Epilogue - Gabby
Three months later, Sugar & Flour has a line out the door on Saturday mornings.
This is still surreal. That’s the only word for it—surreal in the specific way that getting what you wanted feels surreal when you spent most of your life expecting disappointment.
There are people standing outside my bakery in October, in Ashwood Falls, Alaska, in thirty-eight-degree weather, waiting for salmon croissants.
Salmon croissants. The thing that started as a desperate accident on a morning when the oven tried to kill me and I had nothing but leftover fish and panic is now on the permanent menu.
Item number one. Most popular order. Reviewed on three different food blogs by people who drove from Anchorage specifically to try them.
The review that made me cry—the good kind of crying, the kind where you laugh at the same time because your body can’t decide which emotion wins—said: “The salmon croissant at Sugar & Flour is what happens when a pastry chef from Austin meets Alaska and decides to stop fighting it.”
I printed that review. It’s taped to the register, right below the hand-lettered sign that reads THE MUTE AND THE MOTORMOUTH, which Dotty said once and I framed because some things are too perfect to let go.
The oven—Carl—has good days and bad days.
Good days, he heats evenly and holds temperature and behaves like a reasonable piece of kitchen equipment.
Bad days, he burns the left side of everything and makes a ticking sound that I’ve started interpreting as passive aggression.
I talk to him either way. “Good morning, Carl. We’re doing croissants today, Carl.
If you burn the brioche again I’m replacing you with something from this century, Carl. ”
He burned the brioche last Tuesday. I did not replace him. We have an understanding.
Jace’s furniture fills the bakery now. The baker’s bench—the one he built for me, the one with the hidden drawer that still makes my throat tight when I open it—sits against the wall by the window. Inside the drawer is a note. I’ve read it maybe thirty times. It says:
For the woman who taught me that silence isn’t always the loudest thing in a room.
No signature. Just his handwriting, careful and precise, the way he does everything.
The tables are his: solid cherry, clean lines, craftsmanship that makes people run their hands across the surface before they sit down.
People do this without being asked—they come in for a croissant and they stay for five minutes just running their palms across the wood grain like it’s something alive.
I’ve watched strangers fall in love with his work. I understand completely.
The chairs are his. The display shelf is his.
Every piece of wood in this building was touched by his hands.
Some of them have imperfections—little marks that he could have sanded out but didn’t.
Blemishes. Character. Evidence of how they were made.
When I asked him about it once, he said: “Perfect is boring. Real is better.”
I’m learning that’s true about people too. About relationships. About the messy, imperfect way that two people can fit together if they’re willing to show each other the grain.
Every piece of wood in this building is his, and sometimes when the morning light hits the grain just right, I stand there and look at it and think about how this man’s love language is furniture and fish and patience and I am the luckiest woman in Alaska.
We live between the two properties—his workshop, my kitchen—connected by the trail that once felt like too much distance and now feels like just enough.
Four hundred yards. Close enough to hear each other if we shout.
Far enough that I can stress-bake at midnight without him telling me to go to sleep.
It’s the perfect architecture for two people who need space the way they need air—not to get away from each other but to come back fully.
Jasper has claimed a specific spot in the bakery.
It’s the sun patch by the front window, between the display case and the door, which means every customer who walks in has to step over a seventy-pound Malamute who refuses to acknowledge that he’s in the way.
He’s claimed this spot like it’s the most important real estate in Ashwood Falls, and he might be right.
On clear mornings, the sun pours through that window and catches the dust in the air, and Jasper lies there like he’s been placed there specifically to illustrate what contentment looks like.
Nobody asks him to move. He is a fixture.
He is a landmark. He is the reason people come back, I think.
Not even for the croissants. Just to see if Jasper is in his spot.
Tourists take photos of him. They tag him.
They tell their friends back home: “There’s a moose that eats infrastructure in Alaska, and a dog that has better real estate in a bakery than I do in my own house. ”
Piper—who has more marketing sense than anyone I’ve ever met—put Jasper on the bakery’s Instagram and the post got more engagement than any of the food photos, which tells you everything you need to know about the internet.
The post was captioned: Meet Jasper, owner of Sugar & Flour, keeper of the sunny spot, judge of croissant quality.
It got shared to three different dog accounts.
Jasper is now semi-famous. He does not care.
He sleeps in his patch and lets the fame wash over him with the same indifference he shows to everything.
Morris still visits the bakery porch every morning. I leave him an apple. This is our arrangement—I provide fruit, he does not eat the railing. It’s an elegant system. It’s also consistently broken.
But Jace patched it both times without comment.
He’d show up with wood and nails and the tools he has at his workshop, and he’d fix Morris’s damage like it was an expected maintenance schedule.
Not annoyed. Just present. This is how we handle things now: Morris destroys, Jace rebuilds, I navigate between them like a diplomatic corps of one.
Morris eats the apple. Jace eats whatever I baked that morning.
I get to stand in my kitchen and watch both of them exist in my space.
He is no longer a nuisance. He is a neighbor. He is part of the rhythm. He is the reason Jace comes by with tools in his hand and a specific kind of intention in his eyes.
Piper runs the bakery’s social media. The “Morris Watch” posts got traction first, and now the account has a following that includes people from Tennessee who’ve never been to Alaska but are deeply invested in a moose who eats infrastructure.
Dotty comes in every morning at eight-thirty. You could set a watch by it. She drinks a black coffee—her own blend from the café, which she brings in a thermos because she refuses to drink mine, which is fair because my coffee tastes like regret and hot water compared to hers.
Then, at eight-forty exactly, she gets up. She brings her cup to the counter. And she says something devastating and affectionate before she leaves.
This week: “The brioche is better than last week. Carl must be in a good mood.”
Patrice and Trace bring Brooklyn by every weekend.
The kid is running everywhere now—in that specific way that makes adults cringe every time she gets close to crashing into things, ready to come running if gravity suddenly decides to win an argument.
We’re probably going to be friends as she grows.
Her favorite word was “cookie,” which I claim as a personal victory and which Trace disputes because he says it was actually “Jasper,” but it wasn’t.
It was cookie. I was there. I heard it. I have Piper’s Instagram post to prove it—there’s a photo of Brooklyn sitting in her booster chair with what I can only assume is rapture on her face, holding a half-eaten butter cookie, her mouth forming the shape of the word.
Trace was not there. Patrice was laughing too hard to be a reliable witness.
So by the rules of evidence, cookie is the correct answer.
Tessa and Gage walk the trail on Sunday mornings with Rocco and Toby.
The dogs visit Jasper at the bakery like it’s a scheduled playdate, which it is.
They arrive with the precision of public transportation.
Gage doesn’t own a watch that I’ve ever seen, and yet he always arrives at exactly the same time.
“Time is a suggestion,” he once told me.
“Unless it’s Sunday morning with Tessa.”
While the dogs run, Tessa and I drink coffee.
Her good coffee. She brings it from her house because she knows mine is bad and she’s kind enough to say “I brought extra” instead of “yours is undrinkable.” We talk about nothing and everything.
About the bakery and the weather and the way the mountains look different depending on the light.
About what I’m baking and how Gage is doing and whether Jace has finally learned to smile like he means it.
She never told me to stay. She told me to make a decision. And then she showed up every Sunday after I made it, like checking to make sure the decision was holding. Like a friend checking a wall to see if the crack is spreading or if it’s stable.
It’s holding.
Birdie and I have reached a détente. It’s a détente that only exists between people who respect each other but are still too competitive to admit it directly.
She makes bread. I make pastry. We do not compete. We do not compare. We do not talk about the baking competition where she won and I got Morris’d into oblivion. We just exist in parallel, making different things, occasionally running into each other at the farmer’s market or at Dotty’s café.
But last month, she texted me: “Can you teach me lamination? I want to try Danish.”
And I said: “Can you teach me sourdough? I want to nail the rye.”