Chapter 13
Thirteen
Wren
By eight the next morning, there are fourteen people in my bakery, and I invited exactly none of them.
I come down on three hours of sleep, still smelling of smoke, braced to spend the whole day scrubbing the kitchen alone and quietly coming apart about the oven.
Instead, the front door’s propped wide. The Pelham twins are arguing over the correct method for washing a scorched wall.
Della’s got a bucket and a radio blaring.
Two women I’ve poured coffee for and never once learned the names of are up ladders with sponges.
Somebody has brought a tray of muffins from the grocery bakery across town, which under any other circumstances I would take as a declaration of war.
“Word travels,” Della says, catching my face. “Somebody’s shop catches fire at one in the morning, the whole town knows by breakfast. Grab a sponge, honey. You don’t get to stand there being tragic in your own bakery.”
I don’t know what to do with it. That’s the truth I keep behind my teeth.
Nobody has ever just turned up for me before.
Back in the city, you scheduled help. You owed it back with interest. You sent a thank-you card sized precisely to the favor.
Here, fourteen people walked into a smoke-stained room before I was even awake, because it needed doing, and not one of them is keeping score.
I grab a sponge. I don’t be tragic. I’m too busy blinking hard at a wall until it passes.
Dot’s here too, naturally, in the KISS THE CHIEF apron, running the whole operation from a folding chair she’s commandeered by the window, pointing people at jobs with a coffee she never drinks.
She catches my eye once across the room, and there’s a question in her look I already know I’m going to have to answer, and soon.
I pretend I don’t see it. I have gotten very good at pretending I don’t see Dot.
The oven is the one thing no sponge can fix.
It sits there dead in the middle of everything, black-streaked, forty years of my aunt’s mornings gone cold, and every time my eyes land on it the math starts up again.
No oven, no bake. No bake, no festival. No festival, no shop, and I let Marigold down in under two months flat.
I’m staring at it when the guys arrive, and they don’t come empty-handed.
They come with an oven.
It takes all three of them and a hand truck to get it through the door. An old commercial range, scrubbed up, dinged but solid. Cal’s walking backward and grinning like a fool. Rhett’s informing him he’s about to drop it. Eli’s carrying most of the weight without seeming to notice he’s doing it.
“Absolutely not,” I say.
“It’s a loaner,” Cal says.
“It was in my family’s barn.” Eli sets his end down. It’s the most words he’s offered up all morning. “My gran’s. Sat there for ten years doing nothing. It runs. I went over it last night.”
Last night. After the fire. While the rest of the world slept, Eli was in a cold barn testing a decade-old oven so that I’d have something to bake in this morning.
“I can’t take your grandmother’s oven, Eli.”
“You’re not taking it. You’re using it.” Flat. Final. A tone that shuts the subject like a door and turns the lock. “Till you line up a proper one for the shop. It wants using, birdie. It’s happier hot.”
Cal clocks me not-arguing and grins like he’s won money off it. “He does that,” he tells me, fond. “Decides a thing’s yours, and then there’s just no talking him back out of it. You should’ve seen the campaign he ran to get me off that couch.”
“The couch was structurally unsound,” Eli says, not looking up from the connections.
“It had character,” Cal says.
“It had a spring coming up through the middle of it.”
And that’s the end of the discussion, because there is no arguing with a man who refuses to argue back.
They muscle it into the gap where Marigold’s used to sit.
Eli hooks it up, Cal cleans the connections, Rhett supervises, which I now understand to be a genuine role in this pack.
By noon I have a working oven again and absolutely no idea what to do with the size of what I owe these three men.
The loaner buys me mornings. It doesn’t buy me an oven.
While they’re still packing up tools I call the restaurant supply place in Millbrook, describe Marigold’s dead one, and make the man say the number twice.
Ninety-four hundred, installed, and that’s refurbished.
I write it on the back of an order form so it has somewhere to live besides my chest. Then I do the arithmetic standing up, pencil on flour dust. If the tent does what Marigold’s ledger says it does, the shop buys its winter and starts paying off an oven in spring.
If it doesn’t, Rise & Shine and I are both out of business by February.
I fold the order form in half and tell absolutely no one. Obviously.
So I do the only thing I know how to do when I’m overwhelmed. I bake. And I decide, in a kitchen full of witnesses, that the moment to attempt the festival lemon tart is right now, on a strange oven I have never used in my life.
It goes about as well as you’d think.
I don’t know the new oven’s temper yet. It runs hot on one side, a fact I discover when I open the door on a tart that has managed to be raw in the middle and actively volcanic at the edges, the curd bubbling up over the crust in a slow golden landslide, a curl of smoke rising off it, gentle this time. Almost polite.
“Is that—” Rhett starts.
“Don’t.”
“Should we be worried, or is this a normal amount of—”
“It’s a completely normal amount, Rhett.”
Cal already has the oven door. Eli already has a cloth.
Della’s shouting from the front that if I’ve set another damn fire she’s adding the muffins to my tab.
And I stand there with a spatula and my nine hundredth failed tart, and instead of crying, which is the plan my body’s going with, I start barking orders.
“Cal, prop the door. Eli, get the rack out. Rhett, one more word and I put you in the oven with it.”
The strange part is they just do it. All three, quick and easy, moving around me, around each other, around the small hot kitchen like we’ve run this drill for years.
Cal cracks the door and fans the smoke. Eli lifts the ruined tart clear and sets it down like it isn’t a tragedy.
Rhett puts a fresh bowl in my hands before I can ask for it, no joke attached, because for once he read the room and understood I couldn’t hold one.
For ten minutes, we bake. The four of us.
I call the shots, they follow them. The ruined tart becomes a second attempt, and that one goes in the oven.
Somebody’s got the radio on. Cal’s stealing raw pastry off the board.
Eli’s reading Marigold’s card over my shoulder in that low steady voice.
Rhett’s in the doorway watching the whole thing with a look I can’t read.
It’s easy. That’s the entire problem. It is so unbearably easy.
I stand in the center of my flour-dusted kitchen, running a bake with three alphas turning around me like it’s the most natural arrangement in the world, and I feel exactly how well I fit in the middle of them.
How the shape of the four of us simply works.
And it frightens me more than the fire did, because it means I could have this.
That’s what the ease keeps whispering. This could be every single morning.
I let myself see it for one dangerous second.
Mornings like this one. The radio, the flour, and the four of us.
Someone forever stealing the pastry. Someone forever reading over my shoulder.
A shop full of people who showed up without being asked.
A life with edges soft enough to lean your whole weight on.
I’ve spent my whole life making very sure I never wanted anything that much, because wanting it is the same as handing a person the exact size and shape of the hole they can leave.
I look up and catch Rhett’s eye across the kitchen.
For one second, the doorway grin slips, and the real thing underneath shows through, the sweet note I keep catching off him and can never place.
Then he winks, and it’s gone. He says something that makes Cal snort.
It’s like the counter never happened at all.
That’s the thing I keep snagging on. For him, it’s like the counter never happened.
All easy jokes, no follow-up, exactly the man Della warned me about, and I’ve decided that’s my proof.
My good, solid, sensible proof that it meant nothing.
So I genuinely cannot explain why it stings every single time he does it.
Maybe that’s the answer I keep stepping around. If it truly meant nothing, it wouldn’t sting. You can’t get stung by nothing. But I file that thought where I file all the dangerous ones, out on the cold step where it can’t get to me, and I go back to my tart.
I don’t get long to snag on any of it, because standing in the heat of the borrowed oven, with three alphas close enough to touch, the restless too-warm thing under my skin picks that exact moment to roll through me like a wave. Hard enough that I have to grab the counter and hold on.
It’s not like anything I’ve felt before.
Heat, but from the inside, blooming up my spine and pooling low, my whole body tilting toward the three men in the room like they’re magnets and I’m nothing but filings.
For one horrifying second, I want to walk straight into the middle of them and never come back out.
Then it passes, and I’m just a woman gripping a counter in a hot kitchen, shaking a little.
And all three of them go still.
Heads up. That shift in the room. Rhett’s joke dies in his mouth. Cal takes half a step toward me before he stops himself, a visible act of will. And Eli’s eyes come to me, dark and certain, and this time he doesn’t ask me when I last spoke to Dot.
This time he just says it, low, pitched for me alone. “You see her today. Not tomorrow. Today.”
I open my mouth to tell him I’m perfectly fine.
The wave rolls through me a second time, deeper, and what comes out instead is nothing at all.