Chapter 32
Thirty-Two
Wren
The festival’s a bit over two weeks out, and it doesn’t care one single bit how I feel. Right now that’s the kindest thing about it.
The Harvest Festival needs two hundred cider donuts, ninety loaves for the bread stall, four sheet cakes for the auction, and a bake tent that runs like a Swiss watch from six a.m. to dark.
It needs all of it from me, the woman who inherited the job along with the oven.
So I do the only thing I’ve ever reliably known how to do when my insides are a mess. I work.
I am, this week, a machine. Up at four. Spreadsheets.
A color-coded binder that would make Marigold weep with equal parts pride and concern.
The whole town tromping in and out of Rise & Shine with strong opinions about whether we’re doing the caramel apples again this year (we are, Mrs. Alder, we are, please stop asking).
I have never been busier in my life, and none of it’s an accident.
Busy is a place to hide, and I’ve built myself a big one out of flour and civic duty.
Because if I’m elbow-deep in donut batter at five in the morning, I’m not lying in a half-wrecked nest thinking about the three men who filled it.
That’s the story now, and I’ve got it smooth, I recite it while I prove.
It was a heat. Heats happen. Three decent alphas helped a new girl through a rough patch because they’re decent, and now it’s done and everyone goes back to normal.
And everyone’s so normal about it now. All that room they’re handing me.
If it had meant a thing, they’d be over here, wouldn’t they, underfoot, pushing.
They’re not. They’re being perfectly, respectfully absent, which is exactly what I asked them to be, more or less, by putting the Mr. Delgado voice on and sliding cinnamon rolls across the counter like a drawbridge going up.
It’s working great. I’ve never felt worse in my life.
The town won’t let me sink, though. I didn’t plan for that.
Della’s in every morning with coffee I didn’t order and gossip I didn’t earn.
The Pelham twins have adopted my festival prep as a joint venture and a blood sport.
Dot Hale keeps finding reasons to be in my shop that have nothing to do with the dessert auction and everything to do with keeping an eye on me, which I pretend not to notice, because if I notice it, I’ll cry into the caramel.
Even Mrs. Alder, ninety and mean as a wet cat, brought me her sister’s cider donut recipe on a card gone soft with age and said, “Marigold would’ve wanted you to have it,” then left before I could get my face under control.
I came here to be nobody. Five weeks in, I’ve got a whole town holding me up by the elbows, and not one of them asked my permission. It’s the kindest thing anyone’s ever done to me, and I’m standing in the middle of it quietly planning my exit.
Because the exit’s still there.
Della corners me Wednesday over the second coffee, the one I don’t ask for and drink anyway. She’s got her elbows on my counter and her chin in her hand, settled in like she’s got all day.
“So,” she says. “The family thing.”
“Sorted.” I keep wiping the counter. It’s already clean. I wipe it anyway.
“Uh-huh. And it’s got nothing to do with three firemen suddenly acting like your shop’s got a force field on it.”
I miss a beat on the wipe. Damn her. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Wren.” She says my name kind, which is worse than sharp. “Honey. I ran the diner across from that firehouse for nine years. I know what those three look like happy. I know what they look like now. I know what you look like. It’s the same damn face on all four of you.”
There it is. That little “so” she left hanging, the door held open for me to walk through and say the true thing.
I don’t walk through it. Course I don’t. “It was a heat, Della. That’s all. It’s done.”
She looks at me for a long moment. Then she straightens, pats my hand once, and lets it go, because Della’s good people, and good people don’t shove.
“Okay,” she says. “But for the record, sweetie, a heat doesn’t make a man forget how to tell a joke.
Whatever you’re telling yourself, it’s a bigger story than a heat.
” She carries her coffee to the door. “Rolls were perfect today, by the way. Marigold’s proud, wherever she’s parked. ”
Then she’s gone, and I’m alone with a clean counter and a story that just sprang a leak.
The emails haven’t gone anywhere. Diane’s, the landlord’s, both still sitting there.
I open them sometimes, late, when the shop’s dark and the wall’s at its thinnest. I’ve started a reply to Diane four times.
Thank you so much, I’d love to talk about the, and then I stall out, thumb hovering, because the second I hit send it turns real, and some coward in me likes it better as a door I haven’t walked through than a thing I’ve turned down.
So I don’t send it. I don’t delete it. I keep it, like you keep a fire exit in the back of your mind, glad it’s there, praying you never have to use it.
The exits come with expiration dates now, is the new development.
Diane sent a nudge yesterday, three lines, no exclamation points, which from Diane is practically a court summons.
Week’s nearly up, hon. The owners want a name.
Say the word. And the landlord’s very sorry, but there’s been interest in the apartment, so.
Doors don’t stay propped open. Somebody always wants the doorway.
Then there’s the arithmetic I only do at two in the morning, calculator app lit up over a dark kitchen.
The math votes for leaving. Diane’s number would swallow a ninety-four-hundred-dollar oven in two months flat.
Staying means signing for that oven against a bank account that faints at the end of every month, and betting the whole works on one festival weekend and a lemon tart I’ve failed to bake nine hundred times.
On paper, it’s no contest. I ran the columns twice, straight down, like the sensible woman I used to be.
Then I put the phone face down and stood in the dark with my hand flat on Marigold’s counter, because that, it turns out, is the column my hands vote for.
I haven’t told the guys it exists. Obviously.
What would I even say. Hey, remember the best three days of my life?
Anyway, I might move back to the city, no reason, don’t wait up.
There’s no version of that sentence that isn’t a blade, so I hold it, and holding it is fast becoming the meanest thing I’ve done in years.
I do it anyway. The alternative is saying it out loud and finding out they don’t try to stop me.
They come by Thursday to measure the shop for the auction tables, all three, because of course the firehouse dessert auction runs half out of my front room.
And they’re perfect. That’s the hell of it.
Cal keeps it to a nod and a “hey, sugar,” warm and easy, three feet further back than he used to stand.
Eli asks where I want the tables, does exactly what I say, fixes the wobbly one without being asked, doesn’t linger.
Rhett cracks one joke about the caramel apples, earns a polite laugh out of me, and lets it lie instead of chasing the next one like he can’t usually help doing.
They’re giving me room. Acres of it. The exact thing I engineered, delivered with care, and every considerate inch of it lands like a latch dropping. I wanted proof they’d drift. Here it is, gift-wrapped. I should be relieved.
I stand at my own counter and watch three alphas be gently, respectfully finished with me. Then I turn around and reorganize the muffin case so none of them catches my face doing the thing it’s doing.
I notice, and then I argue myself straight back out of it.
Rhett’s scent is off. That burnt-sugar sweetness I finally found in the dark, it’s buried again, shoved way down under the smoke and the pepper, and his grin’s running at about sixty percent.
Cal laughs at something Eli says, and it stops short of his eyes.
Eli’s got that quiet weight of his aimed at me across the shop, and for one second, one genuinely dangerous second, I let myself think they look every bit as wrecked as I feel.
Then I put it away fast. That’s the exact thought that gets a woman like me in trouble.
That’s hope, and hope is how a person ends up standing in the wreckage afterward, explaining to herself how she misread the whole thing.
They’re tired. They pull forty-eight-hour shifts and run into burning buildings for a living.
Of course they look tired. Tired isn’t heartbroken, and I’d be a fool to squint at the gap between the two and call it the thing I want it to be.
So I keep my head down and my hands moving.
The days help. The days are so full there’s no room in them to come apart.
Wednesday I bake until my shoulders quit.
Thursday, the Pelham twins nearly come to blows over bunting placement, and I referee with a piping bag still in my fist. Friday, a pallet of the wrong flour shows up, and I spend an hour on the phone being firm with a man named Gary.
For that whole hour, it feels like a problem I can actually solve, which is a rare thing this week.
The town keeps handing me things to carry, and carrying them is the only reason I’m still on my feet.
Idle hands would finish me. Idle hands would have me across that street inside a minute, and I’d hate myself the whole walk over.
At night, I lie in the nest I still haven’t taken apart.
I keep meaning to. I keep promising myself I’ll strip it in the morning, wash the stolen flannels, mail Cal’s back, turn my bedroom into a bedroom again instead of a shrine to a thing that’s over.
Every morning I get up and leave it exactly where it is, because taking it apart with my own two hands feels like signing something I can’t take back.
My hands built that nest while my head wasn’t looking. They’re not ready to unbuild it. And my hands have been righter about this whole mess than the rest of me, start to finish.
Two weeks to the festival. I can hold a wall that long. I held one my whole life before I ever met them.
The trouble is, I finally know what’s on the other side of it now. And there’s no unknowing a thing like that, no matter how fast a woman learns to bake.