16. EPILOGUE #2
I took a position near the door. Leaned against the wall with my coffee cup from the gas station two blocks over, the paper sleeve still warm around the cardboard, and let the room adjust to me.
I’d been doing this three mornings a week for months now, and the adjustment period had gotten shorter — used to be a full minute of sideways glances and cleared throats before people went back to their pastries.
Now it was twenty seconds, maybe less. A man at the nearest table looked up, registered the cut, the size, the stillness of someone who didn’t belong in a bakery at eight-thirty on a Tuesday, and then his eyes found Hannah behind the counter and something in his face eased.
She wasn’t worried. Therefore, neither was he.
Basic human math, and it happened at every table in the room within the span of a single breath.
Hannah moved behind the counter like she was born to it.
Which she had been, technically — the bakery had been hers for three years before I walked through her back door with a gun.
Watching her work it was like watching a mechanic strip an engine or a rider take a curve at speed: the confidence of someone doing the thing they were built to do.
She laughed at something the regular at the end of the counter said, older guy in a cardigan, came in every Tuesday for a bear claw and the same joke about retirement that wasn’t getting any funnier, and the sound cut through the clatter of the espresso machine and the register drawer sliding open.
She slid a warm roll across the glass to a kid who stood on tiptoes, fingers just reaching the edge of the counter, and didn’t charge him for it.
The schoolteacher, Ms. Keller, forty-something, wire-rim glasses, came in every Tuesday for a box of pastries to take to the children’s home, stood at the register with her wallet out, and Hannah was already wrapping the box in brown paper and twine while they talked about something that made both of them smile.
I drank my coffee and watched. My back against the wall, one shoulder taking the weight, and the pride I felt wasn’t the possessive kind.
It was quieter. The kind that comes from watching someone excel at the thing that makes them who they are and knowing you had nothing to do with teaching them how.
Hannah belonged here. The same way I belonged on a bike or in a clubhouse or in the silence of a mountain cabin at five in the morning with a putty knife and a roll of weatherstripping.
She moved through this space with the easy authority of ownership, and the customers responded to it — relaxed into it, leaned on the counter the way people lean on counters when they trust the person behind them, and none of it had anything to do with me standing by the door with a coffee cup and a cut that said Property of Wicked Mayhem across the shoulders.
She looked up and caught me watching. Green eyes finding mine across the room with the same direct focus they’d had since that first night in her kitchen, and she held up one finger, one minute, before turning back to Ms. Keller’s change.
I nodded. Didn’t move. Had gotten good at waiting in the six months since I’d pulled her out of this same bakery with a contract burning in my pocket and no plan for what came after.
She finished with the teacher, handed over the wrapped box with a smile that Ms. Keller returned with the warmth of someone who’d been coming here long enough to consider Hannah a friend rather than a vendor.
Then Hannah was around the counter, crossing the floor between tables with the same easy stride she used for everything.
She stopped in front of me, close enough that I could smell the flour on her clothes underneath the bakery smells and handed me a bag that was warm through the brown paper.
“Socket called,” she said. “Said the clubhouse is out of everything again and would I please, and I quote, ‘for the love of God make extra because these animals will eat cardboard if I don’t.’”
I opened the bag. Inside, six cinnamon rolls, still warm, the glaze seeping through the parchment paper they were wrapped in.
The smell rose out of the bag and hit me square in the chest: cinnamon, butter, the richness of something Hannah made that nobody else in this county could replicate if their lives depended on it.
“Socket’s going to get fat,” I said.
Hannah’s mouth pulled up at the corner. “Socket’s going to be grateful. There’s a difference.”
She reached out and adjusted the collar of my cut where it had folded under itself, her fingers brushing the leather once, twice, the casual intimacy of a touch that had stopped being remarkable months ago.
Her hand settled on my arm for half a second, warm through the sleeve of my henley, and then she was stepping back, already turning toward the counter where the next customer had materialized with the raw desperation of someone who needed caffeine and a pastry and needed them five minutes ago.
“I’ll see you tonight,” she said over her shoulder.
I nodded. Pushed off the wall with my coffee cup in one hand and the paper bag in the other, and the bell jangled again as I stepped out onto the sidewalk.
Morning sun hit the awning and turned the pale blue almost white, and through the front window I could see Hannah already back behind the counter, laughing at something the caffeine-desperate customer had said, her hands moving between the espresso machine and the display case with the same practiced efficiency they’d shown in a log cabin six months and a lifetime ago.
I mounted the Harley. Fired the engine. The bag of cinnamon rolls sat warm against my thigh where I’d wedged it between my leg and the tank, and as I pulled away from the curb, I caught one last glimpse of the bakery through the rearview — the pale blue awning, the morning light on the glass, Hannah’s red hair visible behind the counter for exactly two seconds before the building slid out of frame and the road opened up ahead of me.
She had built this. Every inch of it. The bakery, the customers, the warmth of a place that welcomed people at eight in the morning and sent them out better than they came in.
None of it had anything to do with me or the club or the mountain cabin or the cut I wore on my back.
It existed separately, complete unto itself, and the fact that she’d chosen to bring me into it, to hand me paper bags of cinnamon rolls through a front door I’d once approached with a gun, was a gift I still hadn’t found the right words for.
So, I didn’t try. I rode. The bag warm against my leg, the road open, and behind me the bakery kept doing what it did best, with or without anyone watching.
Hannah came through the clubhouse door with her arms full and her property cut riding the shoulders of my old flannel shirt like she’d been wearing it for years.
Roasting pan in both hands, the chicken inside still steaming, two loaves of bread wrapped in a dish towel balanced on top of the pan, and a container of cookies perched on the whole precarious stack like she’d challenged gravity and won.
She kicked the door closed behind her with the heel of her boot and stood in the entryway for exactly two seconds before Socket materialized from the direction of the bar and relieved her of the cookie container without asking.
“Evening, darlin’,” he said, and had the lid off before she’d fully cleared the threshold.
The smell hit the room — chocolate, butter, the richness of something Hannah made that turned grown men into children inside of three bites.
Socket shoved an entire cookie into his mouth and made a sound that was either appreciation or a medical emergency.
“Jesus Christ. These are illegal in fourteen states.”
Hannah laughed. The sound cut through the low hum of the clubhouse — pool balls clicking from the table near the back wall, the rattle of the ancient fridge behind the bar, someone’s classic rock playing at a volume that suggested the speaker had given up on fidelity years ago.
She shifted the roasting pan in her grip, adjusting for the missing weight of the cookies, and that’s when Screwball appeared from the garage door, wiping his hands on a rag that had seen better decades.
“Look what the cat dragged in,” he said, his voice carrying the gravel of a man who smoked things he shouldn’t and didn’t care who knew it.
He dropped the rag on the nearest pool table and crossed to Hannah with his arms out.
“Give me that before you drop it and deprive a room full of hungry bastards of the only real meal they’ve seen in a month. ”
I took the pan from her before Screwball could reach it.
The weight settled into my palms — warm through the metal, the chicken inside releasing a cloud of herb-scented steam that hit my face and reminded me I hadn’t eaten since the cinnamon roll at ten that morning.
Hannah handed me the bread wrapped in its dish towel with a look that said I’m fine, you’re ridiculous, and thank you all at once, and I carried both to the reclaimed table in the center of the room where the brothers were already pulling up stools.