Chapter 12
Jace
The day after the competition, I find her at the bakery, stress-baking like someone is personally coming to steal joy from her.
It’s nine in the morning. She has made seven different types of pastry.
The cases are full. There’s a tray of croissants cooling on the rack.
There’s a bowl with what looks like cream puff dough.
She’s wearing the baggy apron. Her hair is tied back. There’s flour on her left cheekbone and she hasn’t noticed.
“You don’t have to feel bad about yesterday,” I say, which is the wrong opening. I know it’s the wrong opening the second I say it, but I’m already committed. This is the problem with words—you can’t unsay them.
She looks up from the croissant dough she’s decimating with violence. Her hands are deep in it. She’s pushing it down like it personally wronged her, which is how stress-baking looks on Gabby. Creation as punishment. Building as a way to not have to feel.
“I don’t feel bad,” she says.
“Okay,” I say. Seven pastries. A laminate she’s pushing down like it personally wronged her. She’s building as a way to not have to feel.
I’m not good at this. Workshop work responds to pressure. People don’t. Gabby is not predictable. Gabby doesn’t respond to anything the way you’d expect. I walk in expecting her to be down about the competition and she’s just channeling all her feelings into laminated dough.
I think about what Trace said to me yesterday.
The best things I ever built were the ones I was afraid to start.
He was holding his beer, looking at my face like he could read something on it I couldn’t see myself.
He was right. He’s always right about things that matter. And this matters. She matters.
So I do something I have never done before. I attempt humor.
This is a mistake.
“Why did the sourdough go to therapy?” I ask.
She doesn’t answer. She’s frozen with her hands in the dough. It’s a silence that tells me she’s about to be surprised by something, and not in a good way. I’m already regretting this, but I’m committed.
“Because it had deep-seated issues,” I finish.
The silence that follows is the most honest silence I’ve ever participated in. She stares at me like I’ve committed a crime against comedy itself. Like I’ve personally murdered humor and left the body on her kitchen counter.
“That was bad,” she says.
“Really bad,” I agree.
“The worst joke I’ve ever heard in my life.”
“Yeah.”
I stand there while she processes this joke. While she realizes that I, someone who works with wood and precision and things that hold their weight, have apparently attempted a pun. A pun about bread. About her disaster.
And then she laughs.
She suppresses it. Her hands go to her mouth.
The sound breaks through anyway, building until her shoulders shake.
She laughs until her shoulders shake. She laughs until she has to lean against the counter for balance.
She laughs until tears come out and I can’t tell if they’re from the joke being terrible or from yesterday or from something bigger that’s been sitting in her chest all morning.
Maybe all of it. Maybe none of it. Maybe the joke was just permission.
She wipes her face with a floury hand, leaving streaks across her cheeks. Her laughter shifts. It becomes something different. The tears keep coming but the laugh sound changes into something that might be crying. I’m not sure. The transition is seamless.
“I’m sorry,” she says, but she’s still laughing. “This is not—”
“It’s okay,” I say.
“That joke was objectively the worst thing I’ve ever heard, and I’m losing it like it’s the funniest thing in the world, and I don’t know which is the actual problem.”
She sits down on the stool by the counter. She’s laughing and crying at the same time now. Her hands are shaking. The flour dust around her is like a physical manifestation of everything that went wrong yesterday.
“That was objectively the worst,” she says, and she’s still laughing, still crying. “Why would you—like, you’re smart. You could make a good joke. Why that joke?”
I step closer. “Because you weren’t laughing.”
She stops laughing. I’ve said something too true, some version of the thing I meant to keep hidden. The bakery is quiet except for the hum of the oven. The flour dust moves through the light. Everything stops.
She looks at me, and I look at her, and there’s a moment where the ground shifts. Where everything before now is the before, and everything after this is the after, and we both know it. No words for this.
I kiss her.
It’s tender because she’s tender right now, broken open by bad jokes and public failure and the particular terror of wanting something when you’ve already lined up a future that doesn’t include this.
Her mouth tastes like butter and cinnamon and the thing she’s been too scared to say.
I kiss her like my body knows what my mouth can’t say.
She tastes like salt. She tastes like tears and laughter and the person she’s been becoming since she got to Ashwood Falls. I kiss her like I’m trying to hold something fragile. Like I’m trying to say: This matters. You matter. I know you’re terrified but I’m here anyway.
Her hand comes up and grabs my shirt. Not pulling away. Holding on. Like she needs something solid to grip while everything else is shifting.
The flour on her clothes transfers to mine.
White dust on my dark jacket. Her laughter has mixed with crying—I taste both.
Her mouth is salty from tears but her lip catches on mine and that’s from the smile she can’t quite suppress, like some part of her is surprised that we’re doing this, that this is happening even though everything in her life says it shouldn’t.
The kiss deepens. She’s not pulling back. She’s pulling closer, pulling me toward her like she’s trying to memorize this. My hands find the small of her back and she makes a sound—not a word, more like a breath leaving her body and not coming back.
And then she pulls back. Not far. Just far enough to look at me. Her eyes are still wet. Her mouth is still close. There’s flour on her chin where my jaw brushed it.
“This is a temporary situation,” she says. Whispers. Like she’s reminding me of something I should have been paying attention to. Like the words are a wall she’s building between us right now, before we get too far.
“Okay,” I say.
“You’re aware of that.”
“I’m aware.”
“So—”
Jasper puts his paw on her foot.
She stares down at the dog with something like despair. “Even the dog,” she whispers.
The dog is conspiring. The dog is witnessing this moment and deciding to make it even more complicated by being present and adorable and concerned about Gabby’s emotional state. Jasper is now part of the problem, which was not in my planning.
And there it is—the thing that gets me. The realization that I’m jealous of my own dog.
Six years I’ve had Jasper. Six years of feeding him, walking him, building him a place in my workshop, and he’s never given me his full attention the way he gives it to her.
He’s never pushed his head into my chest like she’s the only solid thing in a collapsing world.
And right now, watching him look at her with that liquid devotion, I understand that Hank must have felt something like this.
Hank, who kept Edna’s photograph in his workshop for years.
Who died still loving a woman he couldn’t tell.
Who told me, near the end, that the best things and the worst things are often the same thing—love that can’t be spoken is just love that gets heavier and heavier until it becomes a weight you carry like it’s normal.
I’d always thought that was the tragedy. That Hank spent decades watching someone he couldn’t have.
Now I’m standing in flour dust kissing someone I can have for less than two months, and I understand the tragedy isn’t about the time.
It’s about the choosing—Hank chose to stay close to Edna even though it cost him.
He built her things for her house. He maintained her kitchen.
He left salmon on her porch like a man making a prayer.
And now she’s here. Kissing me back. Tasting like salt and cinnamon.
I don’t say anything. There’s nothing to say that won’t make this worse.
I don’t have words that can fix her exit plan or the fact that she came here on a deadline or the general catastrophe of timing and fear.
So I stand there in the flour dust with her in the space where I kissed her, and I think about how you can’t control what you build once you’ve started building it.
You can only show up and be honest with the materials you’re working with and hope they hold.
She’s going to break. Or I’m going to break. Or we’re both going to break and we’ll have to figure out how to build something from the pieces. But at least it will be real. At least it will be true.
Later, I walk her through the house. The light is long and slow through the windows—it’s getting close to evening in a place where evening moves like honey.
The hallway between the bakery and her cabin cuts through tension and silence, and somewhere outside us the birds are making sounds that don’t make sense because the sun won’t set for hours.
She’s quiet beside me. Her hand is still covered in flour. There’s cinnamon dust in her hair that she’ll find later and wonder about.
“You’re thinking loudly,” she says.
“There’s flour on my shirt,” I say. “I don’t know how I’m supposed to finish a cedar commission with your flour handprint pressed into it.”
She laughs, short and surprised, and the sound does something uneven to my ribs.
“I’m thinking about Hank.”
She doesn’t ask me who Hank is. She already knows—my life is full of him, in the way I move, in the choices I make. He’s the ghost that taught me everything.
“The man who died?” she asks.
“Yeah. He loved someone for a long time. Before they ever actually—” I pause. “It was complicated.”