Chapter 3
Gabby
The morning light hits the bakery kitchen like a personal insult.
I’m standing in what I can only describe as a time capsule dedicated to kitchen suffering.
Everything here is ancient—cast iron, cracked tile, an electric stove so old the burners have developed their own definitions about heat.
The centerpiece of my pain is the oven. The actual oven.
The one I have to use. The one I’m currently staring at with a hatred usually reserved for my ex-husband.
She runs hot on the right. Adjust or suffer the consequences. - E
I laugh. Actually laugh. Because the oven has been here longer than I’ve been alive and it’s already given me life advice.
The cabin kitchen is attached to the bakery by a narrow door that sticks, I’ve mapped every house settling noise at this point, and the bakery itself is basically two large rooms: the production kitchen where the oven lives, and the front café area with a long display counter.
There’s a commercial fridge that runs about forty percent of the time, a sink with water pressure like a dying whale, and absolutely no climate control.
The power cuts out if I run the fridge and the electric kettle simultaneously, which I learned at 5 a.m. when I was making coffee.
Also, there’s the well. Of course there’s a well.
I’d hoped—really hoped—that the water situation was a metaphor, something Edna’s lawyer had mentioned in the way people mention ghosts at a haunted house. But no. There is a literal well. It’s still being used. The pump outside the kitchen door is red and incredibly judgmental.
Let’s assess the damage. Let’s make a list, because lists help when my brain is doing that thing where it spirals like a ceiling fan hitting its highest setting.
One: The oven situation. I’ve baked in professional kitchens with $15,000 ovens that had digital temperature controls and even heat distribution.
This one has a door made of industrial-grade iron and a slot for wood.
It has moods. I can tell because Dotty mentioned Edna’s “special relationship” with it when I asked about supplies yesterday.
Two: The water situation. The pump requires aggressive enthusiasm, and the water comes out the color of a dirty penny before it clears. Which takes about two minutes. I have not yet successfully filled a pot without contemplating my life choices.
Three: The power situation. The cabin is wired like it’s being powered by a hamster on a wheel. A tired hamster.
Four: There’s no source of reliable ingredients or local suppliers listed anywhere. Just a ledger in Edna’s handwriting with dates and cryptic notes like “barley flour—ask Marnie” and “yeast – reorder Wednesdays.”
I have sixty days to make this work. Sixty days to turn this haunted appliance situation into a functional bakery that can sell enough to cover the mortgage. Sixty days or I lose the cabin, the bakery, and the exact amount of my dwindling savings I’ve burned through just getting here.
The anxiety sits behind my sternum. A knot that doesn’t loosen.
So, I do what I always do. I decide that if I’m going to catastrophically fail, I should at least do it thoroughly.
I find flour in a galley cupboard—good flour, King Arthur Baking Company, which gives me hope—and I start assembling the basic ingredients for a simple yeasted bread.
It’s stupid. It’s definitely stupid. But my hands know how to do this part, and maybe if I show up and try, the oven will take pity on me.
The wood is stacked outside the kitchen door in a shed, split and weathered. I load it in like I know what I’m doing. I don’t. I close the door.
Then I wait for it to heat.
And wait.
And wait while my anxiety does that thing where it lists all the reasons I’m going to fail, which is worse than the waiting, so I start doing conversational math with myself instead.
If the oven won’t heat past 400 degrees, Gabby, then you’ll know immediately and you can move on to panicking about something else.
If it heats normally, you’ll get to find out new and inventive ways the wood-fired situation can betray you.
It’s truly a win-win situation, if you define win as “pain,” which, at this point, I do.
The oven hits 450 degrees. It might actually work.
I shape the dough—my hands remember the motions, the resistance, the feeling of gluten organizing itself into something that will hold air—and I score it with a knife. One diagonal slash across the top. Simple. Proof-tested. Unlikely to spontaneously refuse to bake.
Then I put it in the oven and realize I’ve made a catastrophic error.
The oven's interior is smaller than I expected.
And the heat is coming from the right exactly like the note said it would, which I'd accounted for, except I hadn't actually accounted for it.
I'd read "runs hot on the right" and translated it into professional-baker language, meaning I'd positioned the loaf slightly left of center and told myself that was sufficient. It was not sufficient.
I stand there for probably fifteen minutes just staring at the oven door like I can will it into behaving through sheer force of personality. I cannot.
When the timer goes off, I pull the loaf out.
It is not a loaf. It is a science experiment gone wrong.
It’s blackened on one side, pale and under-baked on the other, and it has a crack across the top that looks like the bread is actively angry about being here.
The crust is so hard I can barely cut through it.
The crumb structure is dense and slightly gummy in the center.
I set it on the cooling rack, and I stare at it.
Then I pick it up and throw it in the trash.
This is fine. This is totally fine. This is exactly where I expected to be on my first attempt with a haunted oven in the middle of nowhere. I’m only catastrophically behind already. The 60-day clock is ticking. The mortgage is waiting. Everything is completely under control.
My hands are shaking.
It’s not about the bread. It’s not even really about the oven. It’s about the absolute certainty that I’ve made a terrible mistake, that I’m too far outside my depth, that coming here was the act of a desperate woman with more conviction than sense. Which is fair. All of those things are true.
But I'm also the woman who packed her entire life into a storage unit and drove away without looking back. I’m the woman who learned to make pastry from a Michelin-starred chef who told me I had “decent hands and too many opinions.” I’m the woman who spent three years perfecting laminated dough while my marriage was falling apart right under my nose.
So, I take a breath—the tight one, the kind that doesn’t quite fill my lungs—and I make a list of what I need to figure out.
Marnie’s General Store is exactly what I expected: an explosion of contradictions that has somehow cohered into a place that has been in the same building since the Roosevelt administration, either one.
There are fishing supplies next to thermal socks next to what appears to be a comprehensive collection of bear spray.
There’s a section dedicated entirely to flashlights.
Another section is “Just Marnie’s Opinions About Which Granola Tastes Best,” which I appreciate in the way I appreciate aggressive honesty.
Marnie herself is a petite woman with silver-streaked hair cut in a practical bob. She's standing behind the counter reading a mystery novel with a dog-eared cover, pencil tucked behind her ear like she's ready to argue with it.
“You’re the pastry chef,” she says, not looking up from her book.
"I’m the woman who showed up at midnight, yes," I say. "Word travels fast."
She looks up then. Her eyes are sharp. “Edna's place has been waiting two years for someone to show up. Of course I know."
Marnie sets the book down and stands, and there’s something almost ceremonial about the movement. “What do you need?”
So, I tell her. I tell her about the oven situation. I tell her about the water and the power and the fact that I need supplies, but I don’t know what’s actually available here. I tell her that Edna’s supply ledger is cryptic and possibly written in code.
Marnie listens while rearranging some things behind the counter, and when I’m done, she nods like I’ve confirmed something she already suspected.
“Okay,” she says. “First. You’re going to need this.”
She hands me a headlamp.
“It’s already June,” I say. “Wouldn’t a headlamp be more useful in, like, October?”
“The power cuts out,” Marnie says. It’s not a question.
“How did you—”
“Everyone’s power cuts out at their cabin. The wiring’s held together by duct tape and prayers. Here.” She adds a pair of heavy thermal socks. "The well water is cold enough to come up through the floor. Here." She adds a pair of rubber-soled slippers. "Wear these when you pump."
She moves through the store with the efficiency of someone who has done this exact tour before. A fire extinguisher. A camping lantern. A large flashlight that could probably illuminate a small country. A first aid kit that could probably handle a small amputation. A multitool. Waterproof matches.
“You’re prepping me for the zombie apocalypse,” I say.
“No,” Marnie says. “I’m prepping you for the cabin in June. A zombie apocalypse prepping would take longer.”
I leave with approximately forty pounds of supplies and a weird sense that I’ve just been adopted by a practical grandmother figure. I also leave with the unsettling certainty that I’m exactly the kind of unprepared person who needs everything Marnie just sold me.
I load everything into the Jeep and drive the three blocks to the café, which is probably excessive, but forty pounds of apocalypse gear is not a walking situation.
There's the café (Dotty's), a hardware store, what looks like a real estate office, and a building with a hand-painted sign in the window that reads: Moosehead Lodge – Open Tuesdays, Fridays, and for emotional emergencies.
I like this town. In a way that surprises me.
Dotty’s café is warm and smells like coffee and cinnamon, which is a sensory hug. It’s a place where the tables don’t match and the chairs are mismatched and the menu is handwritten on a board that someone has illustrated with small doodles of coffee cups that look vaguely angry.
Dotty is behind the counter. She’s maybe sixty, with dark hair that she’s clearly colored to a shade of red that says “I have opinions and I’m not hiding them.” She greets me by name, which is still slightly terrifying.
"How was your first night?" she asks, setting a coffee down in front of me without asking if I want one.
"Survivable," I say. "The oven situation is less survivable."
"Lucifer giving you trouble?"
“Lucifer? The oven has a name?”
“It does,” Dotty says. “Edna named it. Edna said it was stubborn, temperamental, and occasionally made you question your faith in divine benevolence. She said that made it a pretty good oven.”
I wrap my hands around the coffee cup. The warmth is good. Sixty days. The number sits behind my sternum like a stone.
"You're doing the math," Dotty says. It's not a question.
"Is it that obvious?"
"Everyone who sits in that chair on their second day does the math." She refills her own coffee. "Edna did too, the first year. Sat right where you're sitting, counting everything."
“Do you think—” I start, and I can’t quite finish the question. Do you think I can do this? is what I mean, but it’s too vulnerable to ask a stranger.
Dotty answers it anyway. “I think Edna wouldn’t have given you sixty days if she thought you couldn’t do it. Edna didn’t believe in false hope. She believed in brutal, honest assessment and then making other people rise to match it.”
There’s something in her voice that makes me think Dotty knew her. Really knew her. Not in a casual neighborly way, but in the way you know someone when you’ve spent years sitting across from each other at small tables.
“The oven—” I start again.
“The oven is fine,” Dotty says. “It just requires respect. Edna said it was like a person that way. You have to pay attention. You have to show up. You have to adjust when it tells you to adjust. And you have to never, ever assume you know better.”
I write this down mentally, filing it next to all the other unhelpful-but-essential advice I’ve received in the last twenty-four hours.
When I get back to the cabin, the water pump is fixed.
I don’t notice it at first. I walk around the cabin with my forty pounds of supplies and my head full of Lucifer and clauses and brutal honest assessment, and I just pump.
The handle moves smoothly. The water comes out clear. I fill a pot with zero effort.
That's strange. I pump it again just to confirm I'm not imagining things.
There’s a note under the cabin door. Actual handwritten on actual paper.
Pump was stuck. Should work now. The oven runs hotter on the right side. Might help. — JM
I read it approximately seventeen times.
He fixed something he didn't have to fix. He gave me information I needed. He did both without fanfare or expectation of gratitude, and somehow that's the part that makes my chest tight in an entirely different way..
And now I owe him.
Not the normal kind of owing. Not the “I’ll bake you a loaf of bread someday” kind of owing.
The kind of owing that makes me want to create a ledger.
A mental one, at least. A careful list of what he’s done so that I can balance it out, so that I’m not just…
taking. So that I can make this transactional in a way that doesn’t feel like I’m accepting something I don’t deserve.
Entry - Jace: Water pump repair (labor + parts unknown)
I add it to my growing list of debts and inadequacies and reasons why I’m probably going to fail at this. But I also—and this is where I lose the thread of my own logic—something shifts. Slightly. Like someone quietly moved one card in a house of cards and the whole structure is still standing.
I read the note again. The oven runs hotter on the right side.
Then I go back into the bakery, and I open the oven door, and I start thinking about what I can do with that information.