Chapter 4
Jace
The bakery lights are still on.
It’s past nine. I drove past earlier after Dotty’s. The lights were off then. Now they’re on. Which means she’s in there doing something.
Piper had thoughts. Piper always has thoughts. She tilted her chair back and said “That's commitment to poor planning.”
Dotty answered, “It's commitment to not knowing where she was going.”
I drank my coffee and said nothing because I'd already met the woman in question, I already knew her name, and my dog had surrendered his dignity on her porch before eight a.m.
Some things don't need adding to.
Piper told her own story after that — Morris eating her rental car's side mirror her first week, standing in the parking lot staring at the damage, and that being the moment she realized she was going to stay.
She said it like it was simple, like the decision had been obvious once she stopped pretending it wasn't.
It's a good story. The kind that makes sense in Ashwood Falls, where everything is slightly absurd and people stay anyway.
I wonder if Gabby stays. I wonder if she understands what staying means here.
And then I think about Edna’s will, about the 60-day clause, about the fact that I volunteered to maintain that cabin and that bakery just because my grandfather asked me to before he died, and the truth lands: I’m making this into something it’s not.
She’s not staying. She’s trying the clause. She’ll either make it or she won’t, and neither of those outcomes is my business.
Except I know what Edna wanted. I know because Hank told me, six months before the heart attack that killed him. He said, “Edna’s worried about the place. Worried nobody good will take it. Worried she’ll leave it and nobody’ll care.”
And I said, “It’s a building, Hank.”
And he said, “No. It’s a place that changes things. She wants it to change something for someone.”
I didn’t think much about it at the time. I was thinking about Hank’s heart, about the fact that he’d been tired for a year. I wasn’t thinking about Edna or her building or any of the responsibilities that were about to land on me.
But then Hank died. And then Edna did too. And somehow I became the person who maintains a cabin that doesn’t belong to me, for a clause that probably doesn’t matter to anyone but the woman who showed up in burgundy stilettos.
Piper asked how she was doing. They were still talking about her, the conversation drifting the way it does in Dotty's, everyone orbiting the same topic without quite admitting it.
"She's scared," Dotty said. "Trying not to show it. Making lists."
"The oven's going to wreck her," Piper said.
I paid and left. And then I drove back here, because the lights were on and I'd told myself it was about the pump, and now I'm standing outside the pump shed staring at something that doesn't need staring at when I hear her voice from inside the bakery.
“Okay, listen,” she’s saying. She sounds like she’s talking to someone, but when I look through the window, there’s nobody there.
She’s talking to the oven. “I understand that you’re difficult.
I get it. You’ve had a long life and you’re unimpressed by modern conveniences.
But we are going to establish a baseline of mutual respect here, or I swear to God I will replace you with a commercial model from a restaurant supply company and you will sit in a landfill in Fairbanks thinking about what you could have done. ”
The oven is silent. It’s an old cast iron silence. The kind that suggests judgment.
She moves closer to it, and I can see her better now through the window. She’s got her hand on the oven door like she’s trying to read it. Like the metal has information she needs.
“You’re made of iron,” she says. “You’re probably insulted by everything I’ve said. You probably think I’m an idiot who doesn’t know how to respect a good tool.”
She’s not wrong, technically. But the way she says it—like she’s already made peace with it, already accepted the insult as fact—it’s different.
“I know how to respect things,” she says to the oven.
“I’m scared. Because if you don’t work, then I’m stuck, and if I’m stuck, then I fail, and I’ve done enough failing for one decade.
So, here’s what I’m proposing: We’re going to work together.
You’re going to heat evenly. I’m going to learn how you heat.
You’re going to stop being angry about your existence.
I’m going to stop being angry about mine. Deal?”
She holds out her hand. Shakes the oven door like it’s going to shake back.
I should leave. I should absolutely leave.
I shouldn’t be standing here. Shouldn’t be watching her negotiate with a stove.
I should not be—
Jasper presses past my legs and walks straight through the open bakery door like he owns the place.
He walks right past me. My dog. My actual dog. My Malamute, who is supposed to be loyal and protective and at least a little bit interested in the person who feeds him. Jasper walks past me like I’m a stranger and goes directly to the woman talking to the oven and lies down at her feet.
Just lies down. Puts his head on his paws and sighs like he’s been looking for exactly this moment his entire life.
The woman looks down and her entire face changes. It softens like someone just turned down the brightness on something too harsh. “Hey,” she says, and it’s soft. “Hey, buddy. You’re not supposed to be in here.”
She reaches down and runs her hand along Jasper’s shoulder, and my breath goes shallow before I register why. My hands curl against my thighs. There’s pressure behind my sternum like a board flexing, and then something cracks open---
Something complicated. Something I don’t have a name for. Something that involves betrayal and warmth and the absolute certainty that my dog has made a better decision than I would have made.
“You belong to the guy with the truck,” the woman says. “The one who fixed the pump.”
I should reveal myself. It would be weirder not to. It’s weirder watching her pet my dog while she talks to the oven.
But I’m frozen. She’s not performing now. There’s no self-deprecation, no humor that preempts rejection. She’s just quiet, and a little sad, and she’s got her hand on my dog like he’s the only solid thing in a world that keeps shifting.
“Thank you,” she says, and I don’t think she’s talking to Jasper anymore. She’s talking to whoever’s responsible for Jasper showing up. Which is me. But she doesn’t know that. “Thank you for the pump. And for the note about the oven. I’m going to figure it out. I have to figure it out.”
Jasper shifts, gets more comfortable, puts his chin on her foot. He’s completely relaxed. Completely settled. Like he’s been waiting for this exact woman and this exact moment his entire doggy existence.
I clear my throat. I don’t want to, but I do it, because standing outside a window watching someone talk to a sleeping dog while making a deal with an oven is not something I can explain if I get caught.
She looks up. The soft, sad person vanishes, and she pulls out the one with the jokes and the self-deprecation, like a shield sliding back into place.
“Hey,” she says, and her voice is different now. Brighter. Defensive. “I’m not stealing your dog. Well. I’m not planning to steal your dog. He made his own choices and I’m respecting them.”
“He has good taste,” I say. It’s deadpan. It’s honest. It’s also too much information, so I add, “How’s Lucifer treating you?”
She huffs a small laugh. “So, you know the name too. I’ve already threatened it with replacement. We’re working on mutual respect. So far it’s winning.”
“The right side runs hot,” I say. It’s the advice I left her. But she needs to hear it out loud. She needs to know that the pump wasn’t pity and the note wasn’t pity. “Fire side. You’ll need to rotate your bakes. Pull from the cooler side first.”
“Yeah, I got that,” she says. “Thank you for the note. And the pump. I’m going to pay you back.”
I know she will. People like her—people who show up in stilettos and make deals with ovens—they keep score. They keep score and then they settle it.
“Not necessary,” I say, and I mean it.
She nods, but her jaw is tight. Like the idea of owing something is physically uncomfortable. Like it’s a debt she’s going to be thinking about.
“I should go,” I say.
“Jasper likes it here,” the woman says. It’s not a question. It’s an observation. She’s still got her hand on my dog, who is apparently in a permanent state of contentment.
“Jasper likes everywhere,” I say. It’s a lie. Jasper likes few places. Jasper has never liked anywhere like this.
She smiles at that. She smiles like she knows I’m lying. “Well, he’s welcome to come back. I’ll owe you coffee or something.”
“You don’t owe me anything,” I say.
“Right,” she says, and she says it like she heard the words but she’s definitely not believing them. “I’m definitely not keeping a running list of every way you’ve helped me without being asked. That would be weird.”
She’s keeping a list? Of course she’s keeping a list. I can see it in her eyes—the compulsion to balance, to make everything transactional, to ensure nobody gives her anything without getting something equivalent in return.
I should tell her that I fixed the pump because that's what you do here. Because this is how Ashwood Falls works — people show up for each other even when they don't ask.
But I don’t. Because she’s not ready. Because she needs to do this her way, with her list and her compensation and her need to balance everything. Because some people have to learn that a kindness isn't a debt.
“I’ll be back for Jasper,” I say instead.
“Take your time,” she says. “He’s planning to lay here until I figure out the oven. We’re negotiating.”
I leave. I don’t watch her go back to talking to the appliance, though I want to. I don’t stand outside the window and watch my dog settle his head back on her foot. I go back to my truck and I drive home, and I think about what Edna used to say.
The bakery would find the right person.
Edna used to say that. Hank told me once, offhand, like it was a thing she believed — that the place would know.
That it was waiting for someone specific.
At the time I thought it was the kind of thing people say when they can't explain why they love something.
Driving home, I'm not sure it's as ridiculous as I thought.
Like it’s an active thing. Like a building can decide. Like Edna left behind something that knows how to choose.
It’s ridiculous. But Hank believed in it, too. He believed that places had intentions. He believed that Edna’s bakery was waiting for something specific.
I wonder if she knows. If Gabby—with her mental ledger of debts and her burgundy stilettos and her deals with ovens—knows that she's not just trying to make a clause work. She's trying to fit into a place that's been waiting for her.
I wonder if she stays. Not just for sixty days, but after. If she figures out Lucifer and learns to bend it to her will, if she makes something beautiful in a building full of ghosts.
I wonder if that matters to me. If it should matter.
Jasper doesn’t come home until midnight.
He walks back to the cabin on his own, which he’s never done before.
He finds me in the workshop where I’m making a bench that nobody asked for out of wood that I've had since Hank died.
He puts his head on my leg and he smells like sugar and flour and her soap.
He smells like home; except he wasn’t home. He was at her place.
Tomorrow I won’t drive past the cabin. Tomorrow I’ll stay in the workshop, and I’ll make furniture for people who can pay for it and I won’t think about a woman who makes deals with ovens or keeps lists.
Tomorrow I’ll do what I always do.
Today, though, I sit with my dog, and I think about Hank’s voice saying something about Edna always knowing. Something about the bakery finding its person.
And I wonder what it means if I think she might be right.