhere below my ribs and moving up.
It doesn’t feel like nerves or the coffee I had at six.
I press two fingers below my sternum, breathe through my nose, and keep going.
Keep talking, keep walking the phone around the space, keep showing the bakery at ten when the rush has cleared and the light comes through the front window.
I’m halfway through explaining the hospital mural, showing the sketch pinned above the register, when the front bell chimes.
I look up.
Reed is in the doorway in a suit jacket, no tie, his hair messed up from the wind. He scans the room, takes in the phone propped against the flour jar, the live counter ticking in the corner of the screen, and he walks forward, straight into the frame.
The viewer count jumps hard. The comment section detonates.
He doesn’t look at the camera, but he locks his eyes with mine, and I know exactly what’s happening before his hand goes to his jacket pocket.
He drops to one knee on my bakery floor.
Right there. Between the display case and the back bench, on the tiles I mopped at four-thirty this morning, in a tailor-made suit.
“Mia.” He says it like there’s nobody else in the room, like the phone propped against the flour jar doesn’t exist, like five thousand people aren’t watching him kneel on my bakery floor.
“I know what you think this is. You think I came in here with a plan.” He shakes his head once. “I came in here because I couldn’t not.”
He looks up at me from the floor, his gray eyes steady on mine.
“We signed a contract. That’s true. You needed the rent and I needed the optics and neither of us pretended it was anything else.
I’m not going to stand here and rewrite that part.
” He turns the ring once in his fingers, his eyes on mine.
“What I didn’t expect was to start setting my alarm twenty minutes earlier than I needed to.
Not for a call, not for a meeting. Just to be in the kitchen before you got up.
Just to have that part of the morning before the rest of it started. ”
The comment section is going off behind me. I don’t look.
“I’ve spent two years making every decision inside a spreadsheet.
What it looks like, what it costs, what it buys me.
I’m good at it. It’s kept a lot of things standing that should have fallen over.
” He looks down at the ring for a second, then back up.
“You don’t fit in a spreadsheet. I’ve tried.
You keep turning up in the columns that aren’t supposed to have anything in them. ”
His jaw shifts.
“I don’t know how to do this without a contract. I don’t know how to ask for something without building a case for it first. So here’s my case.” He holds the ring up. “You make this feel like less of a war. I haven’t had that in a long time and I’m not interested in going back to before I did.”
He holds my gaze.
“Marry me, Mia. I’m asking you for real this time.”
Every word of it is a lie. The steps, the delivery slip, the gratitude. He walked in because he must’ve talked to Celeste the second I hung up. They had a backup plan, and he came in and did it clean because Reed Hawthorne does not do things halfway, not even the things that aren’t real.
I smile. Big and warm and completely fine, the one I’ve had since the Deleon steps, the one I built so long ago I don’t even feel it going on anymore.
“Yes,” I say.
He stands, slides the ring onto my finger, takes my face in both hands and kisses me. The comment section goes nuclear. I kiss him back because the phone is still live, still propped against the flour jar, and the whole internet is watching.
When he wraps both arms around me and pulls me into his chest, my face tucks against his jaw, hidden from the phone on the counter. His hand comes up to the back of my head, his thumb moving once in my hair, one slow stroke. I feel his heartbeat against my cheek, faster than his face lets on.
I turn my mouth to his ear.
“We’re done after the party,” I say quietly, just breath against his skin.
His arms pull tighter. Not for the camera, the camera can’t see it, just his arms holding on for one extra second, and then he pulls back, smiles at the phone, and I smile at the phone, and somewhere out there the internet decides this is the most romantic thing it’s seen all week.
I reach over and end the stream.