Chapter 7
Gabby
"Come on, you temperamental hellmouth," I mutter, sliding another sheet of croissants into the beast's gaping maw. "Don't burn these. I'm begging you. Professional courtesy."
Jace installed a new temperature gauge last Tuesday—or was it Wednesday?
Time is a construct that has ceased to have meaning since I’ve come to Alaska—and I've discovered that talking to the oven helps.
Not because Lucifer responds with actual words, though I wouldn't put it past him, but because narrating my terror keeps me from catastrophizing about why I agreed to this.
This: waking before the sun. Mixing butter and flour. Trying not to think about Austin or Marco or the fact that I talk to my oven now.
The croissants are a risk. Three nights ago, I stood in this kitchen holding the recipe card I'd written for the salmon scone—the one Jace said was right, the one Dotty blessed with a single nod—and I looked at my cold laminated dough and thought: what if I folded the filling in?
Not scones. Croissants. The flaky architecture of Paris with the flesh of an Alaska river running through the middle of it.
I'd laughed at myself out loud. Then I'd done it anyway.
The first batch was a disaster—the salmon wept butter through the layers, the bottom burned, the top refused to brown.
The second batch was better. The third batch, the one I pulled out at 2 AM in my bathrobe, was the thing I've been chasing my entire career without knowing it.
A pastry that tastes like two places at once.
A pastry that says: I came from somewhere and I'm here now and both things are true.
I ate one standing over the counter and cried a little, which I'm not going to think about.
The truth is, I'm adapting. Slowly. Painfully.
But I'm here before the sun, preparing pastry dough and talking to an oven named after a demon, which suggests that somewhere in the last few weeks, I've made peace with this particular version of my life.
Not because I wanted to—not because anything about this situation is what I would have chosen for myself—but because the alternative is spending sixty days feeling sorry for myself in Edna's kitchen, and I'm too stubborn for that.
I check the proofing dough in the cooler.
The butter lamination is coming together.
The yeast is doing exactly what it's supposed to do.
Everything is following the rules, and I'm the kind of person who finds that comforting.
Rules I understand. Rules I can follow. Rules that don't ask me to explain myself or my choices.
Dotty arrives at 6 AM sharp, as she has every morning for the past week and a half, bearing coffee and unsolicited life commentary.
She sets the cup on the counter next to my clipboard of notes—my precious mental ledger, but tangible—and glances at Lucifer's current contents with a maternal scrutiny that makes me want to both hug her and hide from her.
"You and Lucifer finding your rhythm?" She sounds delighted.
"We have an understanding," I say. "Mostly."
"Edna used to say the same thing." She sips her coffee, a knowing smile playing at the corners of her mouth. "For about the first year."
"That's not encouraging," I say. I'm also slowly becoming feral, but that's fine. The feral part is efficient. The feral part doesn't second-guess whether coming to Alaska was the worst decision of my life every three minutes.
"Does this understanding include making more salmon scones?"
My head snaps up. "People are requesting them?"
"Marnie called me last night." Dotty's expression shifts into something that looks like she's been waiting for exactly the right moment to detonate this information.
"Apparently Old Al stopped into the store yesterday and mentioned he'd tried one of the scones you sent over last week.
He told Marnie they were the best thing he'd eaten since his wife's funeral spread, which is apparently a compliment, and now Marnie wants six for the Wednesday potluck.
And Birdie Kowalski heard about it from Marnie, and Birdie told Tessa, and now Tessa wants a dozen for the weekend. "
I stare at her.
"Word travels fast," Dotty says, with the satisfaction of someone who lit the match and is enjoying the warmth. "That's two weeks in and people are already requesting things by name. Do you know how long it takes most people to build that kind of interest?"
"I've made them exactly once," I say. "As a panic pivot. Because Lucifer cremated my would-be croissants."
"And yet." She pours herself a cup from the thermos she brought — she always brings her own, which I've come to understand is less about the coffee and more about having something to do with her hands while she delivers information. "You've achieved a certain mystique."
"A mystique based on a lucky accident," I say weakly.
"Honey, that's how most good things start." She sets the thermos down on the prep counter and looks at the cooling racks with the frank assessment of someone who has been feeding this town for years. "Edna's scones were an accident too. She told me once she'd been aiming for a biscuit."
My chest tightens. Not the bad way. Something unexpected landed and I don’t know what to do with it. The part of my brain that’s been quietly waiting for everything here to fall apart is recalculating, because apparently the thing I made in desperation is the thing people want.
Before she goes, I pull one of the test croissants off the rack — still warm, slightly imperfect, the one I've been eyeing since it came out. "Here," I say. "Tell me if this is insane."
Dotty breaks it open. Steam curls out. She takes a bite, and her expression does the same thing Jace's did with the scone — not reacting, just tasting, absorbing. She chews. She swallows.
"That's not insane," she says.
"That's it? That's all I get?"
"That's everything." She wraps the rest of it in a napkin and tucks it into her jacket pocket like it's something worth keeping. "I have a café to open. Make more of those."
She leaves, and I'm alone with Lucifer and twenty-two croissants and the specific, terrifying feeling of someone believing in something before I've had time to talk myself out of it.
I throw myself into the salmon scones next — six for Marnie, a dozen for Tessa, and a few extra because my hands need something to do with the information that people are asking for things I made.
The technique is automatic now. Flour, butter, buttermilk, the salmon folded in at the last possible moment so it stays in distinct flakes rather than disappearing into the dough.
I've done this enough times that my body knows the steps before my brain catches up.
That part is new. That part is something I didn't have two weeks ago.
Piper Lockwood arrives at half past nine with a bag from Marnie's and the energy of someone who has already had three conversations before most people are awake.
"I come bearing supplies," she announces, setting the bag on the counter and peering at the cooling racks with open curiosity. "And also opinions. The opinions are free."
"That tracks," I say. I've known Piper for exactly two weeks and already understand that the opinions are always free and always specific and almost always right, which is its own kind of exhausting.
She's examining the croissants with the focus of someone doing actual research when it happens.
A crash against the side window. The specific, rattling, every-dish-in-the-kitchen rumble together that I now recognize the way some people recognize a car alarm — the sound of Morris announcing himself.
His face fills the glass. Enormous. Damp. Deeply self-satisfied.
I set the tray I'm holding down on the counter. Carefully. Deliberately. "Morris," I say, the way you'd say the name of someone who keeps showing up uninvited to events they weren't invited to in the first place.
"He does this to everyone," Piper says, completely unbothered, stealing a croissant off the cooling rack.
"Every time I'm holding something," I say.
Morris presses his nose to the glass. A fog circle blooms. He blinks at me with the patient authority of an animal who has never once been told no and doesn't intend to start.
"He wants apple scraps," Piper says. "Edna used to leave them on the sill. He hasn't figured out the management has changed."
"The management has nothing for him." I point at Morris. He stares back. "Nothing. There are no apples. Go eat bark."
Morris blinks. Resumes fogging the window.
Piper takes another croissant. "He's going to stand there until he gets bored or until you give him something."
"Then he's going to stand there a long time," I say, and I turn back to the prep counter because I have eighteen scones to box and Morris has never once respected my schedule and I've accepted this about him.
He stays for twenty minutes. Piper stays longer, perched on the stool by the window like she's watching a nature documentary and finds it deeply entertaining.
She eats two more croissants and declares them "aggressively good," which I've decided to take as a compliment.
By the time Morris finally loses interest and lumbers back into the brush, I've filled both orders of scones and started a third batch just because the rhythm of it feels good.
"He's gone," Piper announces.
"He'll be back," I say.
"Probably." She hops off the stool and collects her bag. "These are excellent, by the way. The croissants. Tessa's going to lose her mind."
She leaves, and the kitchen settles back into its particular quiet — just Lucifer's ticking and the smell of butter and the fog circle Morris left on the glass, slowly fading.
That evening, after I close up, I flip through Edna's journal looking for—I'm not sure what.
Comfort? Evidence that other people have catastrophic kitchen moments?
Proof that moving to a remote Alaskan village and naming your oven was a reasonable decision?
The journal is leather-bound and worn, filled with entries in her precise, careful handwriting.
Some entries are long and philosophical.
Others are a few lines. Tonight, I'm looking for the disasters.
I find, instead, this entry, dated March 14, 1987:
Burned an entire batch tonight—the first one I've done in months.
Ruined them completely. Black discs of failure.
Hank came in, took one look at the wreckage, and sat down at the kitchen table.
I thought he'd tell me I was losing my touch, that maybe I was getting too old, that I should let someone younger take over.
Instead, he took one of the ruined ones and started eating it, slow and steady, like it was the finest thing he'd ever tasted.
Didn't say a word. Just ate three of them, asked for more coffee, and kissed my temple.
I cried so hard I could barely see. This is what love is, I think.
Someone eating your failures like they're victories.
Someone sitting with you in the wreckage and deciding that your presence matters more than the outcome.
I read it three times, each time the words hitting a little differently.
My throat gets tight. Something about partnership. About being seen. About what I’m not ready to understand.
Edna burned things. Edna had panic moments. Edna created disasters and someone loved her through them—not despite them, but through them. He sat down. He ate the failure. He made it clear that the failure didn't change anything.
That's not how it worked with Marco. Marco kept notes for my mistakes.
He had a color-coded system for tracking my failures.
He would bring them up years later as evidence of some fundamental flaw in my character.
He never sat down and ate the ruined batch.
He never kissed my temple and made it mean something other than what it was.
I set the journal down carefully on the counter and press my palms against my eyes, right there in the empty kitchen with the cooling ovens and the lingering smell of dill and butter and the ghost of Morris's foggy nose print on the window.
Outside, somewhere in the Alaskan darkness, Morris is probably doing moose things.
Completely forgetting he startled me. Probably living his best moose life with zero anxiety about his life choices, zero knowledge that I'm inside a kitchen having an emotional crisis triggered by both a moose and a dead woman's life philosophy.
I should aspire to be a moose.
Instead, I think about Hank eating burned croissants like they were the most important thing he'd ever tasted, and something shifts in my chest that I'm not prepared to examine.
It's tender and raw and suggests that maybe I've been thinking about love all wrong.
Maybe love isn't a show. Maybe love is just—someone staying.
Someone eating the disaster. Someone deciding that you're worth the trouble.
I stay in the kitchen until ten, making salmon croissants like someone's life depends on it. Twenty-three total. All of them, as Jace would say, ‘right’. All of them reminders that my hands still know what they're doing even when the rest of me is less certain.
When I'm wiping down Lucifer's face at the end of the night, I wrap one of the croissants in wax paper without really deciding to, set it on the counter, and stare at it.
Jace installed the temperature gauge that made these possible. I’ll give him this one. That's all this is — a practical acknowledgment of a practical fact. The ledger keeping me honest.
I pick up my ledger and set it by the door for the morning.
I don't examine it any further than that. Some things are better left in the column where they landed.